“I suppose you couldn’t tell whether the face formed by the bedclothes was a man or a woman’s?” I remarked.
“Not, perhaps, by the actual features,” she responded, “only by the expression. I can’t explain how, but it was an expression which at once explained to me its sex, and that sex was not masculine.”
As I have said, this was not the only case of haunting in West Quay that I heard of during this visit of mine to New York, but it is the only one of sufficient interest to note here. Two equally interesting cases, perhaps, came my way when I was travelling West. The one was in Boston, the other in Chicago. I will deal with the Chicago one first:—
A banker in Chicago, to whom I had a letter of introduction, hearing that I was interested in ghosts, showed me a house close to Michigan Avenue where he had had a somewhat novel experience.
“Some years ago,” he said, “that house had the reputation for being very badly haunted, and not by one ghost, but by dozens. It was then occupied by an eccentric old millionaire, whom I will call Mr. Hoonigan. Mr. Hoonigan had a very curious hobby. In a room, which he named Duckdom, he had a collection of the most exquisitely wrought models of women, clad in costumes which must surely have cost thousands of pounds. They were all made in Paris, and many of them had once stood in windows in the Rue de Rivoli. I have never seen anything to equal them; their eyes, hair, and finger nails were not only beautifully coloured and moulded, they were most natural and life-like. Mr. Hoonigan worshipped them. He used to spend hours a day sitting before each of them in turn, fondling their hands and making love to them in the most exaggerated fashion. Mad! Yes, of course, he was mad; but his madness did not always take such a harmless form. In a room opposite Duckdom, which he named Devildom, he had collected the models—some fifty or more—of murderers, and other criminals of the lowest type, besides a heterogeneous assortment of the most revolting objects. Amongst these objects were images of the South Sea Islands and Mexican gods; figures in wood and stone, representing ghosts and demons; cases full of mummies and skeletons; weapons that had once belonged to murderers and still bore traces of their victims’ blood; scalping and flaying knives; and a variety of ancient instruments of torture; whilst to accentuate the horror of the room as a whole, paintings such as only a brain in the most advanced stage of morbid disease could have conceived covered the walls. Mr. Hoonigan did not make a practice of showing his collections promiscuously, he was far too jealous of them, and I do not suppose there were ten people in Chicago who knew of their existence. Indeed, it was only with the very greatest difficulty that I got his permission to view them. He allowed no servants to sleep in the house, and when I went there one evening to see his treasures, he opened the door to me himself. ‘Do you see this?’ he cackled, pointing to the brown muzzle of a revolver, which showed itself from under his coat. ‘Well, I have two more of them, and the house is full of pitfalls, all admirable inventions of my own, and warranted to upset the calculations of even the most experienced cracksman.’ ‘Have you ever been troubled by burglars?’ I asked, glancing over the shoulders of the queer old figure before me, and letting my eyes wander round the great hall, dimly lighted and full of many suggestive nooks. ‘Yes, several times,’ he said, ‘and once, one actually got in. He is here now.’ ‘Here now!’ I cried. ‘Why, you surely don’t mean to say that you’ve reformed him and kept him as your servant?’
“Mr. Hoonigan chuckled, and his yellow fangs reminded me unpleasantly of the blunt and rusty teeth of a saw. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘He fell into one of my traps. You will see him later in my little chamber of horrors. He’s been there ever since.’ (This seemed a trifle indiscreet; but Mr. Hoonigan knew he could trust me. You see, I was his banker, and business means business in Chicago.)
“‘But come,’ he continued, ‘I will show you Duckdom first, because you will then the better appreciate its opposite. There is nothing like contrasts to teach you true enjoyment.’ He stepped into an elevator, and we went up, passing storey after storey, all dark, silent and deserted. At last we stopped, and getting out, entered a brilliantly illuminated room. ‘Here they are!’ Mr. Hoonigan exclaimed. ‘Let me introduce you to my fair women friends.’ I looked round, and there before me was a vast assemblage of women, all of them richly dressed in the very latest fashion. All beautiful, however, and all most artistically posed; some sitting, some standing, some lying at full length on rugs and sofas. They were so absolutely natural that it took me some seconds to realise they were only models—models in wax. Mr. Hoonigan approached one, and taking its hand, pressed it reverently. ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘I shall be placed here, and the room shall be hermetically sealed. I want no other heaven.’ He then took me across the landing to another room. I had been prepared for a shock, but not for the kind of shock I got when the door opened, and a hell, seething with devilry—ten thousand times more devilish than the devilry of Dante’s Hell—was suddenly thrust under my very nose. I recoiled, and Mr. Hoonigan, perceiving my fright, playfully pushed me in. When we were well in the midst of them, he pointed with great glee to several of the most notorious murderers, and insisted upon my picking up and examining their weapons. He then made me sit on a garotting chair, which he had quite recently purchased in Cuba, and when I was thus seated, he thrust a skull on my knee, which he said was that of a Red Indian Chief, who had for certain skinned alive with his own hands a whole family of whites.
“By this time, as you may think, I had had enough of it, but, as Mr. Hoonigan truly remarked, there was so much to be seen; besides, he must, he said, whilst I was there, show me a stock of engravings which he had just bought in Madrid. They dated from the reign of Philip II., and represented, in grim detail, all the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. But this was not all. Their chief interest, according to Mr. Hoonigan, lay in the fact that the inquisitors—to quote Mr. Hoonigan’s own words—‘just as an appetiser—an hors d’œuvre, don’t you know,’ used to give them to their victims to examine before they commenced to torture them.
“At the conclusion of this exhibition I managed somehow to get away, and was walking to the elevator, when I saw something slink past us. I turned round, and in the gloom could only see, indistinctly, the form of a man of medium height, with a thick-set, brutal figure, and ambling gait. I could not see his face. He seemed to walk right through the door, which was shut, into the room we had just vacated. ‘What is it?’ Mr. Hoonigan asked. Somewhat nervously, I told him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s only one of them, and one of the least terrifying. You didn’t know, I suppose, that the house is haunted. From your description I should say that what you have just seen is the ghost of the burglar I told you about. But there are other ghosts—if you like to term them so—that are most troublesome. I have had to give up sleeping on this landing. I sleep on the ground floor now, with the electric light full on, all night.’”