MURDER AND MADNESS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XI, Issue 43, 28 October 1893, Page 348

MURDER AND MADNESS.

Here is a story of the supernatural. It happened more than a hundred years ago, so that you may hope it is not true. Yet in those days the invention of news was not yet known, and the paper which contains this story was a sober and honest journal. One of the patients in a madhouse—a parish madhouse ; I think that of Launceston—escaped. That was no new thing; they all wanted to escape. As the woman, although very mad indeed, was quite harmless, they went abont their search in a leisurely fashion. At last they found her, drowned in a shallow ditch, and carried her back to the madhouse. On preparing the unhappy woman for the grave, they found in her corset—they called her stays—something that rustled. They cut the tbingopen.anddiscoveredasmall parcel rolled up tight in some waterproof stuff—whatever was then invented. The parcel was a document written on parchment. It was written very small, and mis spelt, and this was how it ran : * The man came along after dark ; he stopped at onr door, and said he was a stranger, and would my aunt take him in for the night? He seemed a sailor, and said he was respectable, and showed money. “ Elizabeth,” said aunt, “he can have your room, and you shall sleep with me.” There were two bedrooms in the cottage, up a ladder, both garrets. During the evening he sent me out for drink, and he had a lot, and was drunk ; but he got up the ladder safe and so to bed. In the night I heard aunt get out of bed. There was a moon shining in the skylight window. She took something and went into the man’s room. Presently aunt came back, and in the moonlight she saw me sitting up in bed. “ Get up,” she said ; “ go downstairs and get, if you can, a lignt.” So I did, and brought the rush light up the ladder. Aunt had the Bible in her hand. “Swear,” she said, “that you will never tell anyone what has been done.” So I swore, trembling, and wished I might go suddenly mad if I told. “ Then,” she says, “ I’ve killed the lodger. His pockets were full of guineas, and I’m a made woman. But you must help me.” So she made me help to drag the body down into the room below and out into the garden, where we dug a hole under the cabbages And laid it as deep as we could. Then we covered all up and went back to the house, and waited till daybreak. As soon as it was light we washed up the place, and nobody ever found out. One night, when I was a woman grown, the dead man came to my bedside and said, “ Tell the story and I said, “ I cannot, because I swore.” He said, “If you tell yon have sworn to go mad ; if you do not tell I will haunt you till you do go mad.” So, as lam bound to go mad either way, I have written the story down and sewn it up. When lam dead somebody will find it, and will dig up the poor man and bury him in a church. The house is situated . . .’ Thus the narrative. And they dug np the garden in the place indicated, and found the dead body in what had been sailor’s clothes.—Walter Besant.