A CREEPY EXPERIENCE.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 17, Issue 6, 23 January 1903, Page 7

A CREEPY EXPERIENCE.

i HOW A DOG'S VISION IFAS VERI- - FTED BY A CLAIRVOYANT. | "Well, sir,” 1 ' said Crampton, “when It comes to the ghost business, I suppose I | have had as varied an experience as any i man of my ago in the country.” | “And you came in time,” said Farwell, | “to disbelieve in the whole supernatural business, of course?” “I cannot say that I came to any positive conclusion, but I think, on the contrary, that I was led to abandon some : very positive conclusions which were not i unlike those which you seem to hold. ; One was that because I could not see or hear a thing nobody else could. I never \ worked out a bit of satisfactory evidence I of supermundane interference by an in- | vestigation. But, like everybody else who i goes into this sort of thing, I ran up at ! last against a stone wall and then hauled j off. The disturbers refused to disturb ! when I was in the haunted house. The I pale blue light didn’t lighten. The footI steps in the hallway were silent. The j cold air refused to blow oven when I i turned the lights down at midnight. The i blood stains always turned out under the j microscope to be oxide of iron, just as ' the elixir of the clairvoyants turned out jto bo hypophosphates. Slade battled me, j but never convinced me. Home disap- ; pointed me, and the materializing circles wearied me. If any man tried patiently and fearlessly to see a ghost, I did.” "And,” said Farwell, with considerable ! satisfaction, “you arrived at the sensible conclusion that a ghost never is seen. That’s what I said.” “No,” replied Crampton. “I came to the conclusion that ghosts are seen.” | Farwell laughed. “It was some mahatma, or, more likely, a gray eyed sibyl, 1 not at all ghostly herself”— j “No,” said Crampton. “It was a dog i that led me to that conclusion. In 18—, j you will remember, I bought that old j house just out of Chambersburg, in Penn- ■ sylvauia. You will recall the big dining j room, with its old fashioned tireplace, and you may recall my mastiff, Hubert—- ! Tlube,’ we called him. There wasn’t 1 anything mysterious about the house. It j was one of those old fashioned colonial | affairs without any special traditions of interest and unassociated with any 1 crimes that I ever heard of. Nothing oc- ! curred in it to disturb a pleasant life | that I led there with my family until the winter of 18—. Dave Pettus had come down and had been visiting us for sev--1 era! weeks. The fact is, wo were doing some work together on a book for which we had a contract. It was about, the early history of Louisiana, and Pettus had accumulated a great bulk of material for the purpose. He and I used to sit before that big fireplace at night, after the family had retired, and discuss our work, with a bottle of old whisky on the table. ! Nearly always Hube would lie on the rug before the fire, and Alice’s big cat I would be pretty sure to be asleep on the cushioned bench at the corner of the 1 chimney. One night, while we were talking about Lalitte and General Jackson, I Hube growled ominously, jumped up and, | backing against my chair, began to bark violently and exhibit unmistakable signs {of terror. The cat, with her fur stand- ! ing on end, made a break for the closed I door and began to cry piteously to get i out. The disturbance was so sudden ! that Pettus and I were startled. There stood the dog with his tail drawn down between his legs, his nose pointing at the southeast corner of the room and his head slowly turning as he barked, ns if his eyes were following something that was slowly crossing the room diagonally to the northwest corner, and all the time he was pushing against my chair with his hind quarters. He finished this performance, when the object of his excitement had evidently disappeared, by walking over the trail with his nose down to the northwest corner of the room and there giving a farewell bark to the wainscoting. "I took a lantern and went outside, Pettus following me. There was a light fall of snow on the ground and not a break in it anywhere of a footprint or carriage wheel. The dog, instead of searching for trespassers, appeared to be relieved to get out of the house, and when wo wont back it was with some difficulty that I got him in again. But he utterly refused to go into the dining room. As for the cat, she disappeared for three days. ‘lt’s the most extraordinary performance I ever saw,’ I remarked to Pettus, ‘and I can’t imagine what the cause of it was.’ “ ‘Something passed across your room,’ said Pettus. ‘That is unmistakable to me.’ “Then we diligently examined the room, shaking the curtains, inspecting the wainscoting, moving the furniture, sounding the flosr and going through all the familiar proceedings of such a search. But everything was right and tight, not a rat or loose board, window shutters hooked tight and the sashes fastened, not the slightest evidence that vermin or any kind of intruder could have got into the room, and there was no warrant for believing that Hube and the cat would have been terror stricken at any terrestrial intrusion, “Finally we returned to our original positions, made Hube lie down again on the rug, gave the fire a poke and waited to see if we could induce a repetition of the disturbance. But, of course, that is something which, I suppose you know, never can be done, and about 1 o’clock we went to bed. I don’t think we either of us said much about it to the family the next day, for fear that they would naturally attribute it to the whisky bottle. But as soon as Pettus and I got together in the library we fell to talking about it, to the neglect of our work, and, to my astonishment, Pettus, instead of trying to find any rational explanation of it, coolly assured me that there was no sort of doubt that some terrifying thing had gone across my room only visible to the animals. You can understand that such an

