Then we all put our hands on the closed cover of the instrument and waited. For a while nothing happened. Then suddenly from one of the lower notes there came a deep resonant “boom,” followed by another, and another.
There could be no mistaking whence the sound came. Somebody was playing on the closed and locked piano.
At that moment there was a loud shriek, followed by a heavy thud on the floor. One of the women, completely overwrought, had screamed and fainted. That was the end of the séance. Somebody turned up the lights. The girl who had swooned—she was the same who had played the mandoline—was brought to with water and smelling-salts, and the awe-stricken guests took their departure.
Now for the explanation. Before summoning the landlady and her friends to the séance, I had gone to the trouble of fixing threads leading from where I was sitting to the aspidistra plant and the vase, and I had also affixed similar threads, half a dozen of them, to the hammers of the notes of the piano underneath the keyboard, allowing them to dangle down in such a way that I could easily reach them by stretching out my hand.
Simple, isn’t it! Yet it spoofed completely everybody there that night; and to this day, I suppose, they believe that they witnessed some very wonderful and perfectly genuine spirit manifestations.
The following morning early I made up my face delicately with hollow eyes, and wan cheeks, so as to suggest a sleepless night, and when the landlady came in with my morning cup of tea I remarked in awestricken tones that I believed her house was haunted by the spirits. “Why,” I said, “they’ve been walking about in the night upside-down on the ceiling above my head.”
Instinctively the good lady turned her eyes up to the ceiling. Then she let out a yell, dropped the tray she was holding with a crash, and fell gasping and shaking into a near-by arm-chair.
And small wonder! For there on the white plaster of the ceiling, plainly visible, were the marks of naked feet, circling the room and leading out at the door.
And now for another simple explanation. The next bedroom was occupied by a friend of mine, an acrobat. After the household had gone to bed on the previous night, he had stolen into my room, slightly blackened the soles of his bare feet with soot from the chimney, and then, balancing himself upside-down with his hands on my shoulders, he had made the prints on the ceiling which so puzzled and alarmed the landlady.
So simple! And yet she never guessed.