across the hall. While I was searching the room my wife called loudly to
me, and I ran back.
"It is on the mantel now," she said. "It struck the mantel just after
you left; then the ceiling, three times, very loud; then the mantel
again,--don't you hear?"
I heard distinctly; moreover, the mantel shook a little with the
concussion. I took out the fire-board and looked up the chimney; I took
out the register and looked down the furnace-pipe; I ransacked the
garret and the halls; finally, I examined Miss Fellows's door,--it was
locked as I had left it, upon the outside; and that locked door was the
only means of egress from the room, unless the occupant fancied that of
jumping from a two-story window upon a broad flight of stone steps.
I came thoughtfully back across the hall; an invisible trip-hammer
appeared to hit the floor beside me at every step; I attempted to step
aside from it, over it, away from it; but it followed me, pounding into
my room.
"Wind?" suggested Allis. "Plaster cracking? Fancies?
Dreams? Blind
headaches?--I should like to know which you have decided upon?"
Quiet fell upon the house after that for an hour, and I was dropping
into my first nap, when there came a light tap upon the door. Before I
could reach it, it had grown into a thundering blow.
"Whatever it is I'll have it now!" I whispered, turned the latch without
noise, and flung the door wide into the hall. It was silent, dark, and
cold. A little glimmer of moonlight fell in and showed me the figures
upon the carpet, outlined in a frosty bar. No hand or hammer, human or
superhuman, was there.
Determined to investigate matters a little more thoroughly, I asked my
wife to stand upon the inside of the doorway while I kept watch upon the
outside. We took our position, and I closed the door between us.
Instantly a series of furious blows struck the door; the sound was such
as would be made by a stick of oaken wood. The solid door quivered under
it.
"It's on your side!" said I.
"No, it's on yours!" said she.
"You're pounding yourself to fool me," cried I.
"You're pounding yourself to frighten me," sobbed she.
And we nearly had a quarrel. The sound continued with more or less
intermission till daybreak. Allis fell asleep, but I spent the time in
appropriate reflections.
Early in the morning I removed the button from Miss Fellows's door. She
never knew anything about it.
I believe, however, that I had the fairness to exculpate her in my
secret heart from any trickish connection with the disturbances of that
night.
"Just keep quiet about this little affair," I said to my wife; "we shall
come across an explanation in time, and may never have any more of it."
We kept quiet, and for five days so did "the spirits,"
as Miss Fellows
was pleased to pronounce the trip-hammers.
The fifth day I came home early, as it chanced, from the office. Miss
Fellows was writing letters in the parlor. Allis, upstairs, was sorting
and putting away the weekly wash. I came into the room and sat down by
the register to watch her. I always liked to watch her sitting there on
the floor with the little heaps of linen and cotton stuff piled like
blocks of snow about her, and her pink hands darting in and out of the
uncertain sleeves that were just ready to give way in the gathers,
trying the stockings' heels briskly, and testing the buttons with a
little jerk.
She laid aside some under-clothing presently from the rest. "It will
not be needed again this winter," she observed, "and had better go into
the cedar closet." The garments, by the way, were marked and numbered in
indelible ink. I heard her run over the figures in a busy, housekeeper's
undertone, before carrying them into the closet. She locked the closet
door, I think, for I remember the click of the key. If I remember
accurately, I stepped into the hall after that to light a cigar, and
Alison flitted to and fro with her clothes, dropping the baby's little
white stockings every step or two, and anathematizing them
daintily--within orthodox bounds, of course. In about five minutes she
called me; her voice was sharp and alarmed.
"Come quick! O Fred, look here! All those clothes that I locked into the
cedar closet are out here on the bed!"
"My dear wife," I blandly observed, as I sauntered into the room, "too
much of Gertrude Fellows hath made thee mad. Let _me_
see the clothes!"
She pointed to the bed. Some white clothing lay upon it, folded in an
ugly way, to represent a corpse, with crossed hands.
"Is it meant for a joke, Alison? You did it yourself, I suppose!"
"Fred! I have not touched it with the tip of my little finger!"
"Gertrude, then?"
"Gertrude is in the parlor writing."
So she was. I called her up. She looked surprised and troubled.
"It must have been Bridget," I proceeded, authoritatively, "or Tip."
"Bridget is out walking with Tip and the baby. Jane is in the kitchen
making pies."
"At any rate these are not the clothes which you locked into the closet,
however they came here."
"The very same, Fred. See, I noticed the numbers 6 upon the stockings, 2
on the night-caps, and--"
"Give me the key," I interrupted.
