CHAPTER VI.

CASES OF HAUNTINGS IN ST. LOUIS, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO

One of the most extraordinary men I have ever met was Ephraim B. Vandergooch, who, at the time of my travels in America, practised dentistry in 6th Street, St. Louis. Dentists are not, as a rule, the people to associate themselves with psychical research, and it is just as well for their patients, perhaps, that they are not, for sitting up all night in dark houses looking for ghosts has an unsteadying effect on the nerves—it is apt to make one “jumpy”—and if a dentist’s hand were to jump, it is more than likely that his patient would jump too. Mr. Vandergooch, however, was an exception. He was a ghost hunter, and his investigations had but a slight and temporary effect on his nervous system. His hand was as steady as a rock, his wrists like steel. I went to him to have a tooth filled, and during the operation I asked him if he knew of any haunted houses in the town.

He was a stranger to me then, and of course I expected a superior smile, if not an actual sneer, for, as I have said, dentists are, as a rule, anything but psychics. To my surprise, however, he took me quite seriously, and said he knew of several haunted places in St. Louis, and that nothing interested him more than really first-hand ghost stories. He told me he had had an experience himself, and narrated the following:—

“A few years ago,” he began, “I learned of a haunting in a street of rather older houses than these, close to here; and as the evidence in this case was to a large extent corroborative, I decided to investigate it. It was Christmas time, and the thought of earthbound spirits pacing up and down cold, empty houses, when all around was warmth and jollity, depressed me. I felt that I must, now that an opportunity had come, try to see them, and if possible do something for them.

“I set out on Christmas Eve, and I admit that when I left the cheerfully lighted thoroughfare, and plunged into the dark silent emptiness of the house, my heart almost failed me. Apart from ghosts there were so many possibilities, and what more likely than that some tramp or criminal had forced an entrance, and was hiding somewhere on the premises. For a few seconds I stood and listened, and then, feeling a trifle more assured, I closed the door gently and advanced cautiously along the wide hall. At each step I took I became more and more sensitive to an atmosphere of intense sadness and desolation—an atmosphere of intense loneliness, loneliness that is without hope—that is perpetual and absolute. It could be felt in all parts of the house, but more particularly, perhaps, in the kitchen, which was built out at the back on the ground floor. I had never been in such a dreary and inhospitable kitchen. The night was bitterly cold and the bare stones sent chilly currents up my legs and back, into my very brain.

“To remain in such a hole till morning was assuredly courting pneumonia or rheumatic fever. I looked at the range, it was covered with rust and verdigris. If only it could be lighted! Then I uttered an exclamation of joy, for lying in one corner was a pile of wood—boxes, shelves, faggots, etc., intermingled with an assortment of other rubbish. In my early days I had lived on a ranch out west, and the experience I had had there now came in useful. In a few minutes there was a loud crackling, and the kitchen filled with a ruddy glow. A couple of dresser-drawers served me for a seat, and I was soon ensconced in a tolerably snug position, from which, however, I was prepared to spring at a moment’s notice.

“The hours sped by, and the silence deepened.

“At last, just about two o’clock, when I was beginning to think nothing would happen, I heard a door slam somewhere upstairs. This was followed by a series of creaks, and I heard someone cautiously descending the stairs. A great fear now seized me, and had I been able, I should doubtless have beaten a hasty retreat. Instead, I was possessed with a kind of paralysis, which rendered me quite helpless and prevented me from either moving a limb or uttering a sound. The creaks came nearer—down, down, down, until quite suddenly they stopped, and I heard a cough.

“It was repeated—cough, cough, cough. The cough of a delicate, neurotic woman. At first it simply startled me—it sounded so distinct, so reverberating, so real. Then it irritated me, and then it infuriated me—almost drove me mad. ‘God take the woman,’ I raved. ‘Will she never cease.’

“Cough, cough, cough. A nervous, hacking cough, a worrying, grating cough, an intensely silly, murder-instilling cough. I could see the owner of it—upstairs, hidden from me by impenetrable darkness, and yet quite distinct—a slight, pale, excessively plain little woman, with watery eyes and a quivering mouth. Heavens, how the mouth maddened me! On she went—cough, cough, cough! She was still coughing, when I suddenly became aware of a presence close beside me, and I saw in the glow from the dying embers the figure of a man seated at a table in the middle of the kitchen. He appeared to be trying to write, but to be unable to collect his thoughts. Every now and then he paused, dashed his pen down, and clenched his fists furiously. At first I could not understand his behaviour, and then it all of a sudden occurred to me—the coughing, of course. That perpetual noise, that everlasting hacking—it distracted, demented him. I watched him with feelings of infinite sympathy. At last, unable to stand it any longer, he sprang from his seat and dashed upstairs.

