The Ghost of Guir House

by Charles Willing Beale

“It was midnight when he reached his home. He pounded sharply on the door; but his good wife, who never retired without him, failed to answer the summons. So, after repeated knocks, Guir forced the door and entered. All was dark. An unearthly stillness pervaded the air, and a horrid suspicion forced itself upon him while groping his way forward to secure a light. Finding the chimney, he raked together a few coals, which he blew into a flame, and then, with trembling hands, lighted the candle upon the shelf above. Looking about him, Guir's heart sank. His house had been wrecked. His pictures, the work of years, were scattered in fragments about the floor. The windows were smashed, and the hall starred with broken glass. Not an ornament, not a treasure remained intact. But this he knew was as nothing to the horrible sight which he expected momentarily to greet his eyes. He called aloud to each member of his family, in the failing hope that some one would answer; but no sound broke the awful stillness. Suddenly he bethought him of the secret chamber, and with a wild prayer that his loved ones had been able to reach it in safety, and were still in hiding there, he started down the narrow stairs in search. Reaching the bottom, he found that the door had been wrenched from its hinges and thrown to the ground; and then Guir's heart sank, never to rise again. Stepping across the threshold of the room, candle in hand, a vision of blood swam before his eyes, and the dimly-burning light revealed the horror-stricken faces of his murdered family. Not one was left to tell the tale, but the story pictured before him was unmistakable in every detail. The treacherous natives had first tortured and then butchered them. For a time he stood transfixed with horror, unable to remove his eyes from the awful scene, or his feet from the spot where he had first beheld it; then, with the cry of sudden madness, he threw himself beside the bleeding corpses and lost all consciousness. How long he remained there was problematical, but on awaking Guir was still in the dark, and where he had fallen. At that moment a strange and overpowering desire seized him. He must paint the portraits of his murdered family before it became too late. Had he been sane, such a ghastly thought would never have possessed him; but Guir was crazed, and for days and nights following he worked in that dismal vault, by the light of a smoking lamp, at the task he had set himself, his fired imagination even intensifying the horrors of the grewsome tableau.

“Upon each canvas he depicted the awful countenance which fact and fancy had imprinted upon his brain. Guir painted not only what he saw, but what he imagined he saw—dreadful faces, loaded with torture and despair. When completed, he hung them upon the walls of the room, and then with his own hands bricked up the entrance from within, having first carefully replaced and bolted the door. When Guir had thus entombed himself, he lay down again upon the floor, and then, still a madman, opened a vein in his wrist. The letting of blood may have sobered him or restored his mental equilibrium; for suddenly, with a wild change in his feelings, he bounded to his feet and repented. Again he was in darkness, and could not guess how much time had elapsed since his fatal act. Staggering to the closed doorway, he endeavored to tear away the bricks he had so recently placed there, but the mortar was hardening fast, and he was unable to find his trowel. Groping frantically along the floor, he searched in vain for some tool to open the vault in which he was buried, and then, with the anguish of despair, dropped again upon the ground to await his fate. Thus Guir died, in an agony of remorse, and with the intensest desire to live.”

Ah Ben stopped suddenly, and fixed his eyes upon Henley, as if trying to read his thoughts.

“There is one thing in that story that strikes me as very peculiar,” observed Paul, returning his host's look with interest.

“And what is that?” answered the old man, his eyes still fixed on Henley's face.

“The fact that you are able to repeat with such circumstantial detail the feelings and actions of a man who died under such peculiar conditions, and quite alone.”

“It might indeed appear strange to you, Mr. Henley, but my familiarity with the case enables me to speak with knowledge and accuracy.”

“And would you mind telling me how that is possible?” inquired Paul.

“Because I am the man Guir himself; and I have lived on through such ages of agony that I have no longer the will or desire to appear other than as the ancient wreck before you.”

Paul started.