Floating Fancies among the Weird and the Occult

by Clara H. Holmes

A year or so later a son was born to them; John Hilyer, Jr. As young John grew to manhood, he resembled his father in feature and physique; but had a beauty inherited from his mother. No one ever knew the elder Hilyer to transgress a law, human or divine—according to his own estimation of himself. But he ruled his gentle wife as though she were a child; and he required of John unquestioning obedience—a complete subjugation of will, not considering that so sturdy a sapling must possess a growth of its own. He was a hard, selfish man; without sympathy or understanding for desires, and feelings not possessed by himself; he was, to himself, the criterion by which to judge all things. Added to this, he had a mean, miserly way of using religion as a specious plea for denying others the things conducive to comfort or pleasure; he stigmatized all such as sinful.

Young John was of a fiery, almost cruelly persistent turn; where he loved, he loved fiercely, jealously; where he hated it was with a violence of passion frightful to contemplate. His father allowed him no money to spend, and no time for pleasure, or even for recreation, saying that it was a sinful waste of time. All the love of John’s fierce heart was poured out upon his mother, and when she laid down her hard burden, his grief and anger were beyond words, though he cried out to his father: “You starved her to death! You starved her body of the things that might have prolonged her life, and her very soul of all intellectual and spiritual food!” Some little of the truth must have penetrated the old man’s armor of selfishness, as he turned away without reply.

A year later his father died, and so bitter was his feeling against him that he saw him lowered into his grave without a regret. He was like a child let loose from restraint; he plunged into all kinds of excess. He gathered around him a horde of evil companions, who for months made the old place a pandemonium. John was no fool, and he soon sickened of this life; and when one of them thought to be witty at the expense of his mother, and her poor way of living, he grew livid with wrath, and turned them all out, saying as he closed the door upon them, “Neither you, nor I, are fit to mention my mother; but you shall not disgrace her room again!”

He shut himself up in almost total solitude, with a wild idea of doing penance for having outraged his mother’s memory. Several months later one or two of his profligate associates sought him, he promptly shut the door in their faces, and what he said to them he said in such a manner that they left him undisturbed in his solitude. Then he disappeared, and no one knew of his whereabouts for fully a year; even at this time the house had come to have an evil reputation; people said of it that it was an unlucky place, but they passed it with a shudder which meant much more.

One night in early springtime, a passer-by saw a dim light in the front room—the others had long since been stripped of the old-fashioned furniture; the uncanny reputation of the house made him hasten by without a glance more than he could help.

The next day the whole country was in commotion. Early in the forenoon three large vans, loaded with furniture—which in those days was considered elegant—drove up to the door of the farmhouse. To their repeated knocking there was no response; one of the teamsters looked in through the uncurtained window; he gave a horrified cry. In the center of the room, ghastly and covered with blood, lay the body of John Hilyer; in his right hand he still grasped the pistol with which he had slain himself. He had bought the furniture the day before, and ordered it delivered at the house; he seemed to be in an unusually happy mood. What cause led to the deed none could conjecture, and during all these years the old house had kept its secret. Not a person could be induced to approach the place after dark, as all declared it to be haunted.

When Philip returned night had fallen, dark and solemn; he dreaded to enter the room; the weird story impressed him with a nervousness unaccountable to himself; he had ever been of a skeptical turn, and had scoffed at spiritual phenomena and manifestations as creations of an overwrought brain. He felt tempted to leave the old house this night, he had a dread of the coming hours; then, he thought scornfully, it would look too much like running away because of a weird story, and—some unseen force seemed to restrain him; a whisper in the air—an unseen hand—seemed to be holding him.

He tried to shake himself out of the feeling, and said pettishly: “What nonsense this is!—Much better to have gone on!” but he would not, neither could he go.

He gathered a great armful of wood from the old barn at the far end of the lot, and soon the blaze leaped up brightly; the room grew oppressively warm, the heat, together with the loss of sleep the night before, lulled his senses into drowsy nodding; then he dropped into deep sleep, with his head thrown back against the dark cushion, the dying fire playing over his sun-browned face fitfully.

The night waned; the fire died to a bed of embers, still he slept quietly on.