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THE WATER GHOST AND OTHERS

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John Kendrick Bangs

THE WATER GHOST AND OTHERS

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The trouble with Harrowby Hall was that it was haunted, and, what was
worse, the ghost did not content itself with merely appearing at the
bedside of the afflicted person who saw it, but persisted in remaining
there for one mortal hour before it would disappear.

It never appeared except on Christmas Eve, and then as the clock was
striking twelve, in which respect alone was it lacking in that originality
which in these days is a _sine qua non_ of success in spectral life. The
owners of Harrowby Hall had done their utmost to rid themselves of the
damp and dewy lady who rose up out of the best bedroom floor at midnight,
but without avail. They had tried stopping the clock, so that the ghost
would not know when it was midnight; but she made her appearance just the
same, with that fearful miasmatic personality of hers, and there she would
stand until everything about her was thoroughly saturated.

Then the owners of Harrowby Hall calked up every crack in the floor with
the very best quality of hemp, and over this was placed layers of tar and
canvas; the walls were made water-proof, and the doors and windows
likewise, the proprietors having conceived the notion that the unexorcised
lady would find it difficult to leak into the room after these precautions
had been taken; but even this did not suffice. The following Christmas Eve
she appeared as promptly as before, and frightened the occupant of the
room quite out of his senses by sitting down alongside of him and gazing
with her cavernous blue eyes into his; and he noticed, too, that in her
long, aqueously bony fingers bits of dripping sea-weed were entwined, the
ends hanging down, and these ends she drew across his forehead until he
became like one insane. And then he swooned away, and was found
unconscious in his bed the next morning by his host, simply saturated with
sea-water and fright, from the combined effects of which he never
recovered, dying four years later of pneumonia and nervous prostration at
the age of seventy-eight.

The next year the master of Harrowby Hall decided not to have the best
spare bedroom opened at all, thinking that perhaps the ghost's thirst for
making herself disagreeable would be satisfied by haunting the furniture,
but the plan was as unavailing as the many that had preceded it.

The ghost appeared as usual in the room--that is, it was supposed she did,
for the hangings were dripping wet the next morning, and in the parlor
below the haunted room a great damp spot appeared on the ceiling. Finding
no one there, she immediately set out to learn the reason why, and she
chose none other to haunt than the owner of the Harrowby himself. She
found him in his own cosey room drinking whiskey--whiskey undiluted--and
felicitating himself upon having foiled her ghostship, when all of a
sudden the curl went out of his hair, his whiskey bottle filled and
overflowed, and he was himself in a condition similar to that of a man who
has fallen into a water-butt. When he recovered from the shock, which was
a painful one, he saw before him the lady of the cavernous eyes and
sea-weed fingers. The sight was so unexpected and so terrifying that he
fainted, but immediately came to, because of the vast amount of water in
his hair, which, trickling down over his face, restored his consciousness.

Now it so happened that the master of Harrowby was a brave man, and while
he was not particularly fond of interviewing ghosts, especially such
quenching ghosts as the one before him, he was not to be daunted by an
apparition. He had paid the lady the compliment of fainting from the
effects of his first surprise, and now that he had come to he intended to
find out a few things he felt he had a right to know. He would have liked
to put on a dry suit of clothes first, but the apparition declined to
leave him for an instant until her hour was up, and he was forced to deny
himself that pleasure.
Pages
123

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