Our Chostly visit and

Observer, 21 December 1893, Page 32

Our Chostly visit and

"WbITTEN FOB THE ObSEBVEB BY W. J. GeDBIS,

HE thrilling incident that it is my purpose to relate happened away back in the eighties. I was staying at the time in a large rambling house overlooking Wellington harbour. The house is still there, but it is not necessary _ to describe it more fully than to say that it was a large building of respectable age, and that there was associated with it some slight suspicion that it was haunted. We were none of us very superstitious, and the supernatural had no terrors for us. Truth to tell, we were all young fellows and we thought little or nothing about such things. But on this particular Christmas Eve our conversation had been running on ghosts and ghost stories, and some strange reminiscences of uncanny episodes had been told as we sat in the darkness. Then our conversation turned upon the yarns we had heard about the house in which we sat being haunted. Several of us ridiculed the idea of such a thing, but two or three of the fellows were very quiet and thoughtful, and Jenkins especially bo. Jenkins was a believer in the ghost, and as we drew our chairs closer around the fire, for it was a late season and we were actually indulging in the luxury of a fire on Christmas Eve, he repeated the story to us in a thrilling and realistic fashion of his own. It was a simple story enough of a young couple who had once lived in the house. They were new-comers from England, where they had been romantically married, and they had come to the colonies to make a fortune. But fortunes were not so easily made by men like the young fellow in question, having neither trade nor profession, and without strength to dig. Together, they struggled on till their slender resources were exhausted, and one Christmas Eve the man, in despair, took his own life under strange circumstances. His wife had retired first, but midnight having come and there being no sign of him, she ventured downstairs and found him sitting in a chair — stone dead. He had killed himself with a powerful opiate. The shock to the young wife was fatal, and she succumbed, and the story went that her figure, clothed in white, was accustomed to glide into this room in which we sat every Christmas Eve at midnight. We laughed sceptically, but by the flickering light of the fire we could see that Jenkins' face was grave, and one or two of the other chaps looked as if they had seen the ghost themselves and did not like its identity disputed. Just then, the post-office clock began to chime the midnight hour, and with an ironical laugh Jack Gibbons suggested that the time had come for the ghost to prove itself if it had any existence even in shadow-land. Instinctively, every eye turned to the door. Good God 1 There, sure enough, in the moonlight we could see a figure draped in white moving towards us. For my part, I can honestly say that my heart seemed to stand still. The blood was like ice in my veins, and I could feel the hair of my head perceptibly rising. No one stirred or spoke. The figure came slowly towards us with a gliding motion that was horrifying in itself. I would have called out if I could, but my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and if my life depended upon it I could not have articulated a sound. Nor was I singular in this respect. Every one of the seven or eight of us in the group candidly confessed afterwards that he was so horror-stricken that he could not have stirred an inch to save his life. The figure still continued to advance, looking exceedingly Hpiritnelle and ghost-like in the faint light cast by the expiring fire in the grate and the pale moonlight streaming through the window. It was impossible to see the face because it seemed to be wrapped in a fleecy shawl,

but there was no longer the slightest question in the minds of any of us that bt is was the ghost of the woman', wnose nusband had murdered himsen. ' Gliding slowly towards us, the apparition was' soon in tine very centre of our little fireside circle, when suddenly the sceptical Gibbons, who always aewaied :ie did not believe in ghosts but who was as timid as the most of us when the supernatural was in question, made a snatch at the shawl around the snirit's head, and it came away in his uand. Here was somethin tangible. Th en there was a piercing scream from the ghost, and next moment we had returned to our senses and had struck matches, only to find that the supposed restless spirit was really the

flesh-and-blood form of our poor old landlady, who had come in quietly, thinking we had all gone to bed, to see whether the fire had been safely extinguished before she went to sleep. " Oh, you nasty Mr. Gibbons, she gasped, to think of your sitting there in the dark trying to frighten a poor old widow lady. And you, Mr. Woolcott, and you Mr. Miller ; I'm ashamed of you." Jenkins never told his ghost-story again, and I daresay that long ere this the legend of the restless spirit and the haunted house has been forgotten. Perhaps our landlady laid the ghost.