' easy assumption would bring on an argui inent, and Pettus amazed me still more ' by saying that any other proof that the evidence of the animals’ actions was not needed. ‘I think,’ said he, ‘that it is a kind of protective clairvoyance they have. If you have ever been in a caravan on the Great desert at night, you will re- : member some of the strange experiences j when the. thin line of camels huddle closer and every cameleer takes warning from these beasts that there are lurking j close in the dense darkness strange djans ! and affrites. I saw in southern Morocco ; the astonishing spectacle of a caravan stopped at night and cut in two by a 1 great gap, while the latter half of it ■ waited for an invisible procession to pass through.’ “All this, I dare say,” observed Crampton, “sounds very fanciful and mediaeval, just ns it did to me, and the smile on your face is a reflection of the same superior incredulity that I wore myself. Well, Pettus went back to Louisiana, and the whole thing passed out of mind as the year rolled by. But at the beginning of the summer The Journal of Psychologic Knowledge asked me to prepare a paper on a woman of the name of Tibbils, who was attracting a good deal of attention at that time as a clairvoyant. I called on her. She was living in a shabby genteel quarter on Varick street and had already been overrun by reporters and doctors. I found her an uneducated woman of about 30, lymphatic, unvolitional and very impressionable, but rather shrinking from public attention and a little afraid of her own powers, which in a purely scientific sense presented a most remarkable case of clear sight. I satisfied myself that the woman had no fraudulent intent, had, indeed, a most excellent moral character. She was singulari 1y candid in avowing her own ignorance and equally disinclined to be made a subject of public discussion. She did not prescribe, had no nostrums to sell and never, I believe, overcame her repugnance to the trance condition. She had lost her husband some years before and lived upon a small annuity which was sufficient to support her comfortably, with economy. Here was a rare opportunity to study a physical and perhaps a psychical phenomenon that was already eliciting the wonder of the psychologists in Franco and Germany and was not at all confused with any spiritualistic claims. In June Mrs. Tibbits came to Chambersburg and became my guest. She proved a very acceptable inmate of the house, was fond of children, lent a willing hand in the domestic arrangements and proved a modest, retiring, methodical woman, who gave herself to the scientific experiments with something like a mild protest. Dr. J. and I succeeded in eliminating everything of a supernatural character from the investigation, and hers proved to be a remarkable case of unsuspected visual function. She undoubtedly did in certain conditions read a book which was pressed against the back of her head when her eyes wore blindfolded and at other times recognized different faces in total darkness, but she made no claim of communication with departed spirits and scouted the whole spiritualistic business. One night Dr. J., my wife, Mrs. Tibbits and I were sitting in the dining room. It must have been quite early in j the evening. We were listening to the doctor narrate some of hie army experiences. We sat in a careless semicircle between the dining table and the big fireplace, which was now closed with a screen. Mrs. Tibbits was in the middle of the circle with her back to the table. Hube, the dog, I should have told you, had died a month or two before. I noticed that Mrs. Tibbits, who was very much interested in what the doctor was telling us, kept looking behind her at intervals, as one will when somebody annoyingly interrupts a conversation. Suddenly she stood up, turned around i and, in an attitude of intense eagerness and terror, stared into the southeast corner of the room. My wife jumped up, crying out, “What is the matter?” and both the doctor and I rose quickly. There she stood, her elbows drawn up, her eyes seeming to project and the lines of her month rigidly constricted, so that she showed her teeth. Then her head turned slowly as if following something that was crossing the room diagonally. The doctor caught hold of her quickly, and she swooned away in his arms. We got her up stairs as quickly as possible, and the doctor and my udfe worked over her well into the night. She appeared to be overcome with mortal terror, nor could any of us elicit the slightest information as to the nature of the apparition that had frightened her. My own appeals to her the next morning were of little avail. I asked her to be rational and for my sake describe what she saw. But she only shuddered and said, “Something terrible crossed your room.” “What was it like?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I never saw anything like it before. I must get away from here today.” This was unbearably aggravating, but nothing could induce her to stay in the house, and the day after the occurrence I took her to the station, she acting during the whole journey very much like a woman pursued by some unmentionable horror. “I am not a man,” said Crampton, “to be scared by the visions of an uneducated woman, but when she corroborated some kind of clear vision in two animals I began to feel creepy whenever I was left alone in that dining room, and I quietly made up’ my mind that there might be more things in our atmosphere than are dreamed of in our philosophy.” “Did anybody else ever get a shock there?” asked Farwell. “No,” said Crampton. “That end of the house was burned down while I was in England.’ * j

Always a Chance. “You are almost a man. You ought not to go about asking people for help when you are able to earn a living by working for it. Can’t you find a job of any kind?” “Yes’m; I was offered a job the other day, but I didn't think the pay was big enough. All they would give me was |4 a week.” “Yon could have got $4 a week!” “Yes’m.” “Well, that’s a great deal better than nothing. If you could earn as much as that at the beginning and stick to your work faithfully you would be certain to get a raise some day, wouldn’t you?” “Yes’m, I guess so. It was in a dynamite factory.* In No Heed of Fie. “Madam,” said Meandering Mike, when, in response to his request for food, she offered him pie, “do ye remember a year ago wdien ye gave a sufferin’ fellercreature a pie?” “I believe so." “Madam, I’m that man.” “Was it good?” “Good! It saved my life. There was an unfeelin’ farmer thet fired a box of tacks right fur my heart at short range. I bed yer pie buttoned up inside my vest, an’ here it is—full o’ tacks, ez ye kin see fur yerself. It ain’t near wore out, an’ I won’t need another ter take its place fur a year yet.”—Washington Star.

HER STORY. A winsome herb, contented just to grow, Grew brave and true within a wilderness. Day fell upon her like a soft caress; She saw the dawn and twilight come and go And star set night. Life was all good, and so She yielded fragrance as pure souls confess In worldless prayer the heart’s deep tenderness, When, 10, a mower came that way to mowl For her delight recurrent flashed the blade, For her in measured music dropt the grass; “Shall I have meat and fail to render grace?* She said and fell, not only unafraid, But full of joy that so her life could pass, And now her soul of sweetness fills the place, -Charlotte Whitcomb In Woman’s Home Com* panion. {•••O'S'O'S'O O’-O