GHOST STORIES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13841, 1 March 1909, Page 3

GHOST STORIES.

Do vegetables have, ghosts? ;i f This was,the ; uncbmt'ortable tion made by Mr Elliott OJDonhell in. a lecture on haunted houses given rer cently at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, London. My hair lifted crisply from the roots (writes a " Daily Chronicle rt representative who was present) as I v gassed timidly round the darkened room. Hero we were in a notorious food reform restaurant, where hundreds of innocent vegetables are done to death daily, who could tell what unquiet spirits from the kitchen garden might he hpvering around? A colleague, who is strong-minded and fearless in Fleetstreet, started' when I passed him "..a; cigar, thinking in the gloom that a murdered hea<l of aspafagusjliad him in a ghostly clutch. . A cheerful little request was made by Mr O'Dorinell at the beginning of his lecture. He wants a few people to join him in buying a genuine haunted liouse, so that the spooks can be scientifically studied at leisure. However, as it "is he has the good fortune to keep ghosts on the premises. In his house in Cornwall there have been noises and apparitions, for wnich his housekeeper blamed the ghost of a moose whose head hangs in the hall. This house is built on the site of barrows and other old burying grounds, and he thinks the manifestations are the work of. "elemental ghosts," the result of prehistoric men resenting the invnsion of their old territory. Of Hfoese " elemental ghosts" a terrifying selection was shown by limelight from drawings which we were informed were specially, made from material supplied by eye-witnesses. The rather j noisy smiles of the men were drowned

by,the srieks of alarm from the ladies as all kinds of lioitots .were shown ■on the screen. There was, for instance, the figure of ii man with a pig's head who haunts trees in Westmoreland and Ireland. The pig's head is rather by- way of being a finishing touch to ghosts, for another picture showed a similar type of apparition that haunts a certain burial' ground in Northamptonshire. Huge pigs that crouch at the foot of a ghost* ly gallows from which hangs a gnostly, criminal is the appalling phantomgroup seen outside a certain farmhouse. The lecturer's solution was that the lower side of a man's nature Was earthchained iu this form. when his better self went elsewhere after death. "If you live like a pig," he told his audience threateningly,' "you'll be earthbound in the shape of one of these swine." It may be, too, that your house is really haunted when the drains appear defective, for Mr O'Donnell stated that ghosts were sometimes smelt and not seen. "This is very disagreeable," he remarked, and the shuddering audience murmured sympathetically. Sleeping in the dark will quite die out if half the horrors pictured and described at this lecture are realised by the public. In one house, for instance, on opening a bedroom cupboard you t>oo (we were told) a low brutal type of head, with no body, leering at you. In another house ghostly hands lift your chair from the floor as you sit down. If you escape these you may knock at the door of another house only to be stared at by the phantom head of a red-haired servant girl peerover the shoulder of the real maid who opens the door, ■