Ghosts.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVII, Issue 19, 8 May 1912, Page 2

Ghosts.

Mr. R. H. Benson, writing on “Haunted Houses” in “The Dublin Review,” says:—l have listened patiently to every ghost story that has come my way; I have read all the literature I could lay my hands on: I have slept in haunted houses; I once took a suicide’s room, with a bloodstain under the bed, and slept in it for a whole year, in the hope of -seeing a ghost'; and the total effect of all my pathetic attempts to arrive at some conclusion on the matter, to formulate some theory that should satisfy myself at any date, has been that I stand in a position of entire and complete agnosticism. I am acquainted with a certain house in England so badly “haunted” that the family has been forced at last to leave it and to build a new house in the same park a quarter of a mile away. This haunting has been experienced again and again by all kinds of people. Mass has been said in the house repeatedly, but with no effect. It is a beautiful old house, but so terrible are the apparently ghostly events that take ■place there that at least one member of the family, a normal and courageous person, entirely refuses to pass a single night there, even with servants sleeping in the room, because it is against him that the principal force is directed. Many others as well have experienced the attacks. In one ease a perfectly normal man went to stay with the family for a week. He was put in a room two doors away from the haunted room, but such was the effect upon him merely of hearing half-a-dozen inexplicable footsteps pass his door that he left early next morning, and has deelined to set foot in the house since. The supposed “ghost” has been seen on many occasions; there is an extraordinary sensation of evil, felt even by sceptical persons —and, in effect, as 1 have said, the best concrete evidence of the facts is found in the leaving of this old and ancestral house by the family ami the inhabiting of the other. 'Die mo»t startling manifestations take the form of actually physical force. The member of the family has on many occasions been thrown to the ground, and once, at any rate, in the presence of three friends. 1 know these facte well, but the house entirely failed to provide any manifestations for me.