Part 5

One of the most remarkable and appalling experiences possible to conceive recently befell a young man named Robert Perry, at Apedale, in Staffordshire. Tramping about the country in search of work, he arrived one night, utterly tired out, at an ironworks, and unwittingly took shelter in an “air furnace,” used for the purpose of reducing very large pieces of iron, too large to be dealt with in the ordinary way. As it happened, the fire-bars of this particular furnace had been taken out, and Perry had no difficulty in creeping through the opening and thus making his way inside. Here he had to mount a wall five feet in height, and eventually reached the melting chamber, which at the time contained about five tons of iron waiting to be smelted. Arrived at this point, in blissful ignorance of the dangerous character of the place he had selected to sleep in, and appreciating only its dryness and seclusion, he lay down to rest. Exactly why he should have selected such a strange bedchamber it is impossible to say, but tramps have been known to choose even stranger quarters--such as lime-kilns and brick-kilns. Anyhow, the fact remains that he went into the furnace to sleep. What happened afterwards is told below, from information gathered partly from the man himself and partly from other persons who figured in his terrible adventure.

After a long walk in the broiling sun Perry arrived at Apedale quite exhausted, and set about looking for a snug, dry place where he could lie down and have a sleep. During his weary tramp he had been no stranger to curious resting-places, and he had spent the previous night under a railway arch. Presently he came across the smelting works of the Midland Coal, Coke, and Iron Company, and, seeing a furnace which he took to be unused, examined it intently. The wide, open front of the contrivance looked tempting, and he decided to make its interior his abode for the night. Crawling into the opening for some little distance, he discovered that he had a wall five feet in height to climb over, but scaled it without much trouble. Beyond he found himself in pitch-darkness, but clambered cautiously onwards, trying to find a comfortable place to lie down. Proceeding up a slope, he reached a sort of chamber beyond, where a number of great pieces of iron were lying about. Here the weary man lay down, and, being very tired, it did not take him long to fall asleep. Let him tell the manner of his awakening in his own words.

* * * * *

I do not exactly know what awoke me, but upon trying to raise myself a frightful choking feeling came over me, and I became conscious of great heat. Then, like a flash, I realized what a dreadful mistake I had made, and what a terrible situation I was in. The furnace was _not_ disused, and now the workmen had lit it, and I was a prisoner inside! For a moment I felt sick with horror, but it did not take me long to pull myself together and try to find a way out.

The whole place was in total darkness. Although I could hear a dull roaring somewhere, and feel the waves of heated air and fumes passing over me, I could not see the slightest sign of any light. Tremblingly I felt up and down the sides of my prison to see if I could find a door, but nothing of the kind could I discover. I tried to retreat farther into the furnace to get away from that awful heat, but had to return and face it again. Now, with a sickening heart, I saw that flames were approaching my position. Thinking my end was near at hand, I decided at all costs to go down the slope. This meant that I must face the fire, which was now licking up towards me, sucked inwards by the tremendous draught. Shivering with horror I made the attempt, but the heat and flames were unendurable, and beat me back. Then, crouching down, I worked myself along the side, thinking this my best plan. At last--Heaven alone knows how--I reached the foot of the wall. In a half-dazed, choking condition, I tried to climb up, but was met by a veritable hurricane of fierce flames, which knocked me down and burnt all the hair off my head. Half-blinded, scorched, and with my brain benumbed from the effects of the fumes, I still did not quite lose heart: something seemed to force me on to make a struggle for life. Suddenly, as I lay there gasping in that inferno of heat and flame, I heard voices outside, but I could not understand what was said. I wondered dully whether, if I called out, the men I could hear speaking would hear me, so, in my agony of physical suffering and mental distress, I shouted, “O Lord, save me! O Lord, save me!” The murmur of voices still went on, but presently one man evidently heard my cries, and called out to a “Mr. Phillips” that he thought he heard a shout for help. This, however, Mr. Phillips--who seemed to be the foreman--ridiculed, and they went on working as before.

I was now on the verge of giving up; my strength seemed to be failing me, but I decided to make one final attempt to get on the wall. I am glad to say that it was not in vain, and after a desperate struggle I succeeded in reaching the top. This seemed to renew my energy, and I braced myself for what I knew was my last hope. I gave one horrified glance at the furnace below, the flames roaring and leaping madly, and then, with all the strength of my fire-scorched lungs, I shrieked out once more, “O Lord, save me!”

The men outside stopped work at once.

“Did you hear that?” cried one, excitedly; “I heard it quite distinctly that time; someone is shouting out ‘Lord, save me’!” This time Mr. Phillips admitted that he _did_ think he heard a noise as if someone was calling out, but where could it come from? It was impossible for anyone to be in the furnace alive, for the fire had been going for some time. Then someone else said, “Open the fire-door and see if you can see anything.”

