The papers took inquisitive note of all these circumstances, and let the matter drop as an unexplained mystery. Within the present occupancy of the house, I have heard that the gray lady still walks on moonlight nights, and, in gusty midnights, visits the bedside of terrified inmates to press small, light hands upon the feet, and so passing upward, to rest upon the chest of the awakened sleeper. I was asked by one who had felt them, if I had “ever heard the legend that a bride, dressed for her wedding, fell dead in that upper chamber ages ago.”
My informant could not tell me from whom she had the grewsome tale, or the date thereof. “Somebody had told her that it happened once upon a time.” She knew that the unquiet creature still “walked the halls and stairs.”
She should have been “laid” by the decent ceremony of burial in consecrated ground, awarded to the exhumed bones.
I have talked with a grandson of our former next-door neighbor, and had from him a circumstantial account of the disinterment of the nameless remains. They must have lain nearer the turf above them, a century back, than when they were found. The young man was a boy when he ran to the hole made by the workmen’s spades, and watched the men bring to light the entire skeleton. He verified the story of the high, carved comb. He told me, too, of a midnight alarm of screaming children at the vision of a little gray lady, walking between the double row of beds in the dormitory, adding:
“I told those who asked if any story was attached to the house, that I had lived next door ever since I was born, and played every day with your sisters and brothers, and never heard a whisper that the house was haunted.”
So said all our neighbors. We kept our own counsel. It was our father’s wise decree.
I have told my ghost-story with no attempt at explanation of psychical phenomena. After all these years I fall back, when questioned as to hypotheses, upon my father’s terse dicta:
“How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all!”