HAUNTED ROOMS
How is it that one can "feel" a room is haunted? What is it that gives one the strong impression that there is something unpleasant about a certain room, a something that sets it apart, as a place to be avoided?
The mind operates with the senses. It receives impressions through the air as sound, or through the ether as sight, and so forth. Through the various senses we catch the vibrations of consciousness belonging to our environment, near or far. Psychically developed persons possess an increase of sensibility which enables them to see, hear, and feel more acutely than most people. Wherever some great mental disturbance has taken place, wherever overwhelming sorrow, hatred, pain, terror, or any kind of violent passion has been felt, an impression of a very marked character has been imprinted on the astral light. So strong is this impression that often persons possessing but the first glimmer of the psychic faculty are deeply impressed by it. But a slight temporary increase of sensibility would enable them to visualize the whole scene. That such impressions should be imprinted on the astral light is no more wonderful than ordinary photography, or the impression of the human voice upon the cylinders of a gramophone.
To me, a haunted room is always full of shadows. That is how I see it. That is one of several ways by which I distinguish it from other rooms. Other people do not always see these shadows, and the room may actually be flooded with sunshine when I enter it for the first time. This makes no difference to what I see. The shadows are there, despite the sunshine.
There are long-drawn-out shadows, which seem to take their rise in the corners of the room, and creep across the floor. They are not motionless, but in constant vibration and re-formation, like smoke drifts. Such shadows are not of a uniform gray, but tinged by dull colors, dark red, sulphur yellow, muddy brown. In a haunted room there is always a shadow above one's head. A hovering cloud between the ceiling and midway to the floor.
Then there are the sensations I feel when entering a haunted room. Little shivers run through me, and what I take to be nervous excitation sets all my spine jangling, and the tiny nerve threads quivering. The sensation of icy cold water trickling down my back is most unpleasant.
At times a profound melancholy falls upon me, often blended with a poignant compassion for some one, I know not whom. At other times a sensation of violent repulsion invades my being, which has actually, in some cases, produced physical sickness. Again, there is the helpless feeling, and that is the hardest to bear of all such psychic disturbances. The feeling that something is about to occur in that room which I will be powerless to ward off.
What can one do when paying a visit if one is ushered into a bedroom by one's hostess which one instantly knows to be "unhealthful"? I cannot find a better word to describe many a haunted room. This experience has several times happened to me, and unless I know my hostess very well, I am obliged to sleep in this unhealthful atmosphere.
On one occasion I was invited to dine and sleep with some old friends, who had taken on lease an old castle in the neighborhood of St. Andrews, where I happened to be staying. They had only been in residence for a month or two, an old brother and an old sister, whom I had known all my life.
In spite of this long friendship they were not the sort of people to whom I could have said, "Would you mind giving me another room? The one you have selected for me is haunted, and if I remain in it I will have no sleep. I shall not even dare to try to sleep, but shall have to keep awake all night to ward off the evil." They would have been both shocked and indignant at such a suggestion, and probably have concluded that I had gone stark staring mad.