The fire-door! Where was it, I wondered--far away or near at hand? Then, to my great joy, I heard them releasing a bolt just a few feet from where I was. At last it opened--a place about a foot square--and I saw daylight streaming in and then a man’s face. He peered in anxiously, but evidently he could not see me, for I was now as black as the furnace itself. Then he seemed to half-close the door and I nearly swooned away, for this was my last chance.

Desperately I strove to shout, but the heat, flames, and smoke prevented my uttering a sound save a choking gasp. Fortunately for myself, however, I moved, and the watcher happened to catch sight of something about me--probably the whites of my eyes shining in the reflected light. “Good God!” he cried. “There’s a man in the furnace! Pull the bars out as quickly as you can.”

I did not trouble to think what or where the bars were; I knew only that the men had seen me and would do everything in their power to get me out. I heard them pulling the bars out in frantic haste, and saw Mr. Phillips trying to squeeze himself through the small fire-door.

With my flesh scorching and my breath rapidly failing me in that awful whirlwind of heat and flame, I put my arms down for him to catch hold of. He seized me by the elbows and told me to jump, but this I could not do, for I felt too far gone. With that he gave me a jerk, and I found myself falling--right on to the huge fire! The bars were out, and the fire was keeping itself together by the pressure of one block of coal on another; but when my weight came upon it, it collapsed, sending up a rush of flames all around me. To my intense horror, I felt the skin on my arms giving way, but the courageous Mr. Phillips did not release his hold. His hands were now on my wrists, and, exerting all his strength, he pulled me up towards the door.

The pain of my burns was simply fearful, and I could have shrieked with agony, but somehow, except for a few moans, I kept quiet.

Presently the foreman succeeded in pulling me out of the small door, but I felt as if dead, and as though I was shrivelling up and growing smaller. As I lay on the ground, in agonizing pain, I appealed to the men to strangle me. Again and again, in semi-delirium, I repeated the request: “I’m done for! Strangle me! strangle me!” My whole body seemed to be on fire, but my rescuers lost no time. Procuring some oil, they saturated me with it, thus, in a measure, soothing the pain. Then they got me on to an ambulance and rushed me off to the Chell Infirmary, where I received every care and attention.

Never, so long as I live, shall I forget the terrible time I endured in the furnace, and my unspeakable joy when I saw Mr. Phillips at the fire-door.

* * * * *

I am indebted to Mr. Hill, the general manager of the above-mentioned company, for a plan of the furnace. It may be interesting to add that, even had Perry contrived to shelter himself from the flames at the foot of the wall he mentions, he would very soon have met with a death too awful to contemplate, as the molten iron would have flowed down and overwhelmed him. The authorities inform me that Perry’s adventure is altogether unprecedented in the whole of their experience. At the moment when his first cry was heard the furnace had been alight for some considerable time, having been started with a large quantity of wood and many barrow-loads of hot coal in order to raise the heat quickly!

THE HEADLESS WOMAN.

BY CHARLES NEEDHAM.

I had just recovered from a troublesome throat affection, and under the doctor’s orders had moved out of town for a spell of fresh air and quieter surroundings, selecting the little village of Canewdon, in South-East Essex, as my retreat. I had always had an eye on the village, first making its acquaintance whilst yachting off the coast and in the River Crouch, where my boat had its permanent berth.

Canewdon is actually little more than a straggling hamlet four miles by road to the north of Rochford, and about nine from Southend-on-Sea. It required only a very short residence there for me to find that the secluded little place considered it had its own corner in history, and a very pretty turn in folk-lore and superstition as well. To begin with, Canewdon claims King Canute as one of its founders, and its domestic romances and tragedies would make a presentable volume in the hands of a scribbling antiquary. It had, however, something more than mere history, and far less to my liking, for me to feed my imagination upon, as I was soon to discover.

After a good look round I settled upon a comfortable old cottage, with a small garden traversed by a brook, only a very short distance from the ancient, square-towered church. Into this, having taken it at a very moderate rental, I moved a small amount of furniture, my books, and other paraphernalia, and prepared to settle down to the life of a hermit for a time. The woman who came from close by to “do” for me looked upon me, I fancy, as something of a curiosity, but, for some reason I had not then discovered, she seemed a little uneasy at my solitary existence. She would remark that I must be lonely, or that it was unlikely that I should stop in the place very long. I put all this down to a friendly disposition, coupled with a desire to draw me out as to my place in the larger world I had dropped from so suddenly.

