Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories Read Online

Henry Galbraith, a well-known and highly esteemed Lutheran minister, arrived on foot at his house, a mile and a half from the Deluse place.  Mr. Galbraith had been for a month in Cincinnati.  He had come up the river in a steamboat, and landing at Gallipolis the previous evening had immediately obtained a horse and buggy and set out for home.  The violence of the storm had delayed him over night, and in the morning the fallen trees had compelled him to abandon his conveyance and continue his journey afoot.

“But where did you pass the night?” inquired his wife, after he had briefly related his adventure.

“With old Deluse at the ‘Isle of Pines,’” {1} was the laughing reply; “and a glum enough time I had of it.  He made no objection to my remaining, but not a word could I get out of him.”

Fortunately for the interests of truth there was present at this conversation Mr. Robert Mosely Maren, a lawyer and littérateur of Columbus, the same who wrote the delightful “Mellowcraft Papers.”  Noting, but apparently not sharing, the astonishment caused by Mr. Galbraith’s answer this ready-witted person checked by a gesture the exclamations that would naturally have followed, and tranquilly inquired: “How came you to go in there?”

This is Mr. Maren’s version of Mr. Galbraith’s reply:

“I saw a light moving about the house, and being nearly blinded by the sleet, and half frozen besides, drove in at the gate and put up my horse in the old rail stable, where it is now.  I then rapped at the door, and getting no invitation went in without one.  The room was dark, but having matches I found a candle and lit it.  I tried to enter the adjoining room, but the door was fast, and although I heard the old man’s heavy footsteps in there he made no response to my calls.  There was no fire on the hearth, so I made one and laying [sic] down before it with my overcoat under my head, prepared myself for sleep.  Pretty soon the door that I had tried silently opened and the old man came in, carrying a candle.  I spoke to him pleasantly, apologizing for my intrusion, but he took no notice of me.  He seemed to be searching for something, though his eyes were unmoved in their sockets.  I wonder if he ever walks in his sleep.  He took a circuit a part of the way round the room, and went out the same way he had come in.  Twice more before I slept he came back into the room, acting precisely the same way, and departing as at first.  In the intervals I heard him tramping all over the house, his footsteps distinctly audible in the pauses of the storm.  When I woke in the morning he had already gone out.”

Mr. Maren attempted some further questioning, but was unable longer to restrain the family’s tongues; the story of Deluse’s death and burial came out, greatly to the good minister’s astonishment.

“The explanation of your adventure is very simple,” said Mr. Maren.  “I don’t believe old Deluse walks in his sleep - not in his present one; but you evidently dream in yours.”

And to this view of the matter Mr. Galbraith was compelled reluctantly to assent.

Nevertheless, a late hour of the next night found these two gentlemen, accompanied by a son of the minister, in the road in front of the old Deluse house.  There was a light inside; it appeared now at one window and now at another.  The three men advanced to the door.  Just as they reached it there came from the interior a confusion of the most appalling sounds - the clash of weapons, steel against steel, sharp explosions as of firearms, shrieks of women, groans and the curses of men in combat!  The investigators stood a moment, irresolute, frightened.  Then Mr. Galbraith tried the door.  It was fast.  But the minister was a man of courage, a man, moreover, of Herculean strength.  He retired a pace or two and rushed against the door, striking it with his right shoulder and bursting it from the frame with a loud crash.  In a moment the three were inside.  Darkness and silence!  The only sound was the beating of their hearts.

Mr. Maren had provided himself with matches and a candle.  With some difficulty, begotten of his excitement, he made a light, and they proceeded to explore the place, passing from room to room.  Everything was in orderly arrangement, as it had been left by the sheriff; nothing had been disturbed.  A light coating of dust was everywhere.  A back door was partly open, as if by neglect, and their first thought was that the authors of the awful revelry might have escaped.  The door was opened, and the light of the candle shone through upon the ground.  The expiring effort of the previous night’s storm had been a light fall of snow; there were no footprints; the white surface was unbroken.  They closed the door and entered the last room of the four that the house contained - that farthest from the road, in an angle of the building.  Here the candle in Mr. Maren’s hand was suddenly extinguished as by a draught of air.  Almost immediately followed the sound of a heavy fall.  When the candle had been hastily relighted young Mr. Galbraith was seen prostrate on the floor at a little distance from the others.  He was dead.  In one hand the body grasped a heavy sack of coins, which later examination showed to be all of old Spanish mintage.  Directly over the body as it lay, a board had been torn from its fastenings in the wall, and from the cavity so disclosed it was evident that the bag had been taken.

