A haunted house.
IN my boyhood I used to see spirits, I suppose by a different kind of vision, for they moved and looked solid. About the year 1848, when I was sixteen years of age, I lived with my parents about a mile from Pontypool, Monmouthshire, in an old farm-house which bore the reputation in the neighbourhood of being haunted. The first night I slept in that house, I plainly heard a man with hobnailed boots, walking in the room above mine, but when I went into the room the noise stopped; when I returned to my bedroom it began again, so I called my father. He ridiculed the idea of any one being in th ehouse, but these noises occurred several nights running, and were heard by my mother as well as by myself.
Later still there were noises in the attics like a man using a hammer and chisel. I heard these noises frequently when other persons did not hear them. Occasionally visitors to the house heard them. One day a charwoman, who knew nothing of the circumstance, asked my mother “whether she heard the carpenters upstairs.”
For a long time before we entered the house Welsh servants would not live in it, because it had the reputation of being haunted, and there was a legend that a man had cut his wife’s throat in it, a story which was without proof so far as I know.
On a bank outside the house I sometimes saw a dog of immense size – six feet high – lying down at full length, raising his head, and making a piteous and continuous howling noise. I also frequently saw a little dwarf in the neighbourhood of the house. When I spoke of these things I was ridiculed, but one day when I told a local brewer of the name of Thomas Jones about these spectres, he produced a very old book, written by one “Parson Jones of the Tranch,” in which there was a description of these very spirits, the dog and the dwarf, which the author had seen himself; he called them “ghosts”.
Only six months ago when I was not well I saw a great dog chained up near the door in my bedroom : he kept straining his chain, as if he wished to jump at me.
During the latter part of my residence at Pontypool these visions ceased. I was taken ill with tubercular disease of the lungs, and the medical man recommended that I should go abroad. At that time Ihad a young friend who was studying chemistry, and who had pulmonary disease of the lungs. My parents, thinking it to be contagious, separated us, and would not allow me to see him. But my mother sat up with him at night alternately with his own mother during his illness. On coming home very early one morning, she looked into my bedroom to see that I was all right; I started up, and told her that I knew what she was going to say – namely, that my friend was dead; I next stated that he died about ten o’clock on the preceding night; I further told how his room was furnished, although I had never been in that particular apartment. This was all true. I suddenly woke out of my sleep, and made these statements, and did not know what made me do so, or how I became acquainted with the circumstances, but the occurrence of course surprised both my mother and myself.
Mr Parkes’ account in the Spiritualist, 2nd April 1875.