Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter

by Elliott O'Donnell

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I quietly slipped off my clothes and put out the light. The two men were still haranguing one another for all they were worth when I got in between the sheets and prepared to lie down. The room was not entirely dark; from between the folds of the thick plush curtains that enveloped the windows stray beams from the powerful moonlight filtered through and battled their way to the foot of the bed. I was looking at them with some degree of curiosity, when I saw something move. I glanced at it in astonishment, and, to my unmitigated horror, the shape of something dark and sinister rose noiselessly from the floor and came swiftly towards me. I tried to shout, but could not make a sound. I was completely paralysed, and as I sat there, sick with fear and apprehension, the thing leaped on to me, and, gripping me mercilessly by the throat, bore me backwards.

I gasped, and choked, and suffered the most excruciating pain. But there was no relaxation—the pressure of those bony fingers only tightened and the torture went on. At last, after what seemed to me an eternity, there was a loud buzzing in my ears, my head seemed to spin round violently, and my brain to burst. I lost consciousness. On coming to, I found that my assailant had left me. I struck a light. My fellow-lodgers were still going at one another hammer and tongs—and the door was, as I had left it, locked on the inside. I searched the room thoroughly; the window was bolted; there was nothing in the cupboard; nothing under the bed; nothing anywhere. I got into bed again, full of the worst anticipations, and, if sleep came to me, it was only in the briefest snatches.

At dawn the room became suffused with a cold, grey glow, and the suggestion of something horribly evil standing close beside the bed and sardonically watching me impressed me so strongly that, yielding to a sudden impulse of terror, I hid my head under the bed-clothes, and remained in that undignified position till the morning was well advanced and I was “called.”

I got up, feeling downright ill, and although the sunlight metamorphosing everything now made the mere thought of a ghost simply ludicrous, I hurried out of the room as speedily as possible. Nor did I venture to pass another night there.

My landlady did not demur when I asked her to transfer me to another apartment, and later, before I took my final departure from her house, she confessed to me that it was haunted. She believed that it had been used as a private home for mentally afflicted people, and that someone, either one of the patients or a nurse—she did not know which—had died, under extremely painful circumstances, in the room I had first occupied.

The Davises left the house soon after I did, and who lives there now, and whether the hauntings still continue, I cannot say. When I last made enquiries, about two years ago, I learned that the then occupants had never admitted experiencing anything unusual, but that they always kept the room in which I had undergone the sensations of strangulation carefully locked.

This adventure of mine, intensely unpleasant as it had been at the time, profoundly interested me. Hitherto I had placidly accepted as truth all the dogmas of religion hurled at me from the pulpit and drilled into me at school, for the simple reason that I had always been taught to regard as infinitely correct and absolutely above criticism all that the clergy told me: God made the world, they said, and all the laws and principles appertaining to it—that was sufficient—I need not ask any questions. When I looked about me and saw men, and women, dogs, horses, and other animals suffering indescribable agonies from all kinds of foul and malignant diseases; when I encountered cripples, the maimed and blind, idiots and lunatics; or read in the papers of swindles, murders and suicides; or noted how, throughout nature, the strong animals prey upon the weak; how, for example, the tiger, the lion and the leopard terrorize the jungle, just as the shark and octopus terrorize the sea, and the wasp and spider, centipede and scorpion terrorize insect life (being furnished respectively with weapons for tearing and rending, and sucking the flesh, and entailing the most excruciating tortures on the nerve centres); when, I say, I noted all this, I was given to understand that I must on no account comment upon it—to do so was impious and wicked—I must abide by the precept of my pastor and pedagogue, namely, that “God is almighty and merciful, loving and wise.”

But now it was different—I was no longer in the schoolroom, no longer under the immediate influence of the Church. I met people in Dublin imbued with the broader instincts of a big, cosmopolitan community; I listened to their reasoning—reasoning which at first immeasurably shocked me, and afterwards struck me as horribly sane. Then, at this crisis, came the incident of the strangling. I tried to attribute it to a dream, but I was prevented by the fact that I had only just got into bed, and had not even lain down, when the figure seized me. Hence, I could only conclude that some spirit—the nature of my suffering and the horror it inspired leading me to suppose that it was a particularly evil one—had been my aggressor.

But why was it not in Hell? Had it escaped in spite of the strict supervision of the Almighty? Or could it be possible that the orthodox Paradise and Purgatory did not exist, and that the spirits of the dead were allowed to wander about at will? I became interested—deeply so; all sorts of wild speculations floated through my mind; I resolved to enquire further.

I would not be guided by any creed; I would set out on my work of investigation wholly unbiassed; I would gain whatever knowledge there was to be gained of another world without the aid either of priest or occultist, medium or scientist.