Another inquest was held: another post-mortem examination failed to reveal a probable cause of death.  Another verdict of “the visitation of God” left all at liberty to form their own conclusions.  Mr. Maren contended that the young man died of excitement.



A FRUITLESS ASSIGNMENT



Henry Saylor, who was killed in Covington, in a quarrel with Antonio Finch, was a reporter on the Cincinnati Commercial.  In the year 1859 a vacant dwelling in Vine street, in Cincinnati, became the center of a local excitement because of the strange sights and sounds said to be observed in it nightly.  According to the testimony of many reputable residents of the vicinity these were inconsistent with any other hypothesis than that the house was haunted.  Figures with something singularly unfamiliar about them were seen by crowds on the sidewalk to pass in and out.  No one could say just where they appeared upon the open lawn on their way to the front door by which they entered, nor at exactly what point they vanished as they came out; or, rather, while each spectator was positive enough about these matters, no two agreed.  They were all similarly at variance in their descriptions of the figures themselves.  Some of the bolder of the curious throng ventured on several evenings to stand upon the doorsteps to intercept them, or failing in this, get a nearer look at them.  These courageous men, it was said, were unable to force the door by their united strength, and always were hurled from the steps by some invisible agency and severely injured; the door immediately afterward opening, apparently of its own volition, to admit or free some ghostly guest.  The dwelling was known as the Roscoe house, a family of that name having lived there for some years, and then, one by one, disappeared, the last to leave being an old woman.  Stories of foul play and successive murders had always been rife, but never were authenticated.

One day during the prevalence of the excitement Saylor presented himself at the office of the Commercial for orders.  He received a note from the city editor which read as follows: “Go and pass the night alone in the haunted house in Vine street and if anything occurs worth while make two columns.”  Saylor obeyed his superior; he could not afford to lose his position on the paper.

Apprising the police of his intention, he effected an entrance through a rear window before dark, walked through the deserted rooms, bare of furniture, dusty and desolate, and seating himself at last in the parlor on an old sofa which he had dragged in from another room watched the deepening of the gloom as night came on.  Before it was altogether dark the curious crowd had collected in the street, silent, as a rule, and expectant, with here and there a scoffer uttering his incredulity and courage with scornful remarks or ribald cries.  None knew of the anxious watcher inside.  He feared to make a light; the uncurtained windows would have betrayed his presence, subjecting him to insult, possibly to injury.  Moreover, he was too conscientious to do anything to enfeeble his impressions and unwilling to alter any of the customary conditions under which the manifestations were said to occur.

It was now dark outside, but light from the street faintly illuminated the part of the room that he was in.  He had set open every door in the whole interior, above and below, but all the outer ones were locked and bolted.  Sudden exclamations from the crowd caused him to spring to the window and look out.  He saw the figure of a man moving rapidly across the lawn toward the building - saw it ascend the steps; then a projection of the wall concealed it.  There was a noise as of the opening and closing of the hall door; he heard quick, heavy footsteps along the passage - heard them ascend the stairs - heard them on the uncarpeted floor of the chamber immediately overhead.

Saylor promptly drew his pistol, and groping his way up the stairs entered the chamber, dimly lighted from the street.  No one was there.  He heard footsteps in an adjoining room and entered that.  It was dark and silent.  He struck his foot against some object on the floor, knelt by it, passed his hand over it.  It was a human head - that of a woman.  Lifting it by the hair this iron-nerved man returned to the half-lighted room below, carried it near the window and attentively examined it.  While so engaged he was half conscious of the rapid opening and closing of the outer door, of footfalls sounding all about him.  He raised his eyes from the ghastly object of his attention and saw himself the center of a crowd of men and women dimly seen; the room was thronged with them.  He thought the people had broken in.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, coolly, “you see me under suspicious circumstances, but” - his voice was drowned in peals of laughter - such laughter as is heard in asylums for the insane.  The persons about him pointed at the object in his hand and their merriment increased as he dropped it and it went rolling among their feet.  They danced about it with gestures grotesque and attitudes obscene and indescribable.  They struck it with their feet, urging it about the room from wall to wall; pushed and overthrew one another in their struggles to kick it; cursed and screamed and sang snatches of ribald songs as the battered head bounded about the room as if in terror and trying to escape.  At last it shot out of the door into the hall, followed by all, with tumultuous haste.  That moment the door closed with a sharp concussion.  Saylor was alone, in dead silence.

