The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [50]
In the mid-1870s, the squire had for a neighbor a young man who owned a farm that ran adjacent to his lands. They occasionally hunted together, occasionally had a drink, but the older and younger man did not build what one would call a strong friendship.
On a chilly March evening in 1876 the squire met his neighbor walking across the corner of his estate, and they fell into conversation, mostly somber, about the low prices of farm produce. As they walked back toward home, the young man invited the squire to “come and smoke a cigar.”
This neighbor had rarely been so hospitable, and the older man was a little surprised. He had to refuse, though, explaining that he had a dinner engagement. Yet the other man seemed unusually anxious about the rejection, repeating the invitation several times, before saying good-bye.
About ten that night, after he’d returned home again, the squire went into his library to retrieve a book he was reading on the natural history of birds. He had barely settled into an armchair, near the window, when he heard the front gate open and shut, and a hurry of footsteps approaching the house. The stone walls of his house suddenly seemed transparently thin; he could hear the visitor’s labored breathing. And then a scream, a wail of horror, fading into sobs of agony.
“Of my fright and horror I can say nothing—increased tenfold when I walked into the dining room and found my wife sitting quietly at her work close to the window.” The squire’s wife had heard nothing, but looking up, catching a glimpse of her husband’s pale face, she said, immediately, “What’s the matter?”
“Only someone outside,” he replied.
“Why not go out and look, as you always do when there’s a strange noise?” she inquired.
“There is something so queer and dreadful about the noise,” he answered, and he remained with her, in that comforting circle of domesticity.
He hadn’t been willing to step into the dark just then.
In the morning, though, the squire went out to look for footprints. The ground and paths were frosted with cold. They sparkled in the sun. The glittering surfaces were unmarked, except by the light tracks of a passing hare. There were no marks where he had heard the visitor approach. He couldn’t understand it.
Only a few hours later, a horrified friend came by to tell them that their neighbor had committed suicide by drinking a glass of prussic acid, a cyanide potion distilled from a dye called Prussian blue. The young farmer had bought the poison that morning, telling the chemist that he needed to kill a dangerous dog.
It had been waiting for him at home, after he said good night to the squire. Prussic acid poisoning was a terrible death, rackingly painful. The body looked as if the young man had died screaming. The county coroner thought perhaps the death had occurred after ten or so, the previous night.
As the squire wrote to Gurney, he had no explanation for what happened. He knew only that it had. And just this one time, he emphasized, never before or since. He wanted Gurney to know that he wasn’t a sensitive man, always hearing things and flinching at shadows.
Gurney checked out the story anyway, compiling statements from the man’s wife, neighbors, the chemist who’d sold the poison. He’d verified even the claims of frosty weather by reading newspaper accounts of the time. It was only then that he put the squire’s story into the credible 5 percent pile. Slowly the pile was growing, though. And in the slim stack of stories there, Gurney thought he was just beginning to see the hint of an outline, the faint form of something that might be real.
“I think our case is really strong enough to show that the subject ought to be earnestly prosecuted,