Elliott O'Donnell

“ No amount of experience in ghost hunting will ever enable me to overcome that awful, hideous fear that seizes me when I see the last glimmer of daylight fade, and I realise I am about to be brought into contact with the superphysical, and that I must face it—alone.
Noises in empty houses I have noticed usually commence in the basement, and I was not at all surprised when presently I heard a faint tapping proceeding from one of the kitchens. This was followed by a long spell of silence, and then one of the stairs creaked. ”

“ Imagine then what it is to be haunted all one’s life by such a grim harbinger of woe, to have it ever trailing in one’s wake, always ready and, maybe, eager to make itself heard the moment it detects, by its extraordinary and unhuman powers, the advent of death. One curious idiosyncrasy of the banshee is that it never manifests itself to the person whose death it is prognosticating. ”

“ As it was, I only just managed to pull myself together, and realising that what I saw before me was not a ghost, but a material and now, as far as I was concerned, harmless being, I spoke to it.
“Well,” I said, “at any rate you seem to like my whiskey. How long have you been here?”
The flask was gradually lowered, and a voice, which I decided was that of a woman—for up to the present I hadn’t been able to decipher its sex—gurgled, “I sleep here every night. This is my house.”
“Then the enigma is solved,” I said. “You are the ghost!” ”

“ A door opened and shut downstairs, and bare footsteps pattered their way along the stone passage and up the wooden stairs.
The nearer they drew, the more intolerable became my suspense. What should I see? A white-faced, glassy-eyed phantasm of the dead, or some blood-curdling, semi-human, semi-animal neutrarian. Which would it be? I confess I would have given all I possessed to be out in the road, but, as is usually the case with me when in the presence of the superphysical, I was quite powerless to speak or move. ”

“ I am not a member of any august society that conducts its investigations of the other world, or worlds, with test tube and weighing apparatus; neither do I pretend to be a medium or consistent clairvoyant.
I am merely a ghost hunter; merely one who honestly believes that he inherits in some degree the faculty of psychic perceptiveness from a long line of Celtic ancestry; and who is, and always has been, deeply and genuinely interested in all questions relative to phantasms and a continuance of individual life after physical dissolution. ”

“ Just as the procession had reached the summit of a steep hill, a half-witted man fired a gun from a cottage window, and the horses drawing the hearse, taking fright, dashed down the incline and into a wall at the foot of it. Strange to say, no one was injured, but the coffin was thrown out and broken to pieces. The event made a great impression upon the minds of all who witnessed it, and the landlord informed me that I was by no means the only person who, upon entering the house, had received a vivid mental picture of the scene.
I am often asked if I am a consistent medium. ”

“ I had seen nothing like it since I was in Algiers, but, bah! a soldier can get used to anything. ‘It is a mere nothing,’ I said to myself. ‘I can dive, I can swim; it will take more than cold water to kill me; and if it were twenty times as bad I would face it.’ Ten years is a long time to be away from one’s home, Mr. O’Donnell. I trudged on, and was soon ankle-deep in black mud. At eight o’clock I was confronted by a long line of huge, black trees, that bent their dripping tops as if they had orders to salute me. ”

“ But a moment before I had mixed with the streams of ultra-fashionable people heading for the Spa Concert, the Theatre, and the Valley Park, and, so free had they seemed from all trouble and responsibility—so full of sparkling, spontaneous fun and flippancy—and above all, so full of the flamboyant spirit of sheer life, that one could not help feeling, as one looked at them, that after all there could be no such thing as death for them—that such pronounced vitality must go on for ever. ”

“ I tell those men that my opium will do them no good, but they take it; they take it, and dream as Englishmen would dream—with their spirits chained to their material bodies. When these depraved Chinamen awake and realise that they can never, never again, be drawn by the mighty, majestic love of the Spirit of the Mountain and River, and that they can never again revisit the home of their childhood, so bitter is their disappointment that they kill themselves—not always here, but anywhere—in their lodgings, in the river, or in the docks. ”

