“I don’t know,” he replied; “no one knows. This place was once a madhouse, I believe, and perhaps——”
“Ah, well,” I said, “I can understand it now. Thank goodness I’m leaving to-morrow, and as it’s a choice of two evils, I’ll go up in the lift.”
CHAPTER VII
A HAUNTED WOOD AND A HAUNTED QUARRY IN CANADA
All my ghostly experiences in the United States were of indoor hauntings, consisting mostly of the visitation of phantasms of the dead, who in earthly form had either suffered or committed some deed of violence. I never met with a psychic experience out-of-doors, though I only too well realised the possibilities of such when I was sleeping by myself on the ranche in Oregon, or riding alone through the giant forests of the Cascades mountains.
I believe all the loneliest parts of America, the great, bold Rockies, the vast Californian and Oregon forests are periodically visited by ghosts—ghosts of murdered soldiers, of scalp-raising Indians, of tramp suicides—of all manner of evilly-disposed white and red people, and of neutrarians, spirits that have never inhabited earthly bodies, and which are as grotesque and awe-inspiring as the fantastically carved boulders and queerly shaped tree trunks with which those parts are so lavishly bestrewn.
America, indeed, affords one of the wildest fields in the world for the genuine ghost hunter. I use the word genuine advisedly, for I would differentiate between the ghost hunter who is genuine, and the professor of physics, who expects the Unknown to be subservient to his beck and call. I say, then, for the ghost hunter with a kindly, sympathetic nature, the ghost hunter whose thoughts are more often on the spiritual than the material plane, and who would earnestly seek the chance to succour and comfort a lost soul, the United States of America gives the greatest scope.
From what I have heard, for I have never been there, Canada also is a much haunted country. An account of a haunting there was given me by a French Canadian, Bertram Armand, whom I met with his wife one day at an hotel in New York. Though born and educated in Canada, he had served in the French Army, and had spent a considerable portion of his life in France and Algiers. He had now retired, and it was on the occasion of his quittal of the Army and return to Canada that the event I am about to narrate, and which I give as nearly as possible in his own words, occurred:—
“My home,” he began, “was in a small town called Garvois,[2] to the South-West of Winnipeg, which, at the time of my adventure, some ten or twelve years ago, was nothing like the size it is now.
“I had got out of the train at Winnipeg, and dined at an hotel, and the evening was well set in before I rose from my comfortable seat before the fire and prepared for my long tramp.