She gave me the key. I went to the cedar closet and tried the door. It
was locked. I unlocked it, and opened the drawer in which my wife
assured me that the clothes had lain. Nothing was to be seen in it but
the linen towel which neatly covered the bottom. I lifted it and shook
it. The drawer was empty.
"Give me those clothes, if you please."
She brought them to me. I made in my diary a careful memorandum of their
naming and numbering; placed the articles myself in the drawer,--an
upper drawer, so that there could be no mistake in identifying it;
locked the drawer, put the key in my pocket; locked the door of the
closet, put the key in my pocket; locked the door of the room in which
the closet was, and put that key in my pocket.
We sat down then in the hall, all of us; Allis and Gertrude to fill the
mending-basket, I to smoke and consider. I saw Tip coming home with his
nurse presently, and started to go down and let him in, when a faint
scream from my wife arrested me. I ran past Miss Fellows, who was
sitting on the stairs, and into my room. Allis, going in to put away
Tip's little plaid aprons, had stopped, rather pale, upon the threshold.
Upon the bed lay some clothing, folded, as before, in rude, hideous
imitation of the dead.
I took each article in turn, and compared the name and number with the
names and numbers in my diary. They were identical throughout. I took
the clothes, took the three keys from my pocket, unlocked the
"cedar-room" door, unlocked the closet door, unlocked the upper drawer,
and looked in. The drawer was empty.
To say that from this time I failed to own--to myself, if not to other
people--that some mysterious influence, inexplicable by common or
scientific causes, was at work in my house, would be to accuse myself of
more obstinacy than even I am capable of. I propounded theory after
theory, and gave it up. I arrived at conclusion upon conclusion, and
threw them aside. Finally, I held my peace, ceased to talk of "rats,"
kept my mind in a state of passive vacancy, and narrowly and quietly
watched the progress of affairs.
From the date of that escapade with the underclothes confusion reigned
in our corner of Nemo's Avenue. That night neither my wife nor myself
closed an eye, the house so resounded and re-echoed with the blows of
unseen hammers, fists, logs, and knuckles.
Miss Fellows, too, was pale with her vigils, looked troubled, and
proposed going home. This I peremptorily vetoed, determined if the woman
had any connection, honest or otherwise, with the mystery, to ferret it
out.
The following day, just after dinner, I was writing in the library, when
a child's cry of fright and pain startled me. It seemed to come from the
little yard behind the house, and I hurried thither to behold a singular
sight. There was one apple-tree in the yard,--an old, stunted, crooked
thing; and in that tree I found my son and heir, Tip, tied fast with a
small stout rope. "Tied" does not express it; he was gagged, manacled,
twisted, contorted, wound about, crossed and recrossed, held without a
chance of motion, scarcely of breath.
"You never tied yourself up here, child?" I asked, as I cut the knots.
The question certainly was unnecessary. No juggler could have bound
himself in such a fashion; scarcely, then, a four-years'
child. To my
continued, clear, and gentle inquiries, the boy replied, persistently
and consistently, that nobody tied him there,--"not Cousin Gertrude, nor
Bridget, nor the baby, nor mamma, nor Jane, nor papa, nor the black
kitty"; he was "just tooken up all at once into the tree, and that was
all there was about it." He "s'posed it must have been God, or something
like that, did it."
Poor Tip had a hard time of it. Two days after that, while his mother
and I sat discussing the incident, and the child was at play upon the
floor, he suddenly threw himself at full length, writhing with pain, and
begging to "have them pulled out quick!"
"Have _what_ pulled out?" exclaimed his terrified mother. She took the
child into her lap, and found that he was stuck over from head to foot
with large white pins.
"We haven't so many large pins in all the house," she said as soon as he
was relieved.
As she spoke the words thirty or forty _small_ pins pierced the boy.
Where they came from no one could see. How they came there no one knew.
We looked, and there they were, and Tip was crying and writhing as
before.
For the remainder of that winter we had scarcely a day of quiet. The
rumor that "the Hotchkisses had rented a haunted house"
leaked out and
spread abroad. The frightened servants gave warning, and other
frightened servants took their place, to leave in turn.
My wife was her
own cook and nursery-maid a quarter of the time. The disturbances varied
in character with every week, assuming, as time went on, an importunity
which, had we not quietly settled it in our own minds
"not to be beaten
by a noise," would have driven us from the house.
Night after night the mysterious fingers rapped at the windows, the
doors, the floors, the walls. Day after day uncomfortable tricks were
sprung upon us by invisible agencies. We became used to the noises, so
that we slept through them easily; but many of the phenomena were so
strikingly unpleasant, and so singularly unsuited to the ordinary
conditions of human happiness and housekeeping, that we scarcely
became--as one of our excellent deacons had a cheerful habit of
exhorting us to become--"resigned."
