Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic Experiences

by Violet Tweedale

That noise of infinite pain, of frantic, dying agony, those convulsive, ghastly groans and scuffling of feet, and wrestling, writhing bodies, were spell-binding beyond the power of human conception, and the most awe-inspiring fantasy. I tried to reason with myself, but the horror scattered all reasoning, yet a sense of duty, of natural humanity, and anger with my own fears, kept tugging at me. It seemed as if the sounds were losing force, were beginning to die out. I was lying still in abject terror, whilst a fellow-creature was being deliberately done to death.

A blind fury with myself, and the murderer, suddenly superseded fear. Without turning on the light I jumped out of bed, and knocking up against the furniture in my haste, I dashed towards the faint light coming in from the street. In another moment I had thrust aside the blind, and thrown the window wide. I know I shouted out something; I have no idea what. I thrust my head out between the iron bars, and looked to right and left. I could see absolutely nothing. The street was quite empty, and so well lit that I could see from end to end of it.

I drew in my head, and stood there silently, and quivering still with excitement, as one does when awakened with the broken fragments of an evil dream.

Then, suddenly, a sensation of bristling fear took possession of me once more, unreasoning and unreasonable fear, clutching at my heart with a grip of ice. The noise had not ceased, it continued more faintly, and it came from a corner of my room to the right of the window. Murder had been done in the room in which I now stood, and was being re-enacted now. The certainty rushed on me with the force of a whirlwind.

I was dimly conscious of human voices in the mews, of a window being thrown open. My cry had awakened other sleepers. I left my window open, and let the blind fall before it. Then I crept softly across to the opposite side of the room, whence the dying sound proceeded. The victim was almost dead. I could hear nothing but a gasping, rattling sigh, and then silence. The silence of death.

I was roused from my trance of horror by the measured tread of a policeman outside. I heard him speaking with others, then, seeing nothing to account for the disturbance in the mews, he went away again, and I fell asleep from utter mental exhaustion.

When I awoke the sun was in the room, and I looked towards the corner where the tragedy of the darkness had been enacted. How peaceful and innocent the room now looked, in the light of a cheerful summer morning, and how thankful I was to know that I would be far away from it in a very few hours.

Yet another hotel story comes to me as I write.

My sister and her husband came to Torquay to spend a couple of nights and took rooms in one of the principal hotels. They had not announced their arrival beforehand, and the manageress took them upstairs to see several vacant rooms. There was one not shown to them, but the door was wide open, and my sister seeing that it was unoccupied walked in, and said she preferred it to any of the others, because of its particular view.

For some unknown reason the manageress was greatly against their taking it; she raised every sort of objection, but my sister was firm, and finally the luggage was carried up and she began to unpack, whilst her husband went down to order tea.