The case of the Boston ghost came to my notice in a very direct fashion. I only stayed in the town two nights, and chance led me to put up in an hotel which I learned bore an undeniable reputation for being haunted. It was in rather a poor neighbourhood—at least poor for Boston—and there were few visitors; indeed, on the landing where I slept, no one. I spent all my first day in the town sight-seeing and visiting relatives whom I had never met before, and I did not get back to the hotel till very late. The place was dimly lit and oppressively silent.
“Am I the last in?” I asked the night porter, who rubbed his eyes wearily and yawned.
“Yes, sir,” he said; “the other guests have been gone to bed two hours or more. It’s close on one.”
“What part of Ireland do you come from?” I enquired.
“County Limerick, to be sure,” he said; “but you couldn’t tell I was Irish!”
“At once,” I said. “What were you over there?”
“I was working on the roads,” he said, “and before that I was in the Army—in the Inniskillings.”
“What date?” I enquired.
He told me, and it then transpired that he had enlisted in that regiment when one of my uncles was a major in it, and he remembered him well. We were thus talking away and recalling episodes of the long past, when I heard a familiar sliding kind of noise, and broke off in the middle of a sentence.
“Surely, that’s the elevator,” I exclaimed. “I hope our talking has not disturbed anyone.”