Upon one occasion we had invited a small and select number of friends to
dine. It was to be rather a _recherché_ affair for Nemo's Avenue, and my
wife had spared no painstaking to suit herself with her table. We had
had a comparatively quiet house the night before, so that our cook, who
had been with us three days, consented to remain till our guests had
been provided for. The soup was good, the pigeons better, the bread was
_not_ sour, and Allis looked hopeful, and inclined to trust Providence
for the gravies and dessert.
It was just as I had begun to carve the beef that I observed my wife
suddenly pale, and a telegram from her eyes turned mine in the direction
of General Popgun, who sat at her right hand. My sensations "can better
be imagined than described" when I saw General Popgun's fork, untouched
by any human hand, dancing a jig on his plate. He grasped it and laid it
firmly down. As soon as he released his hold it leaped from the table.
"Really--aw--very singular phenomena," began the General; "very
singular! I was not prepared to credit the extraordinary accounts of
spiritual manifestations in this house, but--aw--Well, I must say--"
Instantly it was Pandemonium at that dinner-table. Dr.
Jump's knife,
Mrs. M'Ready's plate, and Colonel Hope's tumbler sprang from their
places. The pigeons flew from the platter, the caster rattled and
rolled, the salt-cellars bounded to and fro, and the gravies, moved by
some invisible disturber, spattered all over Mrs. Elias P. Critique's
_moire antique_.
Mortified and angered beyond endurance, I for the first time addressed
the spirits,--wrenched for the moment into a profound belief that they
must be spirits indeed.
"Whatever you are, and wherever you are," I shouted, bringing my hand
down hard upon the table, "go out of this room and let us alone!"
The only reply was a furious mazourka of all the dishes on the table. A
gentleman present, who had, as he afterward told us, studied the subject
of spiritualism somewhat, very sceptically and with unsatisfactory
results, observed the performance keenly, and suggested that I should
try a gentler method of appeal. Whatever the agent was,-
-and what it was
he had not yet discovered,--he had noticed repeatedly that the quiet
modes of meeting it were most effective.
Rather amused, I spoke more softly, addressing the caster, and
intimating in my blandest manner that I and my guests would feel under
obligations if we could have the room to ourselves till after we had
dined. The disturbance gradually ceased, and we had no more of it that
day.
A morning or two after Alison chanced to leave half a dozen teaspoons
upon the sideboard in the breakfast-room; they were of solid silver, and
quite thick. She was going to rub them herself, I believe, and went into
the china-closet, which opens from the room, for the silver-soap. The
breakfast-room was left vacant, and it was vacant when she returned to
it, and she insists, with a quiet conviction which it is hardly
reasonable to doubt, that no human being did or could have entered the
room without her knowledge. When she came back to the sideboard every
one of those spoons lay there _bent double_. She showed them to me when
I came home at noon. Had they been pewter toys they could not have been
more completely twisted out of shape than they were. I took them without
any remarks (I began to feel as if this mystery were assuming
uncomfortable proportions), put them away, just as I found them, into a
small cupboard in the wall of the breakfast-room, locked the cupboard
door with the only key in the house which fitted it, put the key in my
inner vest pocket, and meditatively ate my dinner.
About half an hour afterward a neighbor dropped in to groan over the
weather and see the baby, and Allis chanced to mention the incident of
the spoons.
"Really, Mrs. Hotchkiss!" said the lady, with a slight smile, and that
indefinite, quickly smothered change of eye which signifies, "I don't
believe a word of it!" "Are you sure that there is not a mistake
somewhere, or a little mental hallucination? The story is very
entertaining, but--I beg your pardon--I should be interested to see
those spoons."
"Your curiosity shall be gratified, madam," I said, a little testily;
and taking the key from my pocket, I led her to the cupboard and
unlocked the door. I found those spoons as straight, smooth, and fair as
ever spoons had been;--not a dent, not a wrinkle, not a bend nor untrue
line could we discover anywhere upon them.
"_Oh!_" said our visitor, significantly.
That lady, be it recorded, then and thenceforward spared no pains to
found and strengthen throughout Nemo's Avenue the theory that "the
Hotchkisses were getting up all that spiritual nonsense to force their
landlord into lower rents. And such respectable people too! It did seem
a pity, didn't it?"
One night I was alone in the library. It was late; about half-past
eleven, I think. The brightest gas jet was lighted, so that I could see
to every portion of the small room. The door was shut.
There was no
furniture but the book-cases, my table, and chair; no sliding: doors or
concealed corners; no nook or cranny in which any human creature could
lurk unseen by me; and I say that I was alone.
