In the evening, while we were all chatting in the drawing-room, Miss Moore came out into the hall, where she had been looking after the dog. In spite of the noise we were all making, she distinctly heard the clang noise upstairs. She had said the same thing, though with less certainty, once before, and we agreed that one night some one must sit up in the hall. (This was afterwards done without result.)
February 8th, Monday.—Last night my maid heard footsteps and the sound of hands fumbling on her door; this she told us when she came in with our early tea.
Miss Moore in the early morning, between one and two, heard again the sharp, reverberating bang as before. We speculated at breakfast as to whether the sound could have been made by the men after we had gone upstairs, though they were all sure of having been quite still before midnight. We made them rehearse every sound they had in fact made, but nothing was in the least like it, either in quality or quantity.
I had been disturbed about 5.30 a.m. by the sound (which we had not heard hitherto) described by former witnesses as "explosive." I know of nothing quite like it. I have heard the Portsmouth guns when at a place eight miles away; the sound was like that, but did not convey the same impression of distance. I heard it, at intervals, during half-an-hour. Miss Moore is a very light sleeper, but she did not awake. At six I got up and went through my room to the dressing-room door (No. 6), after a sound that seemed especially near. It was so near, that though I thought it quite unlikely under the circumstances, I wanted to satisfy myself that no one was playing jokes on Mr. C——, whose room was close by. The house was deadly still. I could hear the clocks ticking on the stairs. As I stood, the sound came again. It might have been caused by a very heavy fall of snow from a high roof—not sliding, but percussive. Miss Moore had wakened up and heard it too.
(N.B.—We afterwards found that, as the roof is flat, the snow is cleared away daily.)
Mr. W——, an utter sceptic, he declares, left early; then we all went for a walk. We spent the whole afternoon making experiments. Miss Moore or my maid or I, as having heard the noises, shut ourselves up in the room whence they were heard, or stood in the right places on hall or staircase.
The experimental noises made were as follows:—
1. Banging with poker or shovel as hard as possible on every part of the big iron stove in the hall; kicking it, hitting it with sticks (as Miss Moore and I persisted that the first noise was as of metal on wood, or vice versâ).
2. Trampling and banging in every part of the house, obvious and obscure, in cupboards and cistern holes.
3. (On the hypothesis of tricks from outside.) Beating on outside doors with shovels and pokers and wooden things, on the walls and windows accessible; banging and clattering in outside coal-cellars and in the sunk area round the house. (N.B.—Beating on the front door handle with a wooden racket, was right in kind, but not nearly enough in degree.)