“I heard him race up two steps at a time. No madman would have raced faster or more nimbly. Then came a strange variety of sounds—a gratuitous course in phonetics—an altercation, more coughing, oaths, bumping, a scream, a thud, a little feeble cough, silence, and then rapidly descending footsteps—a man’s footsteps. I did not wait for them. The spell that had hitherto held me limb-tied now abruptly left me, and I fled out of the building—home.

“The next day—Christmas Day—I made my report to the owner of the house, and told her exactly what had happened.

“‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed, ‘and he’s married Maisie! Swear that you will never tell a soul, no one, not even your most intimate friend, and I will give you an explanation of what you witnessed.’ (“All this happened years ago,” Mr. Vandergooch remarked, “so it’s all right my telling you now.”) I promised, and she at once began.

“‘Ten years ago the occupants of the house you’ve been in were a well-known dramatist and his wife, whom I will call Mr. and Mrs. Charles Turner. Mrs. Turner was exactly like the woman you imagined—frail, small and very plain; whilst her husband would tally with the man you saw in the kitchen—a tall, muscular, handsome man. He obviously married her for her money, poor soul, for there was nothing in her to attract him, and everyone could see how she irritated him, especially when she coughed—in fact, he often said to me, ‘You don’t know, Mrs. Wehlen, how Eva annoys me. Whenever I am in the midst of my work, trying to concentrate my thoughts, she starts her infernal coughing—I can hear her all over the house—hack, hack, hack.’ ‘She can’t help it, poor thing,’ I replied. ‘You ought to feel sorry for her.’ ‘Feel sorry for her,’ he said. ‘You’d feel sorry for her if you were tormented as I am. I believe she does it on purpose.’

“‘Well, one evening—to be precise, it was Christmas Eve—Mrs. Turner was found at the foot of the hall staircase with her neck broken. There was no direct evidence as to how she came there, but as one of the stair-rods was found loose, it was presumed that she fell over it, and, accordingly, a verdict of accidental death was returned. Charles Turner left the house directly afterwards, and a few months ago married my niece, Maisie. As far as I know, what you have seen has never been seen by anyone else, but coughing in the house has been heard, and it is quite plain to me now that Charles Turner murdered his first wife. I only pray to Heaven he won’t serve Maisie the same.’

“But he did,” Mr. Vandergooch added, “for she, too, was found at the foot of the staircase with her neck broken! In all probability she had possessed some idiosyncrasy that worried and annoyed him; or, possibly having once taken to murder, he felt he must go on with it—the habit of homicide being, no doubt, just as fascinating as the habit of drugs or of drink.

“Nothing, however, was proven, and, for all I know to the contrary, he may still be alive, still be killing people to appease his hyper-sensitive and outraged nerves.”

This experience of Mr. Vandergooch made me think; and eventually led to my devoting no small amount of attention to psychology and criminology. From what a variety of influences, it seemed to me, any one act might be induced, and to what innumerable and varied causes any one crime, for instance murder, might be traced. A minute bone pressing on a certain section of the brain, a stomach continually overladen with beefsteak and other animal food, over-excited nerves, the sight of some locality, such as a wood, an object, such as a knife, all may lead to the same thing—the desire to kill; whilst, at the same time, the superphysical, through the agency of some evil spirit continually whispering to its selected victim the arrestive, the compelling thought, almost enforces any and every sort of crime. Seeing, then, that in every act of cruelty or violence it is more than likely that either one or other of these factors has been at work, is it fair that we should so readily condemn and therewith rest content?

True, it may be, and, I believe, it is expedient to punish the criminal, but surely it is even more urgent that we should make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with his case, so that we may if possible discover the factor that conduces to his crime, and then either destroy or counteract it.

From St. Louis I went to New York, where I lodged in a fifty cent. hotel in West Quay.

