Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter

by Elliott O'Donnell

Several of my friends in Dublin were greatly interested in ghosts, and I learned from them of two houses that had long borne the reputation of being haunted. One was close to St. Stephen’s Green, within sight of the Queen’s Service Academy, and the other, a big, ugly edifice of a dingy grey, was in Blackrock. I had stayed in the former when a child, and had vivid recollections of the holes in the stone stairs, through which boiling oil was poured on the heads of the English soldiers at the time of the ’98.

There were many large and stately rooms in the house, oak-panelled and beautified throughout with much carving. I remember looking with awe and perplexity at the number of odd shadows that used to put in an appearance on the stairs and in the passages, just when it was my bed-time, but I did not then attribute them to ghosts. I simply did not know what they were. I heard sounds, too—clangs and clashes, and footsteps tramping up and down the stairs; sounds I did not attempt to analyse, possibly because I dared not. That was in 1886; I was then a small boy, and now—now only—after I had long left the house, and was back in Dublin, with the experience of the strangling ghost still fresh in my mind, I began to wonder whether these strange sounds and shadows might not have been due to the presence of the Superphysical. I mentioned the matter to my friends, and they expressed astonishment that I had not heard the house was haunted. One of them, a lady, told me that she had once stayed there and had been awakened every night by the sounds I had described—the sounds of heavy footsteps rushing up the stairs, of cries and groans, shrieks and oaths, coupled with the clashing of scabbards and sword blades, and the sound as of falling bodies.

Yet nothing was ever to be seen, saving the moonlight and shadows—plenty of shadows—shadows strangely suggestive of grotesque and fancifully clad people. I tried to obtain permission to sleep in the house, and in my innocence of the ways of landlords, I stated with the most pathetic candour my true intention—I wanted to investigate. The reply I got was certainly not courteous, neither did it permit of argument. Hence, feeling considerably crestfallen and humiliated, I found myself forced to give up my first attempt at ghost-hunting.

Then I turned my attention to the house in Blackrock, and fared no better. The landlord had been bothered to death with requests to spend nights there, and was endeavouring to discover the originator of the report that the place was haunted, in order that he might bring an action for Slander of Title. Consequently I could only examine the house from the outside, hoping that its ghostly inhabitants would one night take pity on me and exhibit themselves at one of the windows. But in this, too, I was disappointed; although, as the place invariably inspired me with the greatest dread, I have no doubt whatever but that it was genuinely and badly haunted.

There were several stories in circulation in Dublin about that time concerning the nature of the haunting, and the following—one of the most reliable—was told me by a Mrs. Blake. I will give it as nearly as I can in her own words:

“When I was a child of about twelve,” she began, “which was a good many years ago, my father, who was then stationed in Dublin, took the house on a three years’ lease, at a very low rental, due, so the owner stated, to the fact that there were far too many stairs, a feature to which most people, on account of their servants, strongly objected. Nothing was said about ghosts, and nothing was further from my parents’ minds when they took possession. We moved in towards the end of July, but it was not until the middle of September that we first became aware that the house was haunted. It happened in this way: My father and the maids were out one evening, and only my mother, my small brother and I were in the house. It was about eight o’clock. I was upstairs in the nursery reading to Teddy, and my mother was in the drawing-room, two storeys beneath. I was just in the middle of a sentence, when Teddy interrupted me. ‘Did you hear that?’ he exclaimed; ‘it’s someone on the stairs. I believe they are listening.’ I paused, and heard a loud creak. ‘Who can it be?’ I said; ‘there’s only mother in the house!’ Much mystified, I closed the book and went out on to the landing. No one was there; but when I got to the head of the stairs, I heard a loud scream, and then a dull thud, just as if someone had fallen. In an agony of mind I ran downstairs to see what had happened. As I arrived in the hall, the door of the drawing-room was slowly opened, and I saw, peeping cautiously out, a white face with two dark, gleaming, obliquely-set eyes, that filled with an expression of the most diabolical hatred as they met mine. I was so terrified that I started back some paces, and, as I did so, the door opened a little wider, and the figure of a short, elderly woman, clad in an old-fashioned black dress, and white cap crumpled closely round her lean, haggard face, glided out, and, passing by, ascended the stairs. As she came to the first bend, she turned, and looking down at me with an evil leer, shook her hand menacingly at me. She then passed out of sight, and I heard her climb the stairs, step by step, till she came to the nursery landing. A moment later, and Teddy gave a violent shriek.

“My terror was now so great that I think I should have gone mad had I been left there any longer by myself; but, by a merciful providence, a key turned in the lock of the front door, and my father entered. The sight of his well-known figure on the threshold at once loosened the spell that had bound me, and with a cry of delight I clutched him by the arms, imploring him to see at once what had happened to mother and Teddy.