For the first day or two matters went smoothly enough, and I began to feel that my choice of locality had been a lucky and inexpensive one. Then something occurred which startled me sufficiently to make me alter my opinion.

I always used the little kitchen at meal-times for convenience’ sake, and one night I remained there reading until very late, the kitchen being lit only by one small lamp at my back. I had just closed my book--it was about one o’clock--and was summoning the effort required to take me bedwards, when I noticed a very slight movement of the iron latch upon the door leading into the back garden. My thoughts naturally flew to burglars. The locality was lonely, and no doubt my coming had been duly talked over in the village with all the exaggeration and surmise an out-of-the-way place is capable of.

I was, of course, considerably startled, and sat watching the latch slowly rise, evidently actuated by a very delicate and even pressure from without. The door itself was bolted at both top and bottom, and when the latch had risen clear of the hasp I fully expected to hear the bolts rattle as the person outside put his weight against the door to try it. But nothing of the sort happened; the latch, after remaining suspended for a moment, fell back again into place as slowly and evenly as it had risen.

Startled and puzzled as I was, I still held to my belief that this must be a timid attempt at robbery, and that, finding the back door locked, the intruder would try the front one also. Nor was I wrong, for I had scarcely slipped quietly into the sitting-room and taken up my position when the latch there began to rise in precisely the same manner. This door possessed only one bolt, and that at the bottom, so that the door, an old and ill-fitting one, would show the slightest pressure at once. But none was placed upon it, and the latch fell into place as evenly and noiselessly as before. By this time I must confess to being slightly scared, and when a chair banged heavily on the floor and a loud shout of “Who’s that?” brought no sound of a retreating shuffle on the cobble-stones outside, I had to summon all my remaining courage to unbar and fling open the door. Not a soul or a sound met me as I stepped outside. The night was a light one in early September, so that a retreating figure could have been followed by the eye for twenty or thirty yards. After a careful look round the garden I went to bed nonplussed at the weirdness of the whole affair.

The following day brought another intruder--a material one this time. I found that during the morning a travelling caravan had taken a pitch just outside my hedge; and its owner turned out to be an Oxford man, who, with his wife, was leading a vagabond life about the shires. He was an extremely well-read man, and we soon got on the best of terms, exchanging books and opinions, till he inspanned for pastures new a week later. The night before he left I was treated to another queer happening.

We had been talking and reading in my tiny sitting-room till about eleven o’clock, when my vagabond friend bade me a sleepy “Good night” and opened the front door. He had, however, only just put his foot on the cobbles when he stepped backwards with a sharp exclamation, and a scared look on his face.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“It’s awfully queer,” he replied; “I could have sworn I saw a face looking straight at me close to that bush”--he pointed to the privet hedge at the left of the door--“but there didn’t seem to be any body to it. I’m certainly not drunk, but I may have been dreaming.”

After my recent experience, which I had not thought it worth while to mention to such a hard-headed soul as my chance companion, I felt anything but comfortable. We were both rather ashamed of our brief lapse from common sense, and laughed the incident off as best we might.

The following day found me in all the doubtful glory of my solitude once more, and I must confess to having been thankful when an invitation reached me that same evening, from friends at Fambridge, for a few days’ fishing.

I have never suffered from that popular present-day malady known as “nerves,” possibly because of an open-air existence with plenty of exercise, but, though I had only been there a short time, the cottage and the locality now seemed to have become almost uncanny to me. Had I mixed more with the inhabitants, I should have discovered, as I did later, that this strange feeling was not without some foundation.

The few days I spent in Fambridge put all thought of the two queer incidents out of my mind, which will show that the subsequent events were not the outcome of an overtaxed imagination or a course of long brooding upon disquieting phenomena.

It must have been about nine o’clock in the evening that my Fambridge friend put a little Welsh pony into his governess-car to drive me back the four odd miles to my cottage. The night was fine, but there were clouds about and no moon, so that objects outside the radius of the lamps were hard to distinguish. The pony had already had a fairly hard day of it along the coast, but he was a sturdy little beast and pulled like a steam-engine, rattling us down to the outskirts of Canewdon in excellent time.

We had been bowling along, talking about the day’s sport, and were now rapidly nearing a stile leading to a footpath upon the left of the road, which takes one by a short cut across a field, over another stile, into the churchyard, and so into the village High Street. We had barely reached the stile when the pony pulled up short, reared, and refused to go another step in that direction. The pony, always a strong and willing little chap, had never done such a thing in his life before, and my friend was not only puzzled but annoyed. A sound beating had no more effect than words of encouragement; there the little beggar stuck, his four legs splayed out, the picture of all that was most stubborn in nature, whilst we two sat in the car trying to devise some plan by which to budge him.

