TRUE GHOST STORIES.

Waipawa Mail, Volume 5, Issue 517, 28 August 1883, Page 4

TRUE GHOST STORIES.

The two ghost stories told (says the London correspondent of the Liverpool Mercury) by our most eminent anatomist are as romantic in their way as any told by the Psychological Society. When hardly more than a lad, at Lancaster, the future defender of vivisection was studying for the medical profession. He had a horror of the ghastly details of the business, which he imagined he could never overcome. He was cured, strange to say, by a fright. Having to take some medicine on a windy night to Lancaster Castle, he had to pass through the room in which he had taken part in dissections. Just as he entered the room with the basket of medicine under his arm the clouds which hid the moon suddenly parted, a door Blammed, and looking up, the future biologist saw what he thought was an enormous figure in white. He dropped his basket and ran. The patients in Lancaster Castle got no medicine that night. But when he returned next day and it was found that he had been frightened by mortuary sheets, he braced his nerves up so that he was soon collecting skulls. Ho made a fine set, but for a long time he could not get an Ethiopian skull. At last a negro died in Lancaster Castle, and the young doctor got permission to have the head. It was again a windy night when the operation of removing the head was determined on. But habited in his long cloak—then the fashion—and provided with a blue bag, the comparative anatomist soon had the head safely stowed away. As he left the room in which the coffin lay, however, the wind slammed the door, caught his cloak, and nearly threw him upon his face. Attempting to recover himself, h© lost his hold of the bag, the head fell out, rolled with increasing velocity down a flight of steps, across a courtyard, and settled itself upon the neck, with one eye opened and the other shut, in a room where two women were. The professor rushed wildly after it, took no notice of the women, seized the skull, put it in his bag again, and ran from the castle. Four or five years afterwards he was attending a dying woman, who called loudly for a clergyman, to whom she had something to tell. The doctor begged her to tell him, as no clergyman was near enough to be called in time. At length she spoke. “ Oh, sir, I had a husband who was a negro, and, I fear, a bad man. He died, sir, in Lancaster Oustle and, ob 1 sir, X was standing one day in the rooms when my husband’s head came out of the floor, and seemed to ask me to help him. And then, sir, the Devil came out of the door, snatched up the head, put it in a bag, and disappeared before I could do anything. And I have never done anything. Oh, sir, what can I do for my poor husband’s soul ?”