I had been writing to a confidential friend a somewhat minute account
of the disturbances in my house, which were now of about six weeks'
duration. I had begged him to come and observe them for himself, and help
me out with a solution,--I myself was at a loss for a reasonable one.
There certainly seemed to be evidence of superhuman agency; but I was
hardly ready yet to commit myself thoroughly to that view of the matter,
and--
In the middle of that sentence I laid down my pen. A consciousness,
sudden and distinct, came to me that I was not alone in that bright
little silent room. Yet to mortal eyes alone I was. I pushed away my
writing and looked about. The warm air was empty of outline; the
curtains were undisturbed; the little recess under the library table
held nothing but my own feet; there was no sound but the ordinary
rap-rapping on the floor, to which I had by this time become so
accustomed that often it passed unnoticed. I rose and examined the room
thoroughly, until quite satisfied that I was its only visible occupant;
then sat down again. The rappings had meantime become loud and
impatient.
I had learned that very week from Miss Fellows the spiritual alphabet
with which she was in the habit of "communicating with her dead mother."
I had never asked her, nor had she proposed, to use it herself for my
benefit. I had meant to try all other means of investigation before
resorting to it. Now, however being alone, and being perplexed and
annoyed by my sense of having invisible company, I turned and spelled
out upon the table, so many raps to a letter till the question was
complete:--
"_What do you want of me?_"
Instantly the answer came rapping back:--
"_Stretch down your hand._"
I put my fingers under the table, and I felt, as indubitably as I ever
felt a touch in my life, the grasp of a _warm, human hand_.
I added to the broken paragraph in the letter to my friend a brief
account of the occurrence, and reiterated my entreaties that he would
come at his earliest convenience to my house. He was an Episcopal
clergyman, by the way, and I considered that his testimony would uphold
my fast-sinking character for veracity among my townspeople. I began to
have an impression that this dilemma in which I found myself was a
pretty serious one for a man of peaceable disposition and honest
intentions to be in.
About this time I undertook to come to a little better understanding
with Miss Fellows. I took her away alone, and having tried my best not
to frighten the life out of her by my grave face, asked her seriously
and kindly to tell me whether she supposed herself to have any
connection with the phenomena in my house. To my surprise she answered
promptly that she thought she had. I repressed a whistle, and "asked for
information."
"The presence of a medium renders easy what would otherwise be
impossible," she replied. "I offered to go away, Mr.
Hotchkiss, in the
beginning."
I assured her that I had no desire to have her go away at present, and
begged her to proceed.
"The Influences in the house are strong, as I have said before," she
continued, looking through me and beyond me with her vacant eyes.
"Something is wrong. They are never at rest. I hear them. I feel them. I
see them. They go up and down the stairs with me. I find them in my
room. I see them gliding about. I see them standing now, with their
hands almost upon your shoulders."
I confess to a kind of chill that crept down my backbone at these words,
and to having turned my head and stared hard at the book-cases behind
me.
"But they--I mean something--rapped one night before you came," I
suggested.
"Yes, and they might rap after I was gone. The simple noises are not
uncommon in places where there are no better means of communication. The
extreme methods of expression, such as you have witnessed this winter,
are, I doubt not, practicable only when the system of a medium is
accessible. They write all sorts of messages for you.
You would ridicule
them. I do not repeat them. You and Cousin Alison do not see, hear, feel
as I do. We are differently made. There are lying spirits and true, good
spirits and bad. Sometimes the bad deceive and distress me, but
sometimes--sometimes my mother comes."
She lowered her voice reverently, and I was fain to hush the laugh upon
my lips. Whatever the thing might prove to be to me, it was daily
comfort to the nervous, unstrung, lonely woman, whom to suspect of
trickery I began to think was worse than stupidity.
From the time of my midnight experience in the library I allowed myself
to look a little further into the subject of
"communications." Miss
Fellows wrote them out at my request whenever they
"came" to her.
Writers on Spiritualism have described the process so frequently, that
it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon it at length. The influences took
her unawares in the usual manner. In the usual manner her arm--to all
appearance the passive instrument of some unseen, powerful
agency--jerked and glided over the paper, writing in curious, scrawly
characters, never in her own neat little old-fashioned hand, messages of
which, on coming out from the "trance" state, she would have-no memory;
of many of which at any time she could have had no comprehension. These
messages assumed every variety of character from the tragic to the
ridiculous, and a large portion of them had no point whatever.
One day Benjamin West desired to give me lessons in oil-painting. The
next, my brother Joseph, dead now for ten years, asked forgiveness for
his share in a little quarrel of ours which had embittered a portion of
his last days,--of which, by the way, I am