“ The police are, I believe, expected to clear the Park before locking-up time, and I’ve no doubt they try to do so, but they cannot possibly look into every nook and cranny in that vast expanse, and there are many in which one could easily hide and defy detection. I have tried the experiment once, and I am not anxious to try it again; there is no place so terribly depressing, so strangely suggestive of suicide, and hauntings by the most grotesque type of neutrarians, as London’s premier park by night. ”

“ Mingling with the crowds in the parks and gliding in and out the trees, I have often seen people with the pallor of corpses; I have followed them, and they have unaccountably vanished. I believe Hyde Park, particularly the northern side, to be as full of ghosts as any spot in London, and I have heard many strange tales from the outcasts, the tattered and torn brigade, who have slept all night under its trees and bushes. ”

“ One of them, a lady, told me that she had once stayed there and had been awakened every night by the sounds I had described—the sounds of heavy footsteps rushing up the stairs, of cries and groans, shrieks and oaths, coupled with the clashing of scabbards and sword blades, and the sound as of falling bodies.
Yet nothing was ever to be seen, saving the moonlight and shadows—plenty of shadows—shadows strangely suggestive of grotesque and fancifully clad people. ”

“ Experience is the only medium of conviction, and so long as people are without a personal experience relating to another world, they can never really believe. The boy in rags and tatters may be far more conversant with—may know far more about—a future life than the more [207] learned Professor at the University. But no one can logically claim to be an absolute authority on the Unknown; the most any of us can do—even those of us who have actually seen and heard spirit manifestations—the rest do not count—is to speculate. When we attempt to do more, we label ourselves fools. ”

“ Who that has ridden through woods and jungles, or lonely country roads at night, has not seen their horse suddenly stop and evince every evidence of fear. Though the human eye has seen nothing to account for it, the horse obviously has seen something, and it has only been by dint of the utmost coaxing and petting that the sagacious animal has been persuaded to continue its course. ”

“ Up above, in the fields, woods, valleys, even far away in the primitive parts of the world, one is never quite alone, for the voice of Nature makes itself heard in the birds and insects. One knows one is in the midst of life. ”

“ It was in San Francisco that I had my first experience with an American ghost. I had been out tramping all day along the southern side of the bay, and it was close on midnight before I got back to the city, feeling thoroughly done up and very footsore. The last chime of twelve o’clock sounded, as I swung wearily round 117th Street into a narrow thoroughfare leading to the obscure quarter of the town in which my finances forced me to [50] live. As I came within sight of the end house of a block of low old-fashioned buildings, I received something of a shock. ”

“ But apart from this obvious fraud, can we believe that any one of those whom [121] we have loved and lost would so degrade themselves and us as to appear at a public séance before a company of strangers. Surely we would rather not see them at all, than see them in such circumstances. At any rate, we would rather—much rather—possess our souls in patience, until our departed loved ones can appear to us in private—as they sometimes can—without the intervention of any medium whatsoever.
With regard to automatic or spirit writing, there is, I believe, just as much fraud practised. ”

“ You must see the Pelings, the Hoang-Ho, the rice fields, not as they would appear to the man in the street here, here in London, Piccadilly, but as we, who live near them and know them, see them—as figures that can see and hear, figures with intelligence, expression—intense expression in their eyes. When you see them like that, you will get to love them, and, when you love them, you will unconsciously concentrate on them, as you do on all things that you love. ”

“ I was visiting the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, one day in the summer of 1898, and was so struck with the look of yearning in the eyes of one of the lions, the desperate look of yearning to have just five minutes’ gambol on the sunny lawn outside, five minutes in which to stretch its poor, cramped-up limbs, and sniff, perhaps for the first time, the fine fresh air of freedom, that I could not refrain from mentioning what was passing in my mind to a white-haired old man and a plainly dressed young woman, who were standing near. ”

“ I am often [229] sorry, extremely sorry, I was ever brought into contact with the Unknown. As I said in one of the early chapters of this book, I did not go out of my way to seek the superphysical—it came to me. And it has never given me any peace. I feel its presence beside me at all times. In the evening, when I am writing, the curtains that are tightly drawn across the closed windows slowly bulge, the candlestick on the mantel-shelf rattles, a picture on the wall swings out suddenly at me, and, when I go to bed and try to sleep, I frequently hear breathings and far-away whispers. ”