Carefully putting away his pistol, which all the time he had held in his hand, he went to a window and looked out.  The street was deserted and silent; the lamps were extinguished; the roofs and chimneys of the houses were sharply outlined against the dawn-light in the east.  He left the house, the door yielding easily to his hand, and walked to the Commercial office.  The city editor was still in his office - asleep.  Saylor waked him and said: “I have been at the haunted house.”

The editor stared blankly as if not wholly awake.  “Good God!” he cried, “are you Saylor?”

“Yes - why not?”  The editor made no answer, but continued staring.

“I passed the night there - it seems,” said Saylor.

“They say that things were uncommonly quiet out there,” the editor said, trifling with a paper-weight upon which he had dropped his eyes, “did anything occur?”

“Nothing whatever.”



A VINE ON A HOUSE



About three miles from the little town of Norton, in Missouri, on the road leading to Maysville, stands an old house that was last occupied by a family named Harding.  Since 1886 no one has lived in it, nor is anyone likely to live in it again.  Time and the disfavor of persons dwelling thereabout are converting it into a rather picturesque ruin.  An observer unacquainted with its history would hardly put it into the category of “haunted houses,” yet in all the region round such is its evil reputation.  Its windows are without glass, its doorways without doors; there are wide breaches in the shingle roof, and for lack of paint the weatherboarding is a dun gray.  But these unfailing signs of the supernatural are partly concealed and greatly softened by the abundant foliage of a large vine overrunning the entire structure.  This vine - of a species which no botanist has ever been able to name - has an important part in the story of the house.

The Harding family consisted of Robert Harding, his wife Matilda, Miss Julia Went, who was her sister, and two young children.  Robert Harding was a silent, cold-mannered man who made no friends in the neighborhood and apparently cared to make none.  He was about forty years old, frugal and industrious, and made a living from the little farm which is now overgrown with brush and brambles.  He and his sister-in-law were rather tabooed by their neighbors, who seemed to think that they were seen too frequently together - not entirely their fault, for at these times they evidently did not challenge observation.  The moral code of rural Missouri is stern and exacting.

Mrs. Harding was a gentle, sad-eyed woman, lacking a left foot.

At some time in 1884 it became known that she had gone to visit her mother in Iowa.  That was what her husband said in reply to inquiries, and his manner of saying it did not encourage further questioning.  She never came back, and two years later, without selling his farm or anything that was his, or appointing an agent to look after his interests, or removing his household goods, Harding, with the rest of the family, left the country.  Nobody knew whither he went; nobody at that time cared.  Naturally, whatever was movable about the place soon disappeared and the deserted house became “haunted” in the manner of its kind.

One summer evening, four or five years later, the Rev. J. Gruber, of Norton, and a Maysville attorney named Hyatt met on horseback in front of the Harding place.  Having business matters to discuss, they hitched their animals and going to the house sat on the porch to talk.  Some humorous reference to the somber reputation of the place was made and forgotten as soon as uttered, and they talked of their business affairs until it grew almost dark.  The evening was oppressively warm, the air stagnant.

Presently both men started from their seats in surprise: a long vine that covered half the front of the house and dangled its branches from the edge of the porch above them was visibly and audibly agitated, shaking violently in every stem and leaf.

“We shall have a storm,” Hyatt exclaimed.

Gruber said nothing, but silently directed the other’s attention to the foliage of adjacent trees, which showed no movement; even the delicate tips of the boughs silhouetted against the clear sky were motionless.  They hastily passed down the steps to what had been a lawn and looked upward at the vine, whose entire length was now visible.  It continued in violent agitation, yet they could discern no disturbing cause.

“Let us leave,” said the minister.

And leave they did.  Forgetting that they had been traveling in opposite directions, they rode away together.  They went to Norton, where they related their strange experience to several discreet friends.  The next evening, at about the same hour, accompanied by two others whose names are not recalled, they were again on the porch of the Harding house, and again the mysterious phenomenon occurred: the vine was violently agitated while under the closest scrutiny from root to tip, nor did their combined strength applied to the trunk serve to still it.  After an hour’s observation they retreated, no less wise, it is thought, than when they had come.

No great time was required for these singular facts to rouse the curiosity of the entire neighborhood.  By day and by night crowds of persons assembled at the Harding house “seeking a sign.”  It does not appear that any found it, yet so credible were the witnesses mentioned that none doubted the reality of the “manifestations” to which they testified.