It was not a particularly elevating neighbourhood, but it was one that boasted of several haunted houses. I was taken to see one of them—a small store that supplied seamen’s kits—by a fellow lodger, who, if I remember rightly, bore the name of Boxer. The proprietor of the store was a Swede; his name I cannot quite recall, it was, I believe, Jansen, or something like Jansen. He was at first extremely reticent, but on my assuring him that I was not in touch with any of the New York journals, and would not connive at his story getting into print, he agreed to tell me what had happened.

Calling his wife, a plain, stolid-looking woman, dressed in a neat and spotlessly clean print gown, he led the way upstairs to the top landing. There he stopped opposite a closed door, in front of which stood a large oak chest. “That’s the room,” he said; “we’ve barricaded it like that to prevent the children going in. When we first came here, my wife, and I, and our youngest child, Bertha, slept there. But we none of us liked the room, and we soon began to have very disturbed nights. I had ghastly nightmares, and so had my wife.

“And Bertha too,” Mrs. Jansen chimed in; “she used to dread being left alone in the room even for five minutes, and used to cry till one or other of us went to her.”

“That’s right enough,” Mr. Jansen interrupted; “and Bertha’s never behaved like that since we moved her into another room.”

“Well, we experienced nothing more disturbing than bad dreams for the first fortnight or so, and nothing happened until we were both aroused one night by hearing Bertha scream. We lit a candle and got out of bed. ‘What is the matter,’ I asked; ‘are you in pain?’ ‘No, Poppa,’ she said. ‘Not in pain, but so frightened. I kept hearing the bed creak, and I thought one of you was coming out of it to kill me.’

“‘Why, what nonsense,’ I said. ‘You’ve been dreaming again, child.’ Then, turning to my wife, I remarked, ‘If she has many more of these nightmares we had better send for the doctor. Don’t you think so?’ My wife made no answer, but suddenly gave a cry and pointed at the bed. ‘Otto!’ she cried. ‘Look at the clothes! We never left them like that. What’s happened to them?’ I looked. The clothes were all heaped together down the centre of the bed exactly in the shape of a human body, with the face turned towards us.

“We all three stared at it in open-mouthed silence, and the longer we gazed, the more pronounced grew the features, until they at last became so lifelike, so evil, that my wife and I instinctively shrank back against the child’s cot, and tried to hide the thing from her. My wife declares she saw it move.”

“It did,” Mrs. Jansen said. “I saw it distinctly shift nearer to us. So did Bertha.”

“I know you were both agreed on that point,” Mr. Jansen went on. “All I can say is I didn’t see it do that, but I started praying, and whether it was the effect of my prayers or not, the clothes gradually became clothes again, and, after soothing Bertha, we scrambled back into bed, feeling rather ashamed we had been so frightened.

“The following evening after Bertha had been put to bed, we heard her scream again, and we ran up and found her quivering under the bedclothes. She said our bed had begun rattling, just as if we were moving in it. On turning to examine it, we found the clothes just as we had seen them in the night, with one of the pillows pressed and moulded into the speaking likeness of a face.

“As I looked at it, the features became convulsed with such an indescribable expression of hellishness that I backed against the table and upset the light.

“On re-lighting it, the thing on the bed had disappeared, and the clothes were once again normal. That same night, some time after we were in bed, I awoke to find myself being roughly shaken by the shoulders. It was my wife, but, perhaps I had better let her go on with the story.”

“I shook him,” Mrs. Jansen explained, “because a feeling had suddenly come over me that I must kill Bertha. The very first night we slept in the room I became obsessed with a passionate desire to see someone die, a desire that I can assure you was absolutely novel to me, because I flatter myself I am naturally kind-hearted and extremely sensitive to seeing other people suffer.”

“She’s kindness itself,” Mr. Jansen observed.

“Well,” Mrs. Jansen went on, “the feeling became so unbearable, that fearing I should actually be compelled to kill someone, I awoke my husband and begged him to tie my hands together; which, after some hesitation, he did. Bertha was crying bitterly, and told us she had again heard creaks in the room, just as if someone was getting out of bed to murder her. That was the last time we slept in the room. I felt it was a positive danger to spend another night in it, and so we removed into the one we are sleeping in now.”

“And has it never been occupied since?” I asked.

“Yes, for one night,” Mrs. Jansen replied. “A niece of mine, Charlotte, came to stay with us, and as we had nowhere else to put her, she had to sleep there. We went to bed rather late that night, and I dreamed three times in succession that Charlotte was creeping down the stairs with some strange weapon in her hand, with which she intended killing Bertha. Bertha was then sleeping alone in the room facing ours.

