The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [61]
The emerging pattern derived from number and repetition, in the way that so many stories of the dead echoed each other, by their weird consistency. As mystery piled on mystery, strangeness upon strangeness, each ghost story—based on diaries from the past and letters in the present—gained power from each other:
A British nobleman was traveling with friends in Sweden. They decided to make a long day’s journey toward Norway and finally halted, exhausted, at a coaching inn.
It was one o’clock in the morning when they stopped, an icy winter night. The nobleman was so thoroughly chilled that once he had stumbled into his room, his teeth still chattered in his head. He decided to see if a steaming bath would thaw him out.
“While lying in it and enjoying the comfort of the heat, after the late freezing I had undergone, I turned my head around, looking toward the chair on which I deposited my clothes, as I was about to get out of the bath.”
Sitting on the chair was a man he’d once known well. They’d been the closest of friends as university students together. But his friend had joined the Civil Service and gone to work in India; it had been many years since they’d spoken.
The nobleman was so startled that he stood up, slipped, and went sprawling onto the floor. When he pulled himself up, his friend was gone.
It was such a strange moment that he couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone. But he wrote it down, noting the date in his diary—December 19, 1799. And he wondered what it meant; he worried about his friend—and himself.
“No doubt,” he wrote to Gurney, “I had fallen asleep and the appearance, presented so distinctly to my eyes was a dream.” Except that he could not quite persuade himself of that. He had never had a dream that felt quite so vivid, quite so compelling, and quite so awake.
And except that shortly after his return home, he received a letter from India, announcing his friend’s death and giving the date as December 19, 1799.
The woman woke suddenly in the night: “I felt uneasy, and sat up in bed.” She looked around the room and saw one of her sons, Joseph, standing at the door.
His head was heavily bandaged and his face bruised and bloody, especially about the eyes. He was wearing a dirty white nightdress. He stood silent, looking at her “with great earnestness,” and then seemed to fade away.
At breakfast she told her family—four daughters gathered round the table—that she was prepared for bad news about Joseph. They laughed it away: “It was only a dream and all nonsense.” But within days, in the midst of that frozen January of 1856, she received the news; her son had been killed in a steamer collision on the Mississippi, during which a mast had split apart and fallen onto his head.
Another brother, who’d rushed to the accident, had been there when Joseph died, calling for his mother. His head had been wrapped with bandages, as it “was nearly cut in two by the blow and his face dreadfully disfigured.” Joseph had died wearing a white nightdress, soiled with blood and dirt.
The time of his death, almost to the minute, matched the moment when his mother had seen him watching her from the doorway.
The theater was crowded in Toronto. The merchant was taking a night off during a trip from England, relaxing in the company of a Canadian businessman.
He was looking down from the dress circle where they sat when suddenly a shadow, or a flicker, in the pit below caught his attention. He leaned over and saw a man standing below, looking up at him. He leaned further, and “I recognized in the features my twin brother, who at that time was in China.”
His brother stood half in shadow, half in an oddly golden light that made his features startlingly clear. “I instantly exclaimed to my friend, ‘Good