By either a happy inspiration or some destructive design, it was one day proposed - nobody appeared to know from whom the suggestion came - to dig up the vine, and after a good deal of debate this was done.  Nothing was found but the root, yet nothing could have been more strange!

For five or six feet from the trunk, which had at the surface of the ground a diameter of several inches, it ran downward, single and straight, into a loose, friable earth; then it divided and subdivided into rootlets, fibers and filaments, most curiously interwoven.  When carefully freed from soil they showed a singular formation.  In their ramifications and doublings back upon themselves they made a compact network, having in size and shape an amazing resemblance to the human figure.  Head, trunk and limbs were there; even the fingers and toes were distinctly defined; and many professed to see in the distribution and arrangement of the fibers in the globular mass representing the head a grotesque suggestion of a face.  The figure was horizontal; the smaller roots had begun to unite at the breast.

In point of resemblance to the human form this image was imperfect.  At about ten inches from one of the knees, the cilia forming that leg had abruptly doubled backward and inward upon their course of growth.  The figure lacked the left foot.

There was but one inference - the obvious one; but in the ensuing excitement as many courses of action were proposed as there were incapable counselors.  The matter was settled by the sheriff of the county, who as the lawful custodian of the abandoned estate ordered the root replaced and the excavation filled with the earth that had been removed.

Later inquiry brought out only one fact of relevancy and significance: Mrs. Harding had never visited her relatives in Iowa, nor did they know that she was supposed to have done so.

Of Robert Harding and the rest of his family nothing is known.  The house retains its evil reputation, but the replanted vine is as orderly and well-behaved a vegetable as a nervous person could wish to sit under of a pleasant night, when the katydids grate out their immemorial revelation and the distant whippoorwill signifies his notion of what ought to be done about it.



AT OLD MAN ECKERT’S



Philip Eckert lived for many years in an old, weather-stained wooden house about three miles from the little town of Marion, in Vermont.  There must be quite a number of persons living who remember him, not unkindly, I trust, and know something of the story that I am about to tell.

“Old Man Eckert,” as he was always called, was not of a sociable disposition and lived alone.  As he was never known to speak of his own affairs nobody thereabout knew anything of his past, nor of his relatives if he had any.  Without being particularly ungracious or repellent in manner or speech, he managed somehow to be immune to impertinent curiosity, yet exempt from the evil repute with which it commonly revenges itself when baffled; so far as I know, Mr. Eckert’s renown as a reformed assassin or a retired pirate of the Spanish Main had not reached any ear in Marion.  He got his living cultivating a small and not very fertile farm.

One day he disappeared and a prolonged search by his neighbors failed to turn him up or throw any light upon his whereabouts or whyabouts.  Nothing indicated preparation to leave: all was as he might have left it to go to the spring for a bucket of water.  For a few weeks little else was talked of in that region; then “old man Eckert” became a village tale for the ear of the stranger.  I do not know what was done regarding his property - the correct legal thing, doubtless.  The house was standing, still vacant and conspicuously unfit, when I last heard of it, some twenty years afterward.

Of course it came to be considered “haunted,” and the customary tales were told of moving lights, dolorous sounds and startling apparitions.  At one time, about five years after the disappearance, these stories of the supernatural became so rife, or through some attesting circumstances seemed so important, that some of Marion’s most serious citizens deemed it well to investigate, and to that end arranged for a night session on the premises.  The parties to this undertaking were John Holcomb, an apothecary; Wilson Merle, a lawyer, and Andrus C. Palmer, the teacher of the public school, all men of consequence and repute.  They were to meet at Holcomb’s house at eight o’clock in the evening of the appointed day and go together to the scene of their vigil, where certain arrangements for their comfort, a provision of fuel and the like, for the season was winter, had been already made.

Palmer did not keep the engagement, and after waiting a half-hour for him the others went to the Eckert house without him.  They established themselves in the principal room, before a glowing fire, and without other light than it gave, awaited events.  It had been agreed to speak as little as possible: they did not even renew the exchange of views regarding the defection of Palmer, which had occupied their minds on the way.

Probably an hour had passed without incident when they heard (not without emotion, doubtless) the sound of an opening door in the rear of the house, followed by footfalls in the room adjoining that in which they sat.  The watchers rose to their feet, but stood firm, prepared for whatever might ensue.  A long silence followed - how long neither would afterward undertake to say.  Then the door between the two rooms opened and a man entered.

It was Palmer.  He was pale, as if from excitement - as pale as the others felt themselves to be.  His manner, too, was singularly distrait: he neither responded to their salutations nor so much as looked at them, but walked slowly across the room in the light of the failing fire and opening the front door passed out into the darkness.

