Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter

by Elliott O'Donnell

During the next few days I was told a story that fully accounted for the hauntings.

It appears that about thirty years before my visit to the house a little girl had lived there with her father and step-mother. Her nurse, to whom she was very much attached, being summarily dismissed by her step-mother, she became ill, and very soon died, so it was rumoured, of a broken heart.

Shortly after her death the house was to let, and no tenant, I found out, has ever occupied it since for very long.

I have often wished that I had spoken to the sad little spirit, but I was too fascinated by it, and too much engaged watching its movements, to think of anything else. And I have found that this same fascination and preoccupation have prevented me from trying to communicate with the ghost in nearly all the cases of haunting that I have ever investigated. On the few occasions that I have spoken to a phantasm, I have received no reply, no indication even that it has heard me.

In a very famous haunted house in the West of England, during my investigations which were spread over a period of nine, not uninterruptedly consecutive, nights, manifestations took place twice, and on both occasions I stood up and spoke, but in neither case was there any response whatever. This same ghost had been subjected to exorcism by a well-known ecclesiast, but, far from being exorcised, the ghost so scared his exorciser that he all but fainted. These demonstrations were visual. In a haunted house that I was asked to visit in Sussex I saw nothing, but heard knockings, and by means of them tried, though without success, to establish a code. I heard of the case in this way.

A young lady, whom I will call Miss Hemming, wrote to me. She and her mother occupied a modern and picturesquely situated house at the foot of the Downs, and were very frequently disturbed, she said, between nine and ten in the evening, by sounds, such as might be made with a muffled hammer, on the wall of her mother’s room. Simultaneously the figure of a young man moved noiselessly across the lawn, from the direction of a swing. He usually approached her window and came to a halt immediately beneath it. He had never replied when spoken to. She had fired at him several times, but the bullets had had no effect whatever. It seemed as if they had passed right through him, because he still stood there, whilst the gravel was splattered up immediately behind him. On one or two occasions he shone a bicycle lamp on his face, so that she could distinctly see his features. It was the face of no one she knew, though she fancied it bore a close resemblance to a notorious murderer, whose photos had been in the papers, and who had expiated his crime on the gallows. These were not the only manifestations. Stones had been repeatedly thrown at Mrs. Hemming, and, although the house was being closely watched by the police, the stone-throwing still went on, and so far the culprit had not even been seen, let alone caught.

I visited the house once by myself, and once with a party of men. On the former occasion I hid in a little copse at the furthest extremity of the lawn, and watched the house and swing closely, but I neither heard nor saw anything. Returning to the house, I was told by Miss Hemming that both she and her mother had heard the knockings, and that she herself had, at the same time, seen the figure on the lawn.

On the occasion of my second visit, we all heard the knockings on the wall of Mrs. Hemming’s room, and one of us, who was looking out of her daughter’s window, saw what he fancied were two shadows of human beings cross the moonlit lawn and vanish in the direction of a hedge. Trickery was practically impossible, as the garden was protected on all sides by barbed wire, and there were on the premises four or five dogs, including a young bloodhound. We had of course made a thorough search of the house and grounds previously.

One or two other incidents happened during the night. When I was in the hall alone, a light, as from a bicycle lamp, was suddenly shone in my face, apparently from a blank wall, and when we were all seated in front of the dining-room fire, we heard heavy footsteps cross the hall, and although we ran out at once we could see no one. We were shown the stones that were alleged to have been thrown, but none were thrown whilst we were there. They were a peculiar kind of flint, which certainly did not belong to the neighbourhood. Mrs. Hemming had several times narrowly escaped being hit by them, and one had crashed through the bedroom window as she was looking out of it.

I did not continue my investigation of the case, because there were certain features in connection with it of a private and family nature, which greatly added to its complexity, and which would, of necessity, have rendered any attempt at solution incomplete and unsatisfactory.