“He ran into the drawing-room first and found my mother on the floor, just reviving from a faint. Lighting the gas, he fetched her some brandy, and then, bidding me stay with her, he hastened upstairs to Teddy. The latter was very badly frightened, and it was some days before he was well enough to give anything like a coherent account of what had happened. Of course, mother and father told Teddy that the queer figure they had seen was some friend of the servants, who had called while they were out, but I suppose they deemed me old enough to know the truth, for they discussed the incident openly in my presence. It appears that my mother had been quietly knitting in the drawing-room, when she suddenly felt very cold, and rising from her chair, with the intention of closing the door, found herself confronted by a hideous form. Subsequently, my father made a thorough search of the house, but he found no one, and as all the windows were fastened and the doors locked on the inside, we could only come to the conclusion that the figure my mother and Teddy and I had all seen was a ghost. A few days later it appeared to my father. He was coming out of his bedroom, when he saw a woman steal stealthily out of a room on the same landing and creep downstairs in front of him. There was something about her so intensely sinister that he felt chilled; but, determining to find out who she was, he followed her, and catching her up, demanded her name. There was a chuckling answer, the figure instantly disappeared, and a number of invisible somethings clattered down the stairs past him.

“I think my father was very scared; at all events he came into the breakfast-room with a very white face and ate hardly anything. Some time after this, when the autumn was well advanced, my uncle came to stay with us. He was a jolly, rollicking sailor, who had fought the Turks at Navarino, and had had many exciting adventures with Chinese pirates.

“No one told him the house was haunted; it was decided he should find that out for himself. One afternoon, several days after his arrival, he was taking off his boots in a room in the basement, when a current of icy air blew in on him, and, on raising his eyes to see whence the draught came, he perceived an extraordinarily pretty girl, clad in a dark green riding-habit, such as he believed were worn in the days of his great grand-parents, standing in the doorway, watching him intently. ‘This is one of Jack’s surprises’ (Jack was my father), he said to himself, ‘and a deuced pleasant one, too! The rogue, he knows nothing pleases me so much as the sight of a pretty girl, and, by Jove, she is pretty!’ Springing to his feet—for my uncle was never bashful in the presence of the fair sex—he advanced to shake hands. To his chagrin, however, she promptly turned round, and, walking swiftly away, began to ascend the stairs. My uncle followed her. On and on she led him till she came to the drawing-room; there she paused, and with the forefinger of her left hand on her lips, glanced coyly round at him. She then quietly turned the door handle, and signalling to him to follow, stole into the room on tiptoe. Charmed with this piece of acting, the naïvety of it appealing very strongly to his susceptible nature, my uncle hastened after her. The moment he crossed the threshold, however, he recoiled. Standing in the middle of the room was an old woman with a hideous, white face and black, leering eyes. There were no signs anywhere of the young and beautiful lady. She had completely vanished. My uncle was so shocked by the spectacle before him that he retreated on to the landing, and, as he did so, the drawing-room door swung to with a loud crash. He called my father, and they entered the room together; but it was quite empty, the old hag had disappeared as inexplicably as the girl. That evening there was to be a party, and the table in the dining-room groaned beneath the weight of one of those inimitable ‘spreads,’ in vogue some fifty or sixty years ago. With somewhat pardonable pride my mother took us all—my father, uncle and myself—to have a peep at it, before the guests arrived. As we drew near the room, we heard, to our astonishment, the plaintive sound of a spinet. My mother instantly drew back, trembling, whereupon my uncle, forcing a laugh, said, ‘This is one of the occasions upon which a gentleman should go first.’ He threw open the door as he spoke, and we all peered in. What I saw will never be effaced from my memory. The room exhibited a complete wreckage—the cloth was half off the table, the massive silver candlesticks were overturned, and the floor was strewn with piles of broken glass, china and eatables—everything was smashed and ruined. In the midst of the debris, her face turned towards us, lay a very beautiful girl. There were unmistakable evidences of a ghastly wound, but her eyes were partly open, and the strange light which gleamed from their blue depths revealed an expression which could only have been hatched in hell—a hell, peopled not with passive torture-torn sufferers, but with wholly abandoned beings actively engaged in licentiousness and everything that is destructive and antagonistic to man’s moral and mental progress. Standing over the woman, and holding a kind of stiletto in his hand, was a tall, fair man, in whose agonised and remorseful features we recognised at once a most startling likeness to my uncle. No detail was wanting—there was the deep scar on the temple, the curiously deep dimple in the chin; indeed, saving for the old-fashioned clothes, no likeness could have been more exact. Standing by his side, her hideous, scowling face thrust forward, her evil eyes glaring at us with the same vindictive insolence, was the old woman I had seen that night in the hall. Then, my father, uttering some exclamation, crossed himself, and, as he did so, the figures abruptly vanished, whilst the whole house echoed and re-echoed with loud peals of mocking, diabolical laughter. That was the finale; we left immediately afterwards, and from that day to this the house, I believe, has stood almost uninterruptedly empty.”