Suddenly "Pompey" growled, and turned towards the staircase, with all his hair bristling. I also looked round and saw a tall, quite ordinary man mounting the staircase.
I thought nothing of this, supposing him to be the factor whom we expected, and I rose to my feet at once. He came on along the corridor straight towards us, and looking directly at us, but when within about ten feet from where we stood he suddenly vanished.
I heard my maid give a sharp exclamation, and at the same instant "Pompey" made a furious dash at the spot, and growling angrily began to pursue something invisible to us, down the stairs.
I followed as quickly as I could. I feared "Pompey" would be lost if he ran out into the deer forest surrounding us on all sides. I caught him at the deer fence, edging the vegetable garden, and induced him with some difficulty to return to the house.
My maid and I compared notes. What I had seen accorded exactly with what she had seen. She soon got over her uncomfortable experience, and though I never saw this entity again, I often felt him near me. He was, however, of so colorless a personality, that he never proved in the least disturbing to any one in the house.
At the time of which I write the Astral Plane was not so generally recognized as an actual residential quarter as it is now. In these days a halfway house for the soul was not considered necessary for Protestants. They either went direct to heaven or hell, according to their manner of life on earth. The Catholics alone had their Purgatory, to which the departed souls repaired, there to slough off the passions of earth and fit themselves for higher realms.
Purgatory and the Astral Plane mean the same thing now to the vast majority of thinkers. A halfway house for the soul. A condition of consciousness interpenetrating this earth, which may actually be visited under certain conditions by those still possessing a physical body, an abode so contiguous to this world as to make the words of the Poet literally true—
"All houses wherein men have lived and died are haunted houses."
In these days I used to get severely chaffed on the subject of the Astral Plane. Frivolous young things would say to me, "Hello! been on the Astral Plane lately?"
One day I was undergoing a certain amount of good-natured chaff from a number of young people at Dunrobin Castle. I defended my beliefs vigorously, and at last the present Lady Londonderry, then Miss Chaplin, the Duke's niece, challenged me to pick out the haunted room in the Castle.