The Ghost
Occasionally I work a ghost in the following way. After some patter, in which I inform the onlookers that I am about to conjure up the shade of some famous character, I extinguish the lights, and withdrawing to a corner of the room, enfold myself in a long black mackintosh or coat that shrouds my head and figure completely.
I strike a match behind the curtain, and, when I have a good spark that will last a few seconds, blow out the flame, and hold the end of the match between my teeth, so that my mouth is lit up ([Fig. 3]). My lips are drawn in a fiendish grin, and I strike an attitude, accompanied by inhuman moans and drum-beating from Hyde.
Fig. 3.—The Ghost.
When the spark dies, I hide the black garment behind the curtain, and assume the position I occupied before the appearance of the ghost.
Hyde switches on the light, and my shivering onlookers have no key to the riddle.
The apparatus employed by the bunkum entertainer and the cost it entails depend largely upon his own ingenuity. Most of the articles I employ are of my own manufacture. My wigs do not hail from a wig-maker’s, but from the lumber room at the top of our house, where Jane and I shred disused rope, fix it by means of gum or stitches on to pieces of stiff book-muslin, shaped so as to fit the head. If other colors, such as black and red, are required, we resort to aniline dyes, and the result is much satisfaction to ourselves.