“The third dream was so vivid that I awoke from it bathed with perspiration. I told my husband, and he said, ‘Well, that’s curious, for I thought I heard someone moving about overhead. I’ll go and see if anything is amiss.’ He opened the door, and, going on to the landing, discovered Charlotte tiptoeing cautiously down the stairs, holding a long, glittering pair of scissors in her hand, and with an expression on her face similar to that on the face in the bedclothes. ‘What are you doing here?’ my husband demanded, and Charlotte at once dropped the scissors and began crying. She told us that no sooner had she got into bed, than she felt like another person. It was just as if someone else’s soul had crept into her body. All her old sentiments and ideals vanished, and the maddest and most unholy ideas presented themselves in rapid succession to her mind. A blind hatred of everyone in the house possessed her, and she was seized with the most ungovernable craving to kill. For a long time she fought against this mania, until at last, unable to restrain it any longer, she got out of bed and sought some weapon. Cold hands, she declared, seemed to guide her to the scissors, and armed with them, she crept downstairs, just as I had seen her in my sleep, determined to butcher Bertha first, and then, if possible, my husband and myself.

“She pleaded our forgiveness and begged to be allowed to go home first thing in the morning. ‘I do not feel I am responsible for my behaviour,’ she said. ‘I never had the slightest inclination to do anything of the sort before. I am sure it’s that room. There’s some sinister influence in it, and if I go back to it, I’m certain I shall do something dreadful.’

“She spent the rest of the night on the sofa in the parlour, and shortly before noon returned to her parents.

“After that we locked up the room and had this chest placed against the door, as you now see it.”

“Do you know the history of the house?” I asked.

“Only that before we came here,” Mrs. Jansen said, “there were several sudden deaths. I do not think any of them were actually attributed to murder, though they were all due to rather extraordinary accidents. Originally, I believe, the house was an inn, kept by a woman who bore a very evil reputation, and we have always wondered if the hauntings had anything to do with her.”

“I suppose you couldn’t tell whether the face formed by the bedclothes was a man or a woman’s?” I remarked.

“Not, perhaps, by the actual features,” she responded, “only by the expression. I can’t explain how, but it was an expression which at once explained to me its sex, and that sex was not masculine.”

* * * * *

As I have said, this was not the only case of haunting in West Quay that I heard of during this visit of mine to New York, but it is the only one of sufficient interest to note here. Two equally interesting cases, perhaps, came my way when I was travelling West. The one was in Boston, the other in Chicago. I will deal with the Chicago one first:—

A banker in Chicago, to whom I had a letter of introduction, hearing that I was interested in ghosts, showed me a house close to Michigan Avenue where he had had a somewhat novel experience.

“Some years ago,” he said, “that house had the reputation for being very badly haunted, and not by one ghost, but by dozens. It was then occupied by an eccentric old millionaire, whom I will call Mr. Hoonigan. Mr. Hoonigan had a very curious hobby. In a room, which he named Duckdom, he had a collection of the most exquisitely wrought models of women, clad in costumes which must surely have cost thousands of pounds. They were all made in Paris, and many of them had once stood in windows in the Rue de Rivoli. I have never seen anything to equal them; their eyes, hair, and finger nails were not only beautifully coloured and moulded, they were most natural and life-like. Mr. Hoonigan worshipped them. He used to spend hours a day sitting before each of them in turn, fondling their hands and making love to them in the most exaggerated fashion. Mad! Yes, of course, he was mad; but his madness did not always take such a harmless form. In a room opposite Duckdom, which he named Devildom, he had collected the models—some fifty or more—of murderers, and other criminals of the lowest type, besides a heterogeneous assortment of the most revolting objects. Amongst these objects were images of the South Sea Islands and Mexican gods; figures in wood and stone, representing ghosts and demons; cases full of mummies and skeletons; weapons that had once belonged to murderers and still bore traces of their victims’ blood; scalping and flaying knives; and a variety of ancient instruments of torture; whilst to accentuate the horror of the room as a whole, paintings such as only a brain in the most advanced stage of morbid disease could have conceived covered the walls. Mr. Hoonigan did not make a practice of showing his collections promiscuously, he was far too jealous of them, and I do not suppose there were ten people in Chicago who knew of their existence. Indeed, it was only with the very greatest difficulty that I got his permission to view them. He allowed no servants to sleep in the house, and when I went there one evening to see his treasures, he opened the door to me himself. ‘Do you see this?’ he cackled, pointing to the brown muzzle of a revolver, which showed itself from under his coat. ‘Well, I have two more of them, and the house is full of pitfalls, all admirable inventions of my own, and warranted to upset the calculations of even the most experienced cracksman.’ ‘Have you ever been troubled by burglars?’ I asked, glancing over the shoulders of the queer old figure before me, and letting my eyes wander round the great hall, dimly lighted and full of many suggestive nooks. ‘Yes, several times,’ he said, ‘and once, one actually got in. He is here now.’ ‘Here now!’ I cried. ‘Why, you surely don’t mean to say that you’ve reformed him and kept him as your servant?’