“ On she went—cough, cough, cough! She was still coughing, when I suddenly became aware of a presence close beside me, and I saw in the glow from the dying embers the figure of a man seated at a table in the middle of the kitchen. He appeared to be trying to write, but to be unable to collect his thoughts. Every now and then he paused, dashed his pen down, and clenched his fists furiously. At first I could not understand his behaviour, and then it all of a sudden [72] occurred to me—the coughing, of course. That perpetual noise, that everlasting hacking—it distracted, demented him. ”

“ He’s pointing at you, George. I see it all now! George, you devil—you murdered him!’
“George looked round—and there, bending over him, was a tall figure, with a strangely white face. He threw out his hands to keep the figure off, and, as he did so, he slipped, and fell, with one loud yell of terror, into the pit. I heard him strike the side of the great abyss once—then thud—that was all! ”

“ Poring over chemicals or figures all day is a very poor training for reading the human mind. An actor is a far more able exponent of psychology than any chemist or mathematician, and this being so, it is the actor who should play a prominent part in psychical research and not the scientist. If a veteran actor were to say to me, “Look here, I have watched that woman very carefully when she was supposed to go into a trance, and to speak in an entirely different voice from her own, and I am convinced she is merely acting,” I should be inclined to believe him. ”

“ Of course, it is not every mine that is haunted in this way, or every miner that sees such sights, for the Unknown confines its manifestations to the few, but I firmly believe such phenomena do happen, because as I state in my “Byways of Ghostland” (W. Rider & Sons) , I have seen several tree ghosts myself. If one form of life possesses a spirit, why should we not assume that other forms of life possess a spirit, too? Why should man have the monopoly of an immaterial self, and alone of all creation continue his identity after physical dissolution? ”

“ Many people have fallen in the error of imagining all banshees are moulded after one pattern. Nothing could be more fallacious. The banshee of the O’Rourkes, for [28] example, does not resemble that of the O’Donnells; there are many forms of the banshee, each clan having a distinct one—or more than one—of its own. Some of the banshees are fair to look at, and some old, and foul, and terrifying; but their mission is invariably the same, i.e., to announce a death or some great family catastrophe.
“The banshee is never joyous; it is always either sad or malevolent. ”

“ There is nothing like contrasts to teach you true enjoyment.’ He stepped into an elevator, and we went up, passing storey after storey, all dark, silent and deserted. At last we stopped, and getting out, entered a brilliantly illuminated room. ‘Here they are!’ Mr. Hoonigan exclaimed. ‘Let me introduce you to my fair women friends.’ I looked round, and there before me was a vast assemblage of women, all of them richly dressed in the very latest fashion. All beautiful, however, and all most artistically posed; some sitting, some standing, some lying at full length on rugs and sofas. ”

“ We went back again into the drawing-room and discussed it. Mrs. Rowlandson was the first to speak. She, too, had been particularly impressed by the hands, and she was sure they were the hands of Ernest Dekon.
“I can say nothing about the face,” she cried, “as it did not appear to me, but having seen the hands, I am firmly convinced that the ghost is Ernest Dekon, and that it is Ernest Dekon who is tormenting us. Can’t any of you think of a plan to get rid of him?”
“Cremation is the only thing I can think of!” cried Colonel Rushworth, who had hitherto been silent. ”

“ In olden times, when people were really psychic, those versed in the art from their childhood upwards could only raise a ghost with great difficulty, and often, only by resorting to spells, many of which were of a very subtle and complex nature. And when, in the end, they did succeed, such manifestations invariably had a very alarming effect on the medium as well as the spectator. ”

“ It seems incredible that anyone outside a lunatic asylum could believe that the spirits of such great men as Napoleon, Newman and Dickens should take the trouble to obsess a medium, in order to chat with some nonentity, who is neither extraordinarily clever nor particularly interesting. ”