I never, however, associated this mysterious something with the Elemental I had seen, till, in the course of a conversation with an old and highly respected inhabitant of the village a few days since (August 10, 1908), I learned that he had had a psychical adventure of a somewhat extraordinary nature in his boyhood.
Upon pressing him, he told me that he had lived in the haunted house as a child, and on running upstairs to his bedroom one morning had seen a long, thin human form with a tiny head and animal’s face crouching on the bed and staring at him. Terrified out of his wits by this unexpected and startling spectacle, he had remained glued to the spot for some seconds, until a slight movement on the part of the Elemental broke the spell, and he was able to “bolt” precipitately from the apartment: this was the only time he saw it.
Here then surely was the key to the nature of the haunting—an Elemental or Poltergeist, assuredly the same that had appeared to me some fifty years later at the gate of the old burial-ground.
My informant, by the way, had not heard of my experience; I had told it to no one: hence this visual occult manifestation of mine in Guilsborough stands corroborated.
But why this haunting? Why this form of apparition?
I dived into the history of Guilsborough, and discovered that quantities of fossils (trilobites, &c.), together with implements of flint—i.e., arrow-heads, javelins, celts (the latter popularly known as “thunderbolts”) have been and are still found in various parts of the village and in the gravel-pits of the adjoining hamlets of Nortorft and Hollowell; that tumuli yet remain in Guilsborough Park and in several of the neighbouring fields, and that numbers of very ancient bones have been from time to time dug out of the soil in all parts of the village.
All this is conclusive evidence that Guilsborough is far older than its average inhabitant of to-day imagines, that it has been alternately the site of Palaeolithic and Neolithic settlements, and that all sorts of barbaric rites and ceremonies have been conducted on the very ground where houses and cottages now stand.
Hence it is not very surprising to any one at all versed in the modus operandi of Phantasms and Psychic Phenomena to hear that one of the apparitions (at least) haunting Guilsborough appears in the form of a sub-human or sub-animal elemental.
Superphysical manifestations of this kind—let me explain for the benefit of the inexperienced—usually occur on the sites of or near ancient and unconsecrated or long-disused burial-places—the whys and the wherefores of which I hope to dwell upon in detail in a subsequent volume.