The footfalls came along the few yards of passage between the bottom of
the stairs and my door, and then against my door itself came the brush
of drapery, and on the panels the blind groping of fingers. The handle
rattled as they passed over it, and my terror nearly rose to screaming
point. “Then a sensible hope struck me. The midnight wanderer might be one of
the servants, ill or in want of something, and yet--why the shuffling
feet and the groping hand? But on the instant of the dawning of that
hope (for I knew that it was of the step and that which was moving in
the dark passage of which I was afraid) I turned on both the light at my
bed-head, and the light of the passage outside, and, opening the door,
looked out. The passage was quite bright from end to end, but it was
perfectly empty. Yet as I looked, seeing nothing of the walker, I still
heard. Down the bright boards I heard the shuffle growing fainter as it
receded, until, judging by the ear, it turned into the gallery at the
end and died away. And with it there died also all my sense of terror. It was It of which I had been afraid: now It and my terror had passed. And I went back to bed and slept till morning.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Again Mrs Aldwych paused, and I was silent. Somehow it was in the
extreme simplicity of her experience that the horror lay. She went on
almost immediately. “Now for the sequel,” she said, “or what I choose to call the
explanation. Mrs Denison, as I told you, came down to stay with us not
long ago, and I mentioned that we had heard, though only vaguely, that
the house was supposed to be haunted, and asked for an account of it. This is what she told me:

“‘In the year 1610 the heiress to the property was a girl Helen Denison,
who was engaged to be married to young Lord Southern. In case therefore
of her having children, the property would pass away from Denisons. In
case of her death, childless, it would pass to her first cousin. A week
before the marriage took place, he and a brother of his entered the
house, riding here from thirty miles away, after dark, and made their
way to her room on the second storey. There they gagged her and
attempted to kill her, but she escaped from them, groped her way along
this passage, and into the room at the end of the gallery. They followed
her there, and killed her. The facts were known by the younger brother
turning king’s evidence.’

“Now Mrs Denison told me that the ghost had never been seen, but that it
was occasionally heard coming downstairs or going along the passage. She
told me that it was never heard except between the hours of two and
three in the morning, the hour during which the murder took place.”

“And since then have you heard it again?” I asked. “Yes, more than once. But it has never frightened me again. I feared, as
we all do, what was unknown.”

“I feel that I should fear the known, if I knew it was that,” said I. “I don’t think you would for long. Whatever theory you adopt about it,
the sounds of the steps and the groping hand, I cannot see that there is
anything to shock or frighten one. My own theory you know----”

“Please apply it to what you heard,” I asked. “Simply enough. The poor girl felt her way along this passage in the
despair of her agonised terror, hearing no doubt the soft footsteps of
her murderers gaining on her, as she groped along her lost way. The
waves of that terrible brain-storm raging within her, impressed
themselves in some subtle yet physical manner on the place. It would
only be by those people whom we call sensitives that the wrinkles, so
to speak, made by those breaking waves on the sands would be perceived,
and by them not always. But they are there, even as when a Marconi
apparatus is working the waves are there, though they can only be
perceived by a receiver that is in tune. If you believe in brain-waves
at all, the explanation is not so difficult.”

“Then the brain-wave is permanent?”

“Every wave of whatever kind leaves its mark, does it not? If you
disbelieve the whole thing, shall I give you a room on the route of that
poor murdered harmless walker?”

I got up. “I am very comfortable, thanks, where I am,” I said. THE TERROR BY NIGHT


The transference of emotion is a phenomenon so common, so constantly
witnessed, that mankind in general have long ceased to be conscious of
its existence, as a thing worth our wonder or consideration, regarding
it as being as natural and commonplace as the transference of things
that act by the ascertained laws of matter. Nobody, for instance, is
surprised, if, when the room is too hot, the opening of a window causes
the cold fresh air of outside to be transferred into the room, and in
the same way no one is surprised when into the same room, perhaps, which
we will imagine as being peopled with dull and gloomy persons, there
enters some one of fresh and sunny mind, who instantly brings into the
stuffy mental atmosphere a change analogous to that of the opened
windows. Exactly how this infection is conveyed we do not know;
considering the wireless wonders (that act by material laws) which are
already beginning to lose their wonder now that we have our newspaper
brought as a matter of course every morning in mid-Atlantic, it would
not perhaps be rash to conjecture that in some subtle and occult way the
transference of emotion is in reality material too. Certainly (to take
another instance) the sight of definitely material things, like writing
on a page, conveys emotion apparently direct to our minds, as when our
pleasure or pity is stirred by a book, and it is therefore possible that
mind may act on mind by means as material as that. Occasionally, however, we come across phenomena, which, though they may
easily be as material as any of these things, are rarer, and therefore
more astounding. Some people call them ghosts, some conjuring tricks,
and some nonsense. It seems simpler to group them under the head of
transferred emotions, and they may appeal to any of the senses. Some
ghosts are seen, some heard, some felt, and though I know of no instance
of a ghost being tasted, yet it will seem in the following pages that
these occult phenomenon may appeal at any rate to the senses that
perceive heat, cold, or smell. For, to take the analogy of wireless
telegraphy, we are all of us probably ‘receivers’ to some extent, and
catch now and then a message or part of a message that the eternal waves
of emotion are ceaselessly shouting aloud to those who have ears to
hear, and materializing themselves for those who have eyes to see. Not
being, as a rule, perfectly tuned, we grasp but pieces and fragments of
such messages, a few coherent words it may be, or a few words which seem
to have no sense. The following story, however, to my mind, is
interesting, because it shows how different pieces of what no doubt was
one message were received and recorded by several different people
simultaneously.