Admission to see a ghost.
To make a round sum in dollars out of an apparition which declines to appear is worthy of Yankee cuteness. Mr Crocheron, of Staten Island has done it – and a good many members of the New York Press. On the 1st of March Mr Crocheron and family went to live in a house nearly fifty years old, a ghostly antiquity in America. They suffered much from horrible noises and rappings, and they “claim” that a large iron bedstead was carried about by invisible hands. The “knockings” ceased after Mr Crocheron dropped some balls of rats’ poison down a hole in the floor, but an alarmed family insisted on leaving the house on the 1st of May.
The reporters of the New York papers then hurried down, and begged permission to pass the night in the most haunted room. Mr Crocheron extorted a dollar a head from these representatives of intelligent enterprise, and led them all to an empty bed-chamber. Locking the door behind him, he made a little speech, after hauling from his pocket a billet of oak wood, about two inches thick and a foot and a half in length. “Look here, gentlemen,” he said, waving his truncheon, “if you’ve come down here to crack any jokes at my expense, you’d better look out, for I will give you rate.”
Whatever this promise may imply, it damped the zeal of the reporters. Only three young men remained in the haunted chamber all night, and they beheld “nothing worse than themselves.” So scientifically inquisitive are the citizens however, that Mr Crocheron keeps up his tariff of a dollar a head for visitors, no extra charge being made in case of the arrival of a genuine apparition, while no money is returned at the doors if the “spook” fails to show. The citizens are satisfied with this arrangement, which seems fair and sportsmanlike.
Dublin Daily Express, 4th June 1879.
Ghosts and Reporters.
Ghosts have long been held in disrepute in this country, and they are now getting themselves into trouble in America, whither a good many of them were supposed to have gone, disgusted with the ridicule that was lavished upon them here. The immediate cause of the discredit which has fallen upon them across the Atlantic is their refusal to have anything to say to certain reporters who were deputed to interview them, the consequence being that they have brought down upon themselves the wrath of the newspapers, whose enterprising conductors had hoped to be able to supply their subscribers with a new and attractive description of news.
The ghosts who acted in so rude and ill-advised a manner had made their presence known in a house belonging to a Mr Crocheron by manifestations which certainly do not appear very extraordinary to a dispassionate reader at this safe distance from the scene where they took place, and which do not afford any proof of the possession of extraordinary intelligence by the said ghosts. On one occasion a basket of eggs was found in th ehouse, and as no one knew how it came there it its presence was naturally attributed to the agency of ghosts. Such a thing as the ghost of a hen has probably never been heard of, or it might have been shouldered with the responsibility of depositing the eggs, although in that case the basket would have been a difficulty, as neither a hen nor its ghost could reasonably have been supposed capable of laying a basket.
In addition to the eggs, however, there were other phenomena to be accounted for – knocking had been heard, a bed had been moved, lights had been seen in the house without any visible cause to account for them, and there had been some other strange events, which all the neighbourhood believed to have been the work of spirits, including at least one act of which even spirits might have been ashamed, unless they were very bad spirits indeed.
It was to investigate all these occurrences and their causes that three reporters set out, determined to see the ghosts and demand an explanation of the strange deeds which were laid to their charge. The owner of the house, a man who, like Tam O’Shanter, “car’d nae deils a boddle,” nor ghosts either, accompanied them, armed with a cudgel, which he took in order to prevent any games on the parts of spirits or reporters. Perhaps that was the reason why the ghosts did not put in an appearance, and it must be admitted that the conditions were otherwise inimical to visitations from the other world.
At any rate, nothing supernatural was seen or heard, and the resentment of the reporters takes the form of insinuating that the mysterious noises were the work of rats, and their cessation might have been effected by the judicious deposit of Paris blue. Believers in ghosts will not fail, however, to point out that the moving of a bed and the appearance of lights could not be caused by rats; and it is no argument to say that the bed, which had to be sat on before it showed that it differed from any other, was in such a dilapidated condition that the wonder was not that it moved, but that it did not fall to pieces.
– Evening Standard.
Croydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser, 7th June 1879.