Men, Women, and Ghosts

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

"Your eyes are the only ones so favored, it happens," I said, with a superior smile. But while I spoke Allis started from the pillows with a look of fear.

"I see it, Fred!" she exclaimed, under her breath.

"Women's imagination!" for I saw nothing.

I saw nothing for a moment; then I must depose and say that I did see a tall figure, covered from head to foot with a sheet, standing still in the middle of the room. I sprang upon it with raised arm; my wife states that I was within a foot of it when the sheet dropped. It dropped at my feet,—nothing but a sheet. I picked it up and shook it; only a sheet.

"It is one of those old linen ones of grandmother's," said Allis, examining it; "there are only six, marked in pink with the boar's-head in the corner. It came from the blue chest up garret. They have not been taken out for years."

I took the sheet back to the blue chest myself,—having first observed the number, as I had done before with the underclothes; and locked it in. I came back to my room and sat down by Allis. In about three minutes we saw the figure standing still as before, in the middle of the room. As before, I sprang at it, and as before the drapery dropped, and there was nothing there. I picked up the sheet and turned to the numbered corner. It was the same that I had locked into the blue chest.

Miss Fellows was inclined to fear that I had really endangered my life by this ghostly rendezvous. I can testify, however, that it was by no means "death to me," nor did I experience any ill effects from the event.

My friend, the clergyman, made me the desired visit in January. For a week after his arrival, as if my tormentors were bent on convincing my almost only friend that I was a fool or a juggler, we had no disturbance at all beyond the ordinary rappings. These, the reverend gentleman confessed were of a singular nature, but expressed a polite desire to see some of the extraordinary manifestations of which I had written him.

But one day he had risen with some formality to usher a formal caller to the-door, when, to his slight amazement and my secret delight, his chair—an easy-chair of good proportions—deliberately jumped up and hopped after him across the room. From this period the mystery "manifested" itself to his heart's content. Not only did the rocking-chairs, and the cane-seat chairs, and the round-backed chairs, and Tip's little chairs, and the affghans chase him about, and the heavy tête-à-tête in the corner evince symptoms of agitation at his approach, but the piano trundled a solemn minuet at him; the heavy walnut centre-table rose half-way to the ceiling under his eyes; the marble-topped stand, on which he sat to keep it still, lifted itself and him a foot from the ground; his coffee-cup spilled over when he tried to drink, shaken by an unseen elbow; his dressing-cases disappeared from his bureau and hid themselves, none knew how or when, in his closets and under his bed; mysterious uncanny figures, dressed in his best clothes and stuffed with straw, stood in his room when he came to it at night; his candlesticks walked, untouched by hands, from the mantel into space; keys and chains fell from the air at his feet; and raw turnips dropped from the solid ceiling into his soup-plate.

"Well, Garth," said I one day, confidentially, "how are things? Begin to have a 'realizing sense' of it, eh?"