Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter

by Elliott O'Donnell

“About fifty years ago, a very rich French family occupied the house; and at the coming of age of their daughter they gave a fancy-dress ball. Among the guests was an Italian, who, being a rejected suitor of the daughter’s, had not been invited. He appeared in some grotesque and alarming costume, and when the dance was at its height suddenly overturned a large oil lamp.

“In a moment the whole floor was ablaze; and before anyone could stop him, he had seized the daughter of the house and hurled her into the midst of the flaming mass. Both he and the girl were burned to death, and the house, although it was thoroughly restored, has never let since.”

Having concluded his story, Mr. C.—— said he would like to go with me to the house, and accordingly we set out together.

Though my experience had been only a dream, the coincidence connected with it, which only needed my identification of the scene to be complete, was startling enough, and I grew more and more excited as we neared our destination. When we arrived, Mr. C.—— insisted upon my going first; and once inside, recognising every feature in the house, I led him first to the room in which I had seen the supper-table laid, and then upstairs to the ball-room, where, to my unspeakable surprise, lying in the middle of the floor, I found my hat.

.......

What a strangely fascinating city was old San Francisco—that is to say, San Francisco before the last great fire and earthquake! Consisting of street upon street, terrace upon terrace of quaintly irregular buildings, to me its atmosphere—as no other atmosphere ever has been—was impregnated with the superphysical. I stayed for a few days in a vast hotel in 117th Street, in which I was the only visitor. I shrewdly suspect it was haunted, although I cannot truthfully say that I ever saw a ghost there, and when I retired to bed up flight after flight of stairs, and past dimly-lighted passages teeming with doors—doors with nothing, nothing material at least, behind them—the only sounds I heard were the hollow echoes of my own footsteps as I went on ascending higher, higher, and higher.

Hearing, however, that I was interested in ghosts, the landlord of the hotel introduced me one day to a Mr. Sweeney, who kept a drug store in Market Street.

“The only experience I ever had with the Supernatural,” Mr. Sweeney began, in answer to my interrogations, “took place in this very room. Exactly twelve years ago I engaged the services of a young man called Edward Marsdon. He was very amiable and capable, but highly-strung and hypernormally sensitive. He had been with me about six months, when he came into the parlour one evening with a face like a corpse. ‘I’ve poisoned someone,’ he gasped. ‘Poisoned someone?’ I ejaculated. ‘Good God, what do you mean?’ ‘What I say,’ he replied. ‘A young fellow came into the store about an hour ago and handed me a prescription. It was signed by Dr. Knelligan, of 111th Street. I made it up, as I thought, all right, and gave it him. A few minutes ago, I found I had put in salts of lemon instead of paregoric.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Certain!’ he said, ‘as the bottle of salts of lemon is on the table in the laboratory with the stopper out. I must have used it in mistake. The young man will die, if, indeed, he is not dead already, and I am ruined for life.’ ‘We both are,’ I said tersely. ‘Ring up Dr. Knelligan at once, and ask him for the young man’s address. When you get it, drive round at once and see if you are in time.’ It was of no use scolding him for carelessness—he was upset enough already, and a ‘blowing up’ just then might, I thought, result in another tragedy. The only thing to be done was to hope for the best. He rang up Knelligan, got the address, drove round to it, and discovered that the young man had just left. The landlady had no idea where he had gone. To Marsdon this was the last straw. He came back in a state of utter collapse, trembling all over as if he had ague, and, after telling me what happened, he went upstairs and slammed his door. About a quarter of an hour later, my wife, the servant, and I all heard Marsdon, so we thought, come downstairs and go out. The servant then went up to his room to make the bed, and hearing her scream out, I ran upstairs, to find her standing in the middle of the floor, wringing her hands, whilst Marsdon was sitting in a chair—dead! He had been dead some minutes. That, Mr. O’Donnell, was the beginning of the strange occurrences here. If it was not Marsdon whom we all heard go out, who could it have been? There was no one in the house but we three, and the body in the chair upstairs, so that it must have been Marsdon’s ghost. Well, from that day on, we had no peace.

“Footsteps, which we all recognised as Marsdon’s, for he had a most peculiar lumping kind of walk, trod up and down the stairs all hours of the day and night, and frequently when I was in the laboratory mixing medicines I was strongly conscious of some presence standing close beside me and watching everything I did. One day my wife saw him. She was going out, and wanting some money, she called to me. As I did not answer, she went in search of me, and finding me, as she thought, standing on the hearthrug of the parlour with my back to her, she touched me on the shoulder. The next moment she discovered her mistake. The person whom she had mistaken for me turned round, and she found herself confronted with the white, scared countenance of Edward Marsdon. She started back with a loud shriek, and Marsdon walked out of the room, and apparently right through the servant who came running in to see what was the matter. My wife asked the maid if she had seen anything, and the latter said, ‘No, only a dark shadow seemed to fall right across me, and just for a second or so I felt miserably depressed.’ A week or so afterwards he was again seen; this time by my wife and the maid. They met him on the stairs. He appeared to be under the influence of some very painful emotion, and he passed them at a great rate, and so near that they felt his clothes—apparently quite material—brush against them. He disappeared in the laboratory, and on their entering it immediately afterwards, there was no one there. Something of this nature—either auditory or visual, or both—now happened pretty well daily, until one morning a young man came to the store to see me. ‘I am the young man,’ he said, ‘to whom your assistant gave that unfortunate mixture. I have just returned to San Francisco, and have heard all about it. The medicine was perfectly all right. I drank it directly I left here, and it did me the world of good. There was not even the suspicion of poison in it. Marsdon was labouring under some extraordinary delusion. If only he had told my landlady about it when he called and found I had gone, she could have given him the glass I had drank out of, which doubtless contained some dregs of the stuff—at any rate, a sufficient quantity for analysis. I am told there are rumours afloat that his apparition has been seen several times since he died; not that I believe in such things as ghosts.’

“‘Whether you believe in them or not,’ I said quietly, ‘it is a fact Edward Marsdon has both been seen and heard.’ ‘Then I hope,’ he said, ‘my visit here to-day will put matters all right, and that his poor, wandering spirit, learning that I am alive and well, will find rest, and trouble you no more.’ He then bid me good-morning and walked towards the door. ‘My God!’ he suddenly cried, coming to an abrupt halt, ‘there he is!’ I looked, and as sure as I am sitting here, Mr. O’Donnell, there was Edward Marsdon, just as I had known him in life, standing on the pavement with his face glued to the window, peering in at us. The expression in his eyes was one of infinite joy and astonishment.