“Mr. Hoonigan chuckled, and his yellow fangs reminded me unpleasantly of the blunt and rusty teeth of a saw. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘He fell into one of my traps. You will see him later in my little chamber of horrors. He’s been there ever since.’ (This seemed a trifle indiscreet; but Mr. Hoonigan knew he could trust me. You see, I was his banker, and business means business in Chicago.)

“‘But come,’ he continued, ‘I will show you Duckdom first, because you will then the better appreciate its opposite. There is nothing like contrasts to teach you true enjoyment.’ He stepped into an elevator, and we went up, passing storey after storey, all dark, silent and deserted. At last we stopped, and getting out, entered a brilliantly illuminated room. ‘Here they are!’ Mr. Hoonigan exclaimed. ‘Let me introduce you to my fair women friends.’ I looked round, and there before me was a vast assemblage of women, all of them richly dressed in the very latest fashion. All beautiful, however, and all most artistically posed; some sitting, some standing, some lying at full length on rugs and sofas. They were so absolutely natural that it took me some seconds to realise they were only models—models in wax. Mr. Hoonigan approached one, and taking its hand, pressed it reverently. ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘I shall be placed here, and the room shall be hermetically sealed. I want no other heaven.’ He then took me across the landing to another room. I had been prepared for a shock, but not for the kind of shock I got when the door opened, and a hell, seething with devilry—ten thousand times more devilish than the devilry of Dante’s Hell—was suddenly thrust under my very nose. I recoiled, and Mr. Hoonigan, perceiving my fright, playfully pushed me in. When we were well in the midst of them, he pointed with great glee to several of the most notorious murderers, and insisted upon my picking up and examining their weapons. He then made me sit on a garotting chair, which he had quite recently purchased in Cuba, and when I was thus seated, he thrust a skull on my knee, which he said was that of a Red Indian Chief, who had for certain skinned alive with his own hands a whole family of whites.

“By this time, as you may think, I had had enough of it, but, as Mr. Hoonigan truly remarked, there was so much to be seen; besides, he must, he said, whilst I was there, show me a stock of engravings which he had just bought in Madrid. They dated from the reign of Philip II., and represented, in grim detail, all the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. But this was not all. Their chief interest, according to Mr. Hoonigan, lay in the fact that the inquisitors—to quote Mr. Hoonigan’s own words—‘just as an appetiser—an hors d’œuvre, don’t you know,’ used to give them to their victims to examine before they commenced to torture them.

“At the conclusion of this exhibition I managed somehow to get away, and was walking to the elevator, when I saw something slink past us. I turned round, and in the gloom could only see, indistinctly, the form of a man of medium height, with a thick-set, brutal figure, and ambling gait. I could not see his face. He seemed to walk right through the door, which was shut, into the room we had just vacated. ‘What is it?’ Mr. Hoonigan asked. Somewhat nervously, I told him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s only one of them, and one of the least terrifying. You didn’t know, I suppose, that the house is haunted. From your description I should say that what you have just seen is the ghost of the burglar I told you about. But there are other ghosts—if you like to term them so—that are most troublesome. I have had to give up sleeping on this landing. I sleep on the ground floor now, with the electric light full on, all night.’”

The case of the Boston ghost came to my notice in a very direct fashion. I only stayed in the town two nights, and chance led me to put up in an hotel which I learned bore an undeniable reputation for being haunted. It was in rather a poor neighbourhood—at least poor for Boston—and there were few visitors; indeed, on the landing where I slept, no one. I spent all my first day in the town sight-seeing and visiting relatives whom I had never met before, and I did not get back to the hotel till very late. The place was dimly lit and oppressively silent.

