“The phantasm immediately dissolved into a blue vapour and vanished.
“I could enumerate many other occasions on which similar occult phenomena occurred in the house; sometimes the eyeless woman would be seen gliding down the staircase or heard screaming in the passages; at other times the blue man would pounce upon his unsuspecting victims out of some dark sequestered corner, or frighten them to the verge of a fit, by simply peering at them through a door or window—the manifestations always terminating in a bluish vapour.”
“The house, you say, was quite new,” I observed.
Jarvis nodded.
“Then the history of the hauntings,” I replied, “must either be in some piece of furniture or in the ground itself. The blue man with the bestial expression in his face and tatoo-marks on his arms suggests to me the probability that he is a phantasm of an ancient Celt.
“Possibly he was a suicide or murderer; possibly he was neither, but is merely tied to this earth by his animal propensities—in either case, he would hover round the place of his burial, and his naturally ferocious spirit would be rendered doubly ferocious at being disturbed.
“The woman, of course, may have been some one associated with him in this life—the lack of eyes the sign of some dreadful depravity in her nature.”[6]
APPENDIX TO NO. — HACKHAM TERRACE, SWINDON
At Jarvis’s request, I related to him the story of “The Screaming Woman of Tehiddy,” taken from a collection of remarkable narratives on the certainty of supernatural visitations from the dead to the living, impartially compiled from the works of Baxter, Wesley, Simpson, &c.