My friend was at last obliged to ask me to take the short cut I have just spoken of instead of being driven round by the road the remaining mile and a half to my cottage. I was, of course, willing enough. The short cut would take me barely ten minutes, and I had very little to carry; so, bidding him “Good night,” I jumped out. As I came from behind the trap I noticed a tiny flickering light a few yards ahead, upon the left-hand side of the road, but it was very dim and did not arrest my attention sufficiently to make any impression on the mind. I was able to lead the pony round without any difficulty, and when his head faced Fambridge he seemed to recover his spirits at once, and the red points behind the lamps receded at a rattling pace up the road. When these had disappeared I turned again to climb the stile, but became at once uneasily conscious of something unusual a little way ahead of me.

The spot the pony had refused at was a good deal shadowed by large elms, and these, together with the cloudy sky, made the road still more obscure. The small light, which I had taken little notice of at first--thinking it probably one of the village lights showing through the trees--was still ahead; only, instead of being upon the left of the road, it was now upon the right. For a few seconds I stood looking at it, feeling very much like turning tail and bolting down the road. The flame, for it was no other, showed greeny--white against the black background and shivered in a strange, eerie way.

The most extraordinary part of the business was that it seemed to come from nothing visible, but to appear, as it were, burning in space three or four feet above the road.

I had, of course, read ghost stories in which “corpse candles” and ghostly lights of one sort and another figured largely, but I had never expected to come across one, and this could be translated in no other way.[2] The close proximity of the churchyard, with the square tower of the church itself showing through the trees, added too much colour to the scene to my liking; but, scared though I was, a certain fascination took hold of me, and I advanced a step or two in order to examine the phenomenon at closer range. I had scarcely taken two paces, however, when the clouds parted a little, giving a better light beneath the trees, and at the same moment the weird flame flickered wildly and went out.

[Footnote 2: The light somewhat resembled the _ignis fatuus_, or will-o’-the-wisp, but was larger and greener in colour. Moreover, there was no pond or marshy ground anywhere near the road.]

But this was not to be the end of my ghostly experience. The stronger light brought many roadside objects into prominence, and the moment the flame disappeared I became conscious of an indistinct black blotch against the lighter background of the hedge. It was, of course, too dark for me to be certain of its exact shape, even had I been in a calm enough state of mind to take in details; but in any case I was allowed only a momentary glimpse, for whilst I stood with the breath caught in my throat, this mysterious something took three rapid strides across the road and disappeared without a sound into the thick hawthorn hedge opposite.

At this stage I must confess to having lost all control of myself. Without another look I took to my heels and ran, as though all the powers of darkness were behind me.

The scare I had got made me quite oblivious of my direction, but I suppose natural instinct guided me, for I found myself at last, almost pumped out, trotting into the little High Street of Canewdon by the road along which I should have driven, and no doubt in far better time. I had no relish, in my then state of mind, for another lonely night in the cottage, although it stood only fifty yards away, so I made my way to the Chequers, the only inn the village possessed, and asked for a bed.

My recent arrival in the place had given me little time to become acquainted with the village notables, but I fancy the landlady knew me by sight, and no doubt thought the request strange. In any case her “Certainly, sir,” was followed by a close scrutiny. “You’re looking very queer, sir,” she added; “has anything happened?”

Surrounded by more human elements, I began to feel thoroughly ashamed of myself, and rather doubted the wisdom of giving the narrative away; but the thought that, perhaps, being a resident, she might be able to throw some light upon my weird experience finally decided me to make a clean breast of the whole affair; and I promptly did so in the little inn-parlour.

I had barely got half-way through the incident upon the road when she sat back in her chair, and said in a quiet, almost matter-of-fact tone:--

“You’ve seen the headless woman, sir.”

“The headless woman?” I asked, startled. “Who’s she?”

“I may as well tell you,” she replied, “though we don’t talk of it much here. Have you noticed a wooden house painted white, and standing alone about a hundred yards this way from the stile on the Fambridge road?”

I said that I had, and thought it was a farmhouse.

“Well, so it was till the murder happened,” replied the woman. “The story goes that somewhere about forty years ago a farmer there took to drink, went mad, and murdered his wife. He didn’t stop at that, either, for he cut off her head and buried it, and it wasn’t found till some time after the body had had decent burial.”

“So she’s supposed to haunt the place?” I asked.

“There’s no suppose about it, sir,” she replied, very quietly; “a tidy few people here have seen her, much the same as you did. My husband has, too, by the stile leading into the churchyard. It took him a week in bed to get over it. Sometimes it’s just a face, and sometimes just a black bundle like a body without a head; but always near one of them two stiles, and round about harvest time. Heaven send I never see the sight!” she concluded, devoutly.