It seems to have been the first thought of both men that Palmer was suffering from fright - that something seen, heard or imagined in the back room had deprived him of his senses.  Acting on the same friendly impulse both ran after him through the open door.  But neither they nor anyone ever again saw or heard of Andrus Palmer!

This much was ascertained the next morning.  During the session of Messrs. Holcomb and Merle at the “haunted house” a new snow had fallen to a depth of several inches upon the old.  In this snow Palmer’s trail from his lodging in the village to the back door of the Eckert house was conspicuous.  But there it ended: from the front door nothing led away but the tracks of the two men who swore that he preceded them.  Palmer’s disappearance was as complete as that of “old man Eckert” himself - whom, indeed, the editor of the local paper somewhat graphically accused of having “reached out and pulled him in.”



THE SPOOK HOUSE



On the road leading north from Manchester, in eastern Kentucky, to Booneville, twenty miles away, stood, in 1862, a wooden plantation house of a somewhat better quality than most of the dwellings in that region.  The house was destroyed by fire in the year following - probably by some stragglers from the retreating column of General George W. Morgan, when he was driven from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio river by General Kirby Smith.  At the time of its destruction, it had for four or five years been vacant.  The fields about it were overgrown with brambles, the fences gone, even the few negro quarters, and out-houses generally, fallen partly into ruin by neglect and pillage; for the negroes and poor whites of the vicinity found in the building and fences an abundant supply of fuel, of which they availed themselves without hesitation, openly and by daylight.  By daylight alone; after nightfall no human being except passing strangers ever went near the place.

It was known as the “Spook House.”  That it was tenanted by evil spirits, visible, audible and active, no one in all that region doubted any more than he doubted what he was told of Sundays by the traveling preacher.  Its owner’s opinion of the matter was unknown; he and his family had disappeared one night and no trace of them had ever been found.  They left everything - household goods, clothing, provisions, the horses in the stable, the cows in the field, the negroes in the quarters - all as it stood; nothing was missing - except a man, a woman, three girls, a boy and a babe!  It was not altogether surprising that a plantation where seven human beings could be simultaneously effaced and nobody the wiser should be under some suspicion.

One night in June, 1859, two citizens of Frankfort, Col. J. C. McArdle, a lawyer, and Judge Myron Veigh, of the State Militia, were driving from Booneville to Manchester.  Their business was so important that they decided to push on, despite the darkness and the mutterings of an approaching storm, which eventually broke upon them just as they arrived opposite the “Spook House.”  The lightning was so incessant that they easily found their way through the gateway and into a shed, where they hitched and unharnessed their team.  They then went to the house, through the rain, and knocked at all the doors without getting any response.  Attributing this to the continuous uproar of the thunder they pushed at one of the doors, which yielded.  They entered without further ceremony and closed the door.  That instant they were in darkness and silence.  Not a gleam of the lightning’s unceasing blaze penetrated the windows or crevices; not a whisper of the awful tumult without reached them there.  It was as if they had suddenly been stricken blind and deaf, and McArdle afterward said that for a moment he believed himself to have been killed by a stroke of lightning as he crossed the threshold.  The rest of this adventure can as well be related in his own words, from the Frankfort Advocate of August 6, 1876:

“When I had somewhat recovered from the dazing effect of the transition from uproar to silence, my first impulse was to reopen the door which I had closed, and from the knob of which I was not conscious of having removed my hand; I felt it distinctly, still in the clasp of my fingers.  My notion was to ascertain by stepping again into the storm whether I had been deprived of sight and hearing.  I turned the doorknob and pulled open the door.  It led into another room!

“This apartment was suffused with a faint greenish light, the source of which I could not determine, making everything distinctly visible, though nothing was sharply defined.  Everything, I say, but in truth the only objects within the blank stone walls of that room were human corpses.  In number they were perhaps eight or ten - it may well be understood that I did not truly count them.  They were of different ages, or rather sizes, from infancy up, and of both sexes.  All were prostrate on the floor, excepting one, apparently a young woman, who sat up, her back supported by an angle of the wall.  A babe was clasped in the arms of another and older woman.  A half-grown lad lay face downward across the legs of a full-bearded man.  One or two were nearly naked, and the hand of a young girl held the fragment of a gown which she had torn open at the breast.  The bodies were in various stages of decay, all greatly shrunken in face and figure.  Some were but little more than skeletons.

