Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 53, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1913 — HEARD MUSICAL GHOST [ARTICLE]

HEARD MUSICAL GHOST

AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE SOMETHING NEW IN SPOOK LINE. Sounds Too Long Continued to Be E» plained Away ae- Illusion, and Listeners Are Satisfied It Was a Spirit Visitor. I have never seen a ghost, but ones in the company of a friend I heard a ghost sing. ’ It was in London. I must not mention the house;because to say a house is haunted in London is criminal libeL This house was haunted. I knew it was haunted, but the ghost had never troubled me. It bothered a friend of mine who spent an autumn in the house, by tramping up the stairs in the middle of the night. It troubled my secretary, who used, to work alone in the house in the evening sometimes, by opening and shutting the doors. It troubled the police by lighting up the house and. giving a false alarm of burglars in. the middle of the night It never troubled me. I never saw it I never felt IL I never heard it till this once. It was about one o'clock in the morning. I was sitting in my sitting room friend whom I will call X, who is a well-known author. (One generally adds in a ghost story, “and who was a hard-headed man Of business, utterly skeptical and completely matter of fact” as if- that had anything to do- with it) We had jugt come in and were expecting another friend who dived in the house, and we were sitting up for him. We were talking about Swinburne’s verse, and I took down the first edition of Atalanta in Calydon, which I then possessed and which I foolishly sold for a small sum (it was immediately aft-. erward resold at an auction for a large sum and went to America, and is now in some collector’s library), and I read out a passage. As I was reading, we heard singing next; door. 1 said, “There’s Phil,” and didn’t , pay any further attention, as, 1 expected him to come in, and I went on reading. But the sidging continued. It sounded foreign—like Spanish. Thia didn't surprise us, as Phil was in the habit of singing Provencal songsThe singing went on, and as he didn’t come in, we went to meet him and opened the door. The next room was a tiny ante-room opening into another sitting room, and beyond this again was the smallest of bedrooms—not bigger than a cupboard. There was nobody there, but the singing went on; such curious singing, too; strange, alien, faint, tlnkly, as if four confused voices were singing the song of an earlier century; it was unreal and it had a kind of burr In it, as if you were listening to voices on a telephone that is out of order. We walked through the rooms and we walked through the singing, and we heard it behind us still going on; and in the bedroom we found our friend asleep in his bed. Then the singing stopped. Now, as we walked through the sitting room, I noticed my friend’s hair, in Kipling’s phrase, sitting up. I daresay he noticed the same thing about mine, or he would have done so had I any hair to notice. —Metropolitan. , :