On the night in question, then, we had coaxed Hannah to sit once more, and in a very few minutes we heard undeniable sounds from the neighborhood of the open window. As it was entirely dark we could see nothing, but after a short time Hannah yelled in a terrified voice that something was rubbing against her.
“Hush!” said Tish quietly. “If it is a spirit form it is welcome. Welcome, friend.”
“It’s scratching my leg!” said Hannah in a dreadful tone.
She then let out a bloodcurdling yell and the next instant the spirit form had leaped to Aggie’s shoulder, and she fell from her chair in a dead faint. We were obliged to turn on the light, but it was a long time before she could do more than moan. Naturally the force was entirely dissipated by that time; but Hannah was able to show two long scratches on her leg as evidence, and Aggie’s shoulder revealed three or four minute punctures entirely through the skin.
A careful examination of the room also revealed a startling fact. The goldfish had disappeared from its bowl!
It was, indeed, a remarkable achievement, marking as it did our advance from the piscatorial to the animal plane, and indicating that we might even hope before long for the materialized human body. But, alas for Tish’s hopes, neither Aggie nor Hannah would sit again. So undermined, indeed, was Hannah’s morale by the incident that she gave us a considerable fright only a few days later.
Tish was experimenting with automatic writing at the time, and had already secured a curious result. Her hand had drawn first a series of straight horizontal lines and then crossed them with a similar number of vertical ones, resulting in numerous small squares. Then, moving on inexorably, it had just written beneath: “Number one horizontal,” when we heard a terrific shriek from Hannah’s room, followed by another and another.
The power, of course, was broken, and, on rushing to Hannah’s assistance, we found that she had heard strange movements and sounds from her closet and was convinced that there was a spirit there. It turned out, however, to be only the Ingersolls’ cat; a troublesome animal which had crawled in over the fire escape and was playing with a mouse it had captured.
But this practically ended our experiments in that direction. As Tish so justly observed, the craven heart has no place in the spirit world. I have related it, however, because indirectly but surely it had its influence in the Hartford matter.