“While I stood stupefied with horror by this ghastly spectacle and still holding open the door, by some unaccountable perversity my attention was diverted from the shocking scene and concerned itself with trifles and details.  Perhaps my mind, with an instinct of self-preservation, sought relief in matters which would relax its dangerous tension.  Among other things, I observed that the door that I was holding open was of heavy iron plates, riveted.  Equidistant from one another and from the top and bottom, three strong bolts protruded from the beveled edge.  I turned the knob and they were retracted flush with the edge; released it, and they shot out.  It was a spring lock.  On the inside there was no knob, nor any kind of projection - a smooth surface of iron.

“While noting these things with an interest and attention which it now astonishes me to recall I felt myself thrust aside, and Judge Veigh, whom in the intensity and vicissitudes of my feelings I had altogether forgotten, pushed by me into the room.  ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘do not go in there!  Let us get out of this dreadful place!’

“He gave no heed to my entreaties, but (as fearless a gentleman as lived in all the South) walked quickly to the center of the room, knelt beside one of the bodies for a closer examination and tenderly raised its blackened and shriveled head in his hands.  A strong disagreeable odor came through the doorway, completely overpowering me.  My senses reeled; I felt myself falling, and in clutching at the edge of the door for support pushed it shut with a sharp click!

“I remember no more: six weeks later I recovered my reason in a hotel at Manchester, whither I had been taken by strangers the next day.  For all these weeks I had suffered from a nervous fever, attended with constant delirium.  I had been found lying in the road several miles away from the house; but how I had escaped from it to get there I never knew.  On recovery, or as soon as my physicians permitted me to talk, I inquired the fate of Judge Veigh, whom (to quiet me, as I now know) they represented as well and at home.

“No one believed a word of my story, and who can wonder?  And who can imagine my grief when, arriving at my home in Frankfort two months later, I learned that Judge Veigh had never been heard of since that night?  I then regretted bitterly the pride which since the first few days after the recovery of my reason had forbidden me to repeat my discredited story and insist upon its truth.

“With all that afterward occurred - the examination of the house; the failure to find any room corresponding to that which I have described; the attempt to have me adjudged insane, and my triumph over my accusers - the readers of the Advocate are familiar.  After all these years I am still confident that excavations which I have neither the legal right to undertake nor the wealth to make would disclose the secret of the disappearance of my unhappy friend, and possibly of the former occupants and owners of the deserted and now destroyed house.  I do not despair of yet bringing about such a search, and it is a source of deep grief to me that it has been delayed by the undeserved hostility and unwise incredulity of the family and friends of the late Judge Veigh.”

Colonel McArdle died in Frankfort on the thirteenth day of December, in the year 1879.



THE OTHER LODGERS



“In order to take that train,” said Colonel Levering, sitting in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, “you will have to remain nearly all night in Atlanta.  That is a fine city, but I advise you not to put up at the Breathitt House, one of the principal hotels.  It is an old wooden building in urgent need of repairs.  There are breaches in the walls that you could throw a cat through.  The bedrooms have no locks on the doors, no furniture but a single chair in each, and a bedstead without bedding - just a mattress.  Even these meager accommodations you cannot be sure that you will have in monopoly; you must take your chance of being stowed in with a lot of others.  Sir, it is a most abominable hotel.

“The night that I passed in it was an uncomfortable night.  I got in late and was shown to my room on the ground floor by an apologetic night-clerk with a tallow candle, which he considerately left with me.  I was worn out by two days and a night of hard railway travel and had not entirely recovered from a gunshot wound in the head, received in an altercation.  Rather than look for better quarters I lay down on the mattress without removing my clothing and fell asleep.

“Along toward morning I awoke.  The moon had risen and was shining in at the uncurtained window, illuminating the room with a soft, bluish light which seemed, somehow, a bit spooky, though I dare say it had no uncommon quality; all moonlight is that way if you will observe it.  Imagine my surprise and indignation when I saw the floor occupied by at least a dozen other lodgers!  I sat up, earnestly damning the management of that unthinkable hotel, and was about to spring from the bed to go and make trouble for the night-clerk - him of the apologetic manner and the tallow candle - when something in the situation affected me with a strange indisposition to move.  I suppose I was what a story-writer might call ‘frozen with terror.’  For those men were obviously all dead!

“They lay on their backs, disposed orderly along three sides of the room, their feet to the walls - against the other wall, farthest from the door, stood my bed and the chair.  All the faces were covered, but under their white cloths the features of the two bodies that lay in the square patch of moonlight near the window showed in sharp profile as to nose and chin.

