Haunted Places in England

by Elliott O'Donnell

“Guy Darnton is a very intimate friend of mine. Some people call us inseparables, and I suppose we are—though at times, I believe, no two men could so thoroughly hate one another. Indeed, to such an extremity has this spirit of execration and dislike been carried that I have on occasions actually accused him of being my very worst—my most cruel, and certainly my most subtly destructive—enemy. But even then, even at the moment when my abhorrence of him has been most acute, I have always accorded him—reluctantly, I admit—one great redeeming quality—his affection for and kindness to Ghoul.

“Ghoul was an Irish terrier, just an ordinary-looking Irish terrier, with all the pugnacious and—as some unkind critics would add—quarrelsome characteristics of his race. He hated fops, those little brown Pekinese and King Charles horrors that ladies scent and comb, and stuff to bursting-point with every imaginable dainty; and whenever he saw one mincing its way along the street, he would always block its path and try to bite it.

“Yet he was an idealist. It’s all nonsense to say that animals have no appreciation of beauty. Ghoul had. He was fond of biscuits truly; but he liked other things more, far more than food. I have known him stand in front of a rose bush and gaze at it with an expression which no one but the most unkind and prejudiced sceptic could possibly misinterpret for anything but sheer, solid admiration; and I used to notice that whenever he was introduced to several ladies, he always wagged his tail hardest at the prettiest of them. But most of all Ghoul admired pretty children—dainty little girls with fluffy yellow curls and big, smiling eyes. He adored them, and he hated with equal fervour all children who were in any way physically ill-favoured. I have known him bark furiously at a boy who squinted, and snarl at and refuse to go near a girl who had a blotchy, yellow complexion and a cavernous, frog-shaped mouth.

“But I am speaking as if Ghoul were my property. He was not—at least, not in the legal sense. Darnton paid for his licence—and housed and fed him—and so had every apparent right to call himself Ghoul’s master.

“In spite of this, however, I knew intuitively that Ghoul regarded me as his actual master, and I believe the explanation of this circumstance lay in the superphysical. I am psychic, and I am convinced that the unknown is nearer, far nearer to me than it is to most people. Now dogs, at least most dogs, have the faculty of second sight, of clairvoyance and clairaudience, very acutely developed—you have only to be in a haunted house with them to see it; and there is nothing they stand in awe of more—or for which they have a more profound respect—than the superphysical. Now Ghoul was no exception. He saw around me what I only felt; and he recognised that I was the magnet. He respected me as one true psychic respects another.

“One day we were out together. Darnton had gone to the dentist, and Ghoul, tired of his own company, resolved to pay me a visit. He wandered in at the wicket gate of my garden just as I was about to set off for a morning constitutional. I greeted him somewhat boisterously, for Ghoul, when extra solemn, always excited my risibility, and, after a brief skirmish with him on behalf of my cat, an extraordinarily ugly Tom, for whom Ghoul cherished the most inveterate hatred, we set off together. It was pure accident that led me into the Adelaide Road. I was half-way along it, thinking of nothing in particular, when someone whistled behind me, and I turned round. As a rule, one may see a few pedestrians—one or two at least—at all times of the day in the Adelaide Road, but oddly enough no one was in sight just at that moment, and I could see no traces of Ghoul. I called him, and getting no reply, walked back a little distance. At last I discovered him. He was in the front garden of Barcombe House, sitting in the centre of a grass plot, his eyes fixed on space, but with such an expression of absorbing interest that I was absolutely astounded. Thinking something, perhaps, was hiding in the bushes, I threw stones and made a great shooing; but nothing came out, and Ghoul still maintained his position. The look in his face did not suggest anything antagonistic, it was indicative rather of something very pleasing to him—something idealistic—something he adored.

“I shouted ‘Ghoul!’ He did not take the slightest notice, and when I caught him by the scruff of the neck, he dug his paws in the ground and whined piteously. Then I grew alarmed. He must either have hurt himself or have gone mad. I examined him carefully, and nothing appearing to be the matter with him, I lifted him up, and, despite his frantic struggles, carried him out of the garden.

“The moment I set him down he raced back. Then I grew determined. A taxi was hailed, and Ghoul, driven off in it, speedily found himself a close prisoner in Darnton’s exceedingly unromantic study.