Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter

by Elliott O'Donnell

We did so, and Nielssen gave vent to an expression of relief.

“How did it happen?” Heilborn asked.

“I don’t know,” Nielssen said faintly. He was evidently much shaken, and spoke with the emotion of a man who has undergone some violent shock. “I was only holding the skeleton the same as you, when I suddenly felt its fingers close like a vice on mine. It was a grip of iron. See, my hand is crushed almost out of shape!” He held it out, and we all bent over it curiously. Compared with the other hand, it looked singularly white and limp, and when Flynn touched it, Nielssen very perceptibly winced.

Flynn gave him some brandy, and after a little while he seemed himself again; but he would not continue the séance. “There’s something very odd about the skeleton,” he said. “I don’t believe in spirits, as you know, but there must be something closely akin to one attached to this thing,” and he gave it a vicious kick with his foot.

A week later, when I called at Flynn’s house, he told me that Nielssen was in bed. He had fallen downstairs and badly bruised his spine, besides breaking a leg. “He’ll get over it all right,” Flynn said, “but it will be some time before he can do anything. His account of the accident is most remarkable; in fact, he declares that it wasn’t an accident, that he was deliberately thrown. He swears that he distinctly saw a skeleton hand suddenly catch hold of him round the ankle, and that the next moment he felt himself whirling through the air. He is most emphatic in his declaration that he will never again scoff at ghosts or play with the invisible. And now,” Flynn added, “the wretched thing has begun to plague me. I can’t get a decent night’s sleep. As soon as I begin to doze I am visited by the most disturbing dreams. I invariably hear knocking at the door, and when I open it, something rushes in and strangles me. But the worst of it is, I hear the knocking when I’m awake, too. Sometimes it begins directly I get into bed, before my head has touched the pillow. Knock, knock, knock!—the hard, sharp knock of bony knuckles on door, walls and furniture. I am not actually frightened, but I don’t like it. What do you make of it?”

“If it’s not the skeleton, the spirit of some depraved human,” I replied, “it’s some other equally low and vicious earth-bound, one of the class that visit séances and attach themselves to the unlucky sitter. You might try getting rid of the skeleton—have it cremated and see what effect that has.”

Flynn took my advice; the skeleton was reduced to ashes, and the ashes buried many miles away from Limehouse Causeway, after which, the disturbances, as far as Flynn was concerned, at any rate, entirely ceased. Whether Nielssen was victimised again I cannot say. He rejoined his ship as soon as he had recovered, and since then he has completely passed out of my existence.

There was a house I used occasionally to go to in Whitechapel, a rendezvous of itinerant free lance writers like myself, where, although I never actually saw any ghostly phenomena, I always had very extraordinary impressions. The moment I crossed the threshold, I fancied I was in a big funeral procession following a hearse. It was a dull, winter’s day, I thought; there were inches of slush on the ground, and the cold was intense. I could not see the faces of the people walking beside me, but I instinctively knew that they wore an expression of extreme relief, and that some even of them should-be mourners laughed. We tramped on till we came to a steep hill, then there was a loud report, and at once everything became chaotic. After this my mind gradually cleared and the impressions abruptly ceased. There was no variation in these impressions, they always began and ended in precisely the same way; moreover, I invariably received them whenever I entered the house. I mentioned my experience one day to an habitué of the place, and he quite casually informed me that several men who went there had had similar experiences, and he thought the landlord, if approached tactfully, might offer some sort of explanation. Acting upon this suggestion, I spoke to the landlord, and learned from him that half a century or more ago the house was owned by a wealthy tradesman, who, it was generally supposed, had made his money by sweating his employés. When he died, all the hands had to attend his funeral, but far from looking sad, as they followed the coffin, they had exhibited every manifestation of joy. Just as the procession had reached the summit of a steep hill, a half-witted man fired a gun from a cottage window, and the horses drawing the hearse, taking fright, dashed down the incline and into a wall at the foot of it. Strange to say, no one was injured, but the coffin was thrown out and broken to pieces. The event made a great impression upon the minds of all who witnessed it, and the landlord informed me that I was by no means the only person who, upon entering the house, had received a vivid mental picture of the scene.

I am often asked if I am a consistent medium. No, I am not. It is only at times I see ghosts, only at times I receive vivid impressions, and I do not believe that any person, however mediumistic, can depend upon his or her psychic faculty for consistency. I have been to several public séances, where professional mediums have had the audacity to say they see spirits standing beside practically everyone in the assembly. They rattle off the description of an alleged spirit, as if it were a part in a well-rehearsed play—and play it undoubtedly is to anyone who pauses to reflect. Genuine phantasms do not come to order quite so readily.

In olden times, when people were really psychic, those versed in the art from their childhood upwards could only raise a ghost with great difficulty, and often, only by resorting to spells, many of which were of a very subtle and complex nature. And when, in the end, they did succeed, such manifestations invariably had a very alarming effect on the medium as well as the spectator. How is it, then, that so many of the professional mediums of to-day can not only see visitants from the other world, whenever they like, all around them, but can view these ghostly visitants without being in the least disconcerted, without—as the saying is—turning a hair? Have they really stronger nerves than had Saul, and a closer, far closer intimacy with the Unknown than had the Witch of Endor, or can it be that the Spirit World has so participated in our age of quickness—our rapid forms of locomotion—that a medium has only to raise his or her eyebrows and a host of spirits at once whiz into the room? I do not think so. I believe that such mediums—the mediums whose psychic vision is apparently inexhaustible, and can be turned on and off to order—are either unmitigated humbugs or hysterical dupes, who mistake the baldest impressions for actual spiritual phenomena.