“I thought this a bad dream and tried to cry out, as one does in a nightmare, but could make no sound.  At last, with a desperate effort I threw my feet to the floor and passing between the two rows of clouted faces and the two bodies that lay nearest the door, I escaped from the infernal place and ran to the office.  The night-clerk was there, behind the desk, sitting in the dim light of another tallow candle - just sitting and staring.  He did not rise: my abrupt entrance produced no effect upon him, though I must have looked a veritable corpse myself.  It occurred to me then that I had not before really observed the fellow.  He was a little chap, with a colorless face and the whitest, blankest eyes I ever saw.  He had no more expression than the back of my hand.  His clothing was a dirty gray.

“‘Damn you!’ I said; ‘what do you mean?’

“Just the same, I was shaking like a leaf in the wind and did not recognize my own voice.

“The night-clerk rose, bowed (apologetically) and - well, he was no longer there, and at that moment I felt a hand laid upon my shoulder from behind.  Just fancy that if you can!  Unspeakably frightened, I turned and saw a portly, kind-faced gentleman, who asked:

“‘What is the matter, my friend?’

“I was not long in telling him, but before I made an end of it he went pale himself.  ‘See here,’ he said, ‘are you telling the truth?’

“I had now got myself in hand and terror had given place to indignation.  ‘If you dare to doubt it,’ I said, ‘I’ll hammer the life out of you!’

“‘No,’ he replied, ‘don’t do that; just sit down till I tell you.  This is not a hotel.  It used to be; afterward it was a hospital.  Now it is unoccupied, awaiting a tenant.  The room that you mention was the dead-room - there were always plenty of dead.  The fellow that you call the night-clerk used to be that, but later he booked the patients as they were brought in.  I don’t understand his being here.  He has been dead a few weeks.’

“‘And who are you?’ I blurted out.

“‘Oh, I look after the premises.  I happened to be passing just now, and seeing a light in here came in to investigate.  Let us have a look into that room,’ he added, lifting the sputtering candle from the desk.

“‘I’ll see you at the devil first!’ said I, bolting out of the door into the street.

“Sir, that Breathitt House, in Atlanta, is a beastly place!  Don’t you stop there.”

“God forbid!  Your account of it certainly does not suggest comfort.  By the way, Colonel, when did all that occur?”

“In September, 1864 - shortly after the siege.”



THE THING AT NOLAN



To the south of where the road between Leesville and Hardy, in the State of Missouri, crosses the east fork of May Creek stands an abandoned house.  Nobody has lived in it since the summer of 1879, and it is fast going to pieces.  For some three years before the date mentioned above, it was occupied by the family of Charles May, from one of whose ancestors the creek near which it stands took its name.

Mr. May’s family consisted of a wife, an adult son and two young girls.  The son’s name was John - the names of the daughters are unknown to the writer of this sketch.

John May was of a morose and surly disposition, not easily moved to anger, but having an uncommon gift of sullen, implacable hate.  His father was quite otherwise; of a sunny, jovial disposition, but with a quick temper like a sudden flame kindled in a wisp of straw, which consumes it in a flash and is no more.  He cherished no resentments, and his anger gone, was quick to make overtures for reconciliation.  He had a brother living near by who was unlike him in respect of all this, and it was a current witticism in the neighborhood that John had inherited his disposition from his uncle.

One day a misunderstanding arose between father and son, harsh words ensued, and the father struck the son full in the face with his fist.  John quietly wiped away the blood that followed the blow, fixed his eyes upon the already penitent offender and said with cold composure, “You will die for that.”

The words were overheard by two brothers named Jackson, who were approaching the men at the moment; but seeing them engaged in a quarrel they retired, apparently unobserved.  Charles May afterward related the unfortunate occurrence to his wife and explained that he had apologized to the son for the hasty blow, but without avail; the young man not only rejected his overtures, but refused to withdraw his terrible threat.  Nevertheless, there was no open rupture of relations: John continued living with the family, and things went on very much as before.

One Sunday morning in June, 1879, about two weeks after what has been related, May senior left the house immediately after breakfast, taking a spade.  He said he was going to make an excavation at a certain spring in a wood about a mile away, so that the cattle could obtain water.  John remained in the house for some hours, variously occupied in shaving himself, writing letters and reading a newspaper.  His manner was very nearly what it usually was; perhaps he was a trifle more sullen and surly.

