Page:The Naturalisation of the Supernatural.pdf/278

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258
Haunted Houses

country dull, after London. When she returned she told me that she hoped she would never have to go to stay in that house again, for she had not been able to sleep there during the fortnight, being each night the prey of fears, for which she could not account in any way. My father left this rectory at the end of the summer; and some time afterwards he was talking of the place to me, and mentioned laughingly that before he entered it the rector had "thought it right to let him know that that end of the house in which I and my children were put up was said to be haunted, my room especially, and that several of his visitors—his sister in particular—had been much troubled by this room being apparently entered, and steps and movements heard in the dead of night. I do not like to let you come in," the rector added, "without telling you this, though my own belief in it is small." Within, I think, a year or eighteen months at most of my father's leaving, the house had to undergo considerable repair, and amongst others, a new floor had to be laid in the dining-room. On taking up the old boards four or five (I forget which) skeletons were found close under the boarding in a row, and also close to the hearthstone. Some of the skulls of these skeletons were very peculiar in form.

The Rev. G. M. Capell, writing from Passenham Rectory, October, 1889, says: " I found seven skeletons in my dining-room in 1874"

Two other cases of the kind are cited in the article from which the above account is taken. In one case a feeling of unaccountable horror was experienced in a room under part of the roof where the dried-up body of a baby was afterwards foundIn another case, a governess and one of her girl pupils saw, independently, a ghostly figure in a room in Mannheim in the walls of which a skeleton had been discovered. The skeleton had been removed in the process of converting the room into