Technical form of apparitions: Elemental
Source of authenticity: First-hand evidence
Cause of hauntings: Unknown
Between my exit from the stage in 1900 up till quite recently I had the great, the very great misfortune to be a teacher in a small town in the north of England.
I say misfortune because I found the contrasts between exciting stageland and the monotonous schoolroom, between the generous and jovial theatrical fraternity and the mean and petty local parents, too decidedly pronounced to be other than excessively unpleasant.
I had small patience with the mediocre abilities of very mediocre children, and still less with the continual and unwarrantable interference of their ill-mannered and doting mothers. No lot in life could have been more thoroughly uncongenial than mine; indeed, it would have soon become unbearable had it not been for the constant influx of strangers whose presence in the town made an oasis in the desert.
It is to one of these visitors—Miss Medley—that I owe the following story.
“Some years ago,” she began, “I received an invitation to spend August with a very crochety old aunt of mine residing at Burle Farm, North Devon.
“There was nothing at all extraordinary in the appearance of the house; it belonged to a type common in all parts of England. It was a low, rambling building of yellow stone with a good, substantial, thatched roof and ample stabling. The rooms, sweet with the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle, compared more than favourably with the stuffy dens in which I had been obliged to live in London; whilst the diamond-shaped window-panes and massive oak beams serving as supports to the ceilings, struck me as being quite delightfully quaint.