“Am I the last in?” I asked the night porter, who rubbed his eyes wearily and yawned.

“Yes, sir,” he said; “the other guests have been gone to bed two hours or more. It’s close on one.”

“What part of Ireland do you come from?” I enquired.

“County Limerick, to be sure,” he said; “but you couldn’t tell I was Irish!”

“At once,” I said. “What were you over there?”

“I was working on the roads,” he said, “and before that I was in the Army—in the Inniskillings.”

“What date?” I enquired.

He told me, and it then transpired that he had enlisted in that regiment when one of my uncles was a major in it, and he remembered him well. We were thus talking away and recalling episodes of the long past, when I heard a familiar sliding kind of noise, and broke off in the middle of a sentence.

“Surely, that’s the elevator,” I exclaimed. “I hope our talking has not disturbed anyone.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” he said. “At any rate, I shouldn’t trouble myself about it.” His voice sounded so strange, I thought, and there was such an odd, furtive look in his eyes, that I became curious, and walking across the hall, arrived on the other side, just in time to see the elevator come slowly and softly down.

To my astonishment there was no one in it.

“How’s that happened?” I remarked. “No one called it, and had they done so we must have seen them.”

“I can’t say, sir,” the porter replied, looking very uneasy.

“Well, it’s certainly rather odd,” I ejaculated. “Anyhow, it’s chosen to come down at a very convenient moment.” And, getting in, I went up.

The following night I returned late, and entered the vestibule of the hotel just as the elevator stopped.

“Does it come down at the same time every night?” I asked the porter.

“Yes, sir,” he muttered, “every night.”

“And the reason?—there must, of course, be some reason. An elevator can’t start off unless someone or something starts it.” He was silent. “I see there’s some mystery attached to it,” I persisted. “What is it? Tell me.” He remained obdurate for some seconds, but eventually succumbed.

“For goodness sake, don’t let on, sir,” he said, “because the boss has forbidden any of the staff to mention it, and if he found out I’d told you, he’d sack me at once. This hotel is haunted. Several years ago, before my time, a visitor arrived here late one night and was found by the day porter dead in the lift. How he died was never exactly known; it was rumoured he had either committed suicide or been murdered. It was never found out who he was or where he came from, and, as he had no money on him, he was buried like a pauper. Well, sir, ever since then that elevator has taken it into its head to set itself in motion at the same time every night. Sometimes the gates clang just as if someone were getting in and out. At first I usedn’t to like it at all. You can imagine, perhaps, what it’s like to know that you are the only person about in a place of this sort—and then to hear the elevator suddenly beginning to descend. However, by degrees, I got accustomed to it, and if that was all that happened, I shouldn’t mind.”

“What else does happen?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you, sir. Would you like a bit of exercise?”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Why?”

“Will you try the staircase, then, instead of the elevator? Count the stairs and note carefully when you come to the forty-first.”

I agreed. The stairs were narrow and tortuous, the light meagre, and soon I began to feel very, very far from my friend the porter, and very much alone in the building. This feeling increased the further I proceeded, until, at last, it became so unbearable that I involuntarily halted. I had conscientiously counted the steps. I was at the thirty-ninth. I looked around me. High over head was a kind of funnel formed of black, funereal, and apparently never-ending banisters; below me was a similarly constructed pit. The flickering gas-light brought into play innumerable shadows. I tried to look away from them, for their gambols were unpleasantly emphasized by the ominously oppressive silence, but they fascinated me to such an extent that I was forced to watch them, and, whilst I was thus engaged, I became suddenly aware of a presence. Something I could not see was standing on the staircase, a few steps ahead, barring my way. I advanced one step, and with a tremendous effort I struggled on to the next one. Then the most frightful, the most overwhelming, diabolical terror seized me, and turning round, I tore downstairs.

“Well,” the door porter said, “you’ve come back. Couldn’t pass it. No one who tries to do so at this time of night ever can.”

“What is it?” I gasped. “What is the beastly thing?”

“I don’t know,” he replied; “no one knows. This place was once a madhouse, I believe, and perhaps——”

“Ah, well,” I said, “I can understand it now. Thank goodness I’m leaving to-morrow, and as it’s a choice of two evils, I’ll go up in the lift.”