THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW
Prefatory Note
The annals of crime contain few chapters more lurid than those contributed to them by the record of Frederick Bailey Deeming, who suffered the extreme penalty of the law on the scaffold of the Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) jail on the morning of the twenty-third of May, in the year one thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two.
The details of his misdeeds, his trial, and his punishment were set forth by me at the time in letters to the New York Times and the Boston Journal—of which, as well as of several other publications, I was accredited correspondent during several years of residence and travel in Australasia and the South Seas.
In the narrative that follows, so far as it describes atrocities which shocked the whole English-speaking world, I have endeavored to subordinate particulars in the presentation of a general effect; my purpose has been, not to picture horrors, but to suggest the strange and abnormal personality that lay behind them.
In regard to the peculiar manifestations which followed the criminal's execution, and for which some undefined influence that survived his physical extinction seemed, in part at least, to be responsible, I can advance no opinion.