The parties to this undertaking were John Holcomb, an
apothecary; Wilson Merle, a lawyer, and Andrus C. Palmer, the teacher of
the public school, all men of consequence and repute. They were to meet
at Holcomb’s house at eight o’clock in the evening of the appointed day
and go together to the scene of their vigil, where certain arrangements
for their comfort, a provision of fuel and the like, for the season was
winter, had been already made. Palmer did not keep the engagement, and after waiting a half-hour for him
the others went to the Eckert house without him. They established
themselves in the principal room, before a glowing fire, and without
other light than it gave, awaited events. It had been agreed to speak as
little as possible: they did not even renew the exchange of views
regarding the defection of Palmer, which had occupied their minds on the
way. Probably an hour had passed without incident when they heard (not without
emotion, doubtless) the sound of an opening door in the rear of the
house, followed by footfalls in the room adjoining that in which they
sat. The watchers rose to their feet, but stood firm, prepared for
whatever might ensue. A long silence followed—how long neither would
afterward undertake to say. Then the door between the two rooms opened
and a man entered. It was Palmer. He was pale, as if from excitement—as pale as the others
felt themselves to be. His manner, too, was singularly distrait: he
neither responded to their salutations nor so much as looked at them, but
walked slowly across the room in the light of the failing fire and
opening the front door passed out into the darkness. It seems to have been the first thought of both men that Palmer was
suffering from fright—that something seen, heard or imagined in the back
room had deprived him of his senses. Acting on the same friendly impulse
both ran after him through the open door. But neither they nor anyone
ever again saw or heard of Andrus Palmer! This much was ascertained the next morning. During the session of
Messrs. Holcomb and Merle at the “haunted house” a new snow had fallen to
a depth of several inches upon the old. In this snow Palmer’s trail from
his lodging in the village to the back door of the Eckert house was
conspicuous. But there it ended: from the front door nothing led away
but the tracks of the two men who swore that he preceded them. Palmer’s
disappearance was as complete as that of “old man Eckert” himself—whom,
indeed, the editor of the local paper somewhat graphically accused of
having “reached out and pulled him in.”



THE SPOOK HOUSE


ON the road leading north from Manchester, in eastern Kentucky, to
Booneville, twenty miles away, stood, in 1862, a wooden plantation house
of a somewhat better quality than most of the dwellings in that region. The house was destroyed by fire in the year following—probably by some
stragglers from the retreating column of General George W. Morgan, when
he was driven from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio river by General Kirby
Smith. At the time of its destruction, it had for four or five years
been vacant. The fields about it were overgrown with brambles, the
fences gone, even the few negro quarters, and out-houses generally,
fallen partly into ruin by neglect and pillage; for the negroes and poor
whites of the vicinity found in the building and fences an abundant
supply of fuel, of which they availed themselves without hesitation,
openly and by daylight. By daylight alone; after nightfall no human
being except passing strangers ever went near the place. It was known as the “Spook House.”  That it was tenanted by evil spirits,
visible, audible and active, no one in all that region doubted any more
than he doubted what he was told of Sundays by the traveling preacher. Its owner’s opinion of the matter was unknown; he and his family had
disappeared one night and no trace of them had ever been found. They
left everything—household goods, clothing, provisions, the horses in the
stable, the cows in the field, the negroes in the quarters—all as it
stood; nothing was missing—except a man, a woman, three girls, a boy and
a babe! It was not altogether surprising that a plantation where seven
human beings could be simultaneously effaced and nobody the wiser should
be under some suspicion. One night in June, 1859, two citizens of Frankfort, Col. J. C. McArdle, a
lawyer, and Judge Myron Veigh, of the State Militia, were driving from
Booneville to Manchester. Their business was so important that they
decided to push on, despite the darkness and the mutterings of an
approaching storm, which eventually broke upon them just as they arrived
opposite the “Spook House.”  The lightning was so incessant that they
easily found their way through the gateway and into a shed, where they
hitched and unharnessed their team. They then went to the house, through
the rain, and knocked at all the doors without getting any response. Attributing this to the continuous uproar of the thunder they pushed at
one of the doors, which yielded. They entered without further ceremony
and closed the door. That instant they were in darkness and silence. Not a gleam of the lightning’s unceasing blaze penetrated the windows or
crevices; not a whisper of the awful tumult without reached them there. It was as if they had suddenly been stricken blind and deaf, and McArdle
afterward said that for a moment he believed himself to have been killed
by a stroke of lightning as he crossed the threshold. The rest of this
adventure can as well be related in his own words, from the Frankfort
_Advocate_ of August 6, 1876:

“When I had somewhat recovered from the dazing effect of the transition
from uproar to silence, my first impulse was to reopen the door which I
had closed, and from the knob of which I was not conscious of having
removed my hand; I felt it distinctly, still in the clasp of my fingers. My notion was to ascertain by stepping again into the storm whether I had
been deprived of sight and hearing. I turned the doorknob and pulled
open the door. It led into another room! “This apartment was suffused with a faint greenish light, the source of
which I could not determine, making everything distinctly visible, though
nothing was sharply defined. Everything, I say, but in truth the only
objects within the blank stone walls of that room were human corpses. In
number they were perhaps eight or ten—it may well be understood that I
did not truly count them. They were of different ages, or rather sizes,
from infancy up, and of both sexes. All were prostrate on the floor,
excepting one, apparently a young woman, who sat up, her back supported
by an angle of the wall. A babe was clasped in the arms of another and
older woman. A half-grown lad lay face downward across the legs of a
full-bearded man. One or two were nearly naked, and the hand of a young
girl held the fragment of a gown which she had torn open at the breast.