Hugh went to his sister’s house one night, taking his gun with him. He upbraided Fraser for his ungallant and mean conduct in frightening lone women, and then called on him to come out like a man and face him. But nothing appeared, the ghost evidently declining to face a loaded musket.
Brontë was importunate in his challenge, taunting Fraser’s ghost with all kinds of sarcastic gibes and accusations, that he might irritate it into appearing, but the ghost would not be drawn. Then he fired off his gun, and challenged the ghost to meet him face to face, using every scornful and reproachful epithet to drive it into a passion, but all in vain.
On the following night Hugh returned to the haunted house with a fiddle, and tried to coax the ghost to appear in response to the music. The ghost, however, remained obdurate, regardless alike of threats, reproaches, and blandishments. Brontë returned home that night in a state of wild excitement. All the way he incessantly called on Fraser to come and shake hands with him, and make up their quarrel.
He retired to bed in a delirium of frenzy, and during the night the ghost appeared to him, and gave him a terrific squeeze, from which he never recovered. He died shortly after in great suffering, upbraiding Fraser for his heartless cruelty and cowardice, and he declared, dying, that when he reached the land of shadows he would take measures to prevent Fraser from haunting his sister and niece. After Hugh’s death the rumblings and apparitions ceased to trouble his sister’s house.
The great horror, however, of the haunted glen was the Headless Horseman. The phantom generally made its appearance among thickets of tangled bushes, which no horse could penetrate, and glided silently over uneven and broken ground, where no horse could have gone.
It always appeared to be ridden and guided by a man in flowing robes, whose feet were firmly in the stirrups and whose hands held the bridle, but whose head had been chopped off, leaving only a red and jagged stump.
The ghastly spectacle was so minutely described by the Brontës that others carried the picture of it in their imaginations, and it is not to be wondered at if many thought they saw the spectre among the shimmering shadows of the trees.
A neighbor of the Brontës, Kaly Nesbit, a very old and, I believe, a very good man, once gave to a number of us a vivid account of the apparition. He told the story with great earnestness, and with apparent conviction as to its truth. I give his account as nearly as I can in his own quaint language:
“I heerd the horse nichering in the glen. It was not the voice of a horse but of a fiend, for it came out of the bowels of the earth, and shook the hills, and made the trees quake. Besides, there was no room for a horse on the steep bank, and among the bushes and brablack.
”I had just had a drap of whiskey, about a noggin, and I wasn’t a bit afeard of witch or warlock, ghost or devil, and so I stepped into the glen to see for myself whatever was to be seen.