At two o’clock he left the house.  At five, he returned.  For some reason not connected with any interest in his movements, and which is not now recalled, the time of his departure and that of his return were noted by his mother and sisters, as was attested at his trial for murder.  It was observed that his clothing was wet in spots, as if (so the prosecution afterward pointed out) he had been removing blood-stains from it.  His manner was strange, his look wild.  He complained of illness, and going to his room took to his bed.

May senior did not return.  Later that evening the nearest neighbors were aroused, and during that night and the following day a search was prosecuted through the wood where the spring was.  It resulted in little but the discovery of both men’s footprints in the clay about the spring.  John May in the meantime had grown rapidly worse with what the local physician called brain fever, and in his delirium raved of murder, but did not say whom he conceived to have been murdered, nor whom he imagined to have done the deed.  But his threat was recalled by the brothers Jackson and he was arrested on suspicion and a deputy sheriff put in charge of him at his home.  Public opinion ran strongly against him and but for his illness he would probably have been hanged by a mob.  As it was, a meeting of the neighbors was held on Tuesday and a committee appointed to watch the case and take such action at any time as circumstances might seem to warrant.

On Wednesday all was changed.  From the town of Nolan, eight miles away, came a story which put a quite different light on the matter.  Nolan consisted of a school house, a blacksmith’s shop, a “store” and a half-dozen dwellings.  The store was kept by one Henry Odell, a cousin of the elder May.  On the afternoon of the Sunday of May’s disappearance Mr. Odell and four of his neighbors, men of credibility, were sitting in the store smoking and talking.  It was a warm day; and both the front and the back door were open.  At about three o’clock Charles May, who was well known to three of them, entered at the front door and passed out at the rear.  He was without hat or coat.  He did not look at them, nor return their greeting, a circumstance which did not surprise, for he was evidently seriously hurt.  Above the left eyebrow was a wound - a deep gash from which the blood flowed, covering the whole left side of the face and neck and saturating his light-gray shirt.  Oddly enough, the thought uppermost in the minds of all was that he had been fighting and was going to the brook directly at the back of the store, to wash himself.

Perhaps there was a feeling of delicacy - a backwoods etiquette which restrained them from following him to offer assistance; the court records, from which, mainly, this narrative is drawn, are silent as to anything but the fact.  They waited for him to return, but he did not return.

Bordering the brook behind the store is a forest extending for six miles back to the Medicine Lodge Hills.  As soon as it became known in the neighborhood of the missing man’s dwelling that he had been seen in Nolan there was a marked alteration in public sentiment and feeling.  The vigilance committee went out of existence without the formality of a resolution.  Search along the wooded bottom lands of May Creek was stopped and nearly the entire male population of the region took to beating the bush about Nolan and in the Medicine Lodge Hills.  But of the missing man no trace was found.

One of the strangest circumstances of this strange case is the formal indictment and trial of a man for murder of one whose body no human being professed to have seen - one not known to be dead.  We are all more or less familiar with the vagaries and eccentricities of frontier law, but this instance, it is thought, is unique.  However that may be, it is of record that on recovering from his illness John May was indicted for the murder of his missing father.  Counsel for the defense appears not to have demurred and the case was tried on its merits.  The prosecution was spiritless and perfunctory; the defense easily established - with regard to the deceased - an alibi.  If during the time in which John May must have killed Charles May, if he killed him at all, Charles May was miles away from where John May must have been, it is plain that the deceased must have come to his death at the hands of someone else.

John May was acquitted, immediately left the country, and has never been heard of from that day.  Shortly afterward his mother and sisters removed to St. Louis.  The farm having passed into the possession of a man who owns the land adjoining, and has a dwelling of his own, the May house has ever since been vacant, and has the somber reputation of being haunted.

One day after the May family had left the country, some boys, playing in the woods along May Creek, found concealed under a mass of dead leaves, but partly exposed by the rooting of hogs, a spade, nearly new and bright, except for a spot on one edge, which was rusted and stained with blood.  The implement had the initials C. M. cut into the handle.

This discovery renewed, in some degree, the public excitement of a few months before.  The earth near the spot where the spade was found was carefully examined, and the result was the finding of the dead body of a man.  It had been buried under two or three feet of soil and the spot covered with a layer of dead leaves and twigs.  There was but little decomposition, a fact attributed to some preservative property in the mineral-bearing soil.

Above the left eyebrow was a wound - a deep gash from which blood had flowed, covering the whole left side of the face and neck and saturating the light-gray shirt.  The skull had been cut through by the blow.  The body was that of Charles May.

But what was it that passed through Mr.