Part 35

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We know a haunted garden belonging to an old Manor House in Dorsetshire which was our abode one summer, five or six years ago. The house had once been Catherine Parr’s. It was full of ghosts too, but I am none too sure that they were mellow sixteenth-century spectres; rather I believe were they the objectionable offspring of a table-rapping spiritualistic owner.

The garden ghost was, to our thinking, neither Tudor nor modern, but that of a sad little eighteenth-century nun. For, passing through many hands, the place had for a time been a convent. A gentle community, turned out by the French Revolution, had been offered a refuge in this far corner of England by the then papist possessor of “The Court.” The place had its previous story of faith and persecution: its parish church, which had long clung to the old dispensation, and its priest martyr still lying in the little churchyard. All this is forgotten now. We knew nothing of it, nor of the nuns; but oddly enough, when we came into the house, one of us said to the other: “I am sure there was a chapel here.”

Well, when the nuns packed up their goods and returned to France, they took away with them too ‹so tradition says› the coffins of some sisters who had been buried in the garden. Surely they had forgotten one! What else could account for the dreadful melancholy which fell upon us at a particular turn of the walk that ran round that sunny, bowery enclosure? There was nothing whatsoever suggestive about the spot. The high, warm wall with the spreading fruit trees rose on one side; an Apple tree and a clump of Hazels held the other—yet so sure as one came to this place the heart was gripped, the spirit seized. We each of us felt it; visitors felt it. That dear, departed cat, Tom, of venerable memory—he was a great ghost-seer—he felt it—nay, he saw it! His tail would bristle, his fur stare, he would stand and then flee as if pursued for his life.

The poor little nun, lying in a foreign land, away from the rest of her sisters, forgotten!—Ghosts have walked for much less. In fact, it is curious to note that the restlessness of most authenticated ghosts seems due to an objection to their place of burial. And on this score—if the anecdote takes me away from gardens, it brings me back to them in the end—I have in my mind another tale. It is a true story, as the children say, connected with a house which we have often visited in Ireland: an old monastery, full of that curious depression in its stateliness which so many confiscated church properties retain. It was haunted in many ways.

Personally, beyond unpleasant sensations in traversing some particular corridor and landing, we never met any ghost in the Abbey. But then we were not placed in the ghost-room.

An old friend of our hostess, an elderly lady, was not so kindly treated. She was a spinster of robust constitution and strong mind; a type of the particular generation which comes between the nervous gentility of the Early Victorian sisterhood and the present day “suffrage” community. No doubt the mistress of the Abbey believed her ghost-proof. But she was mistaken. After the first night in the Lavender Bedroom, the visitor’s appearance at breakfast pointed so conclusively to the fatigue of sleeplessness that, with some misgiving, her friend drew her on one side to question her in private:

“Were you disturbed, Lucy?”

“I was, Mary.” The maiden lady was not a person of many words.

“Did you—did you ... see any thing, Lucy?” exclaimed the hostess. The family had but lately come into possession; and the idea of haunters and haunted annoyed rather than frightened her.

“I did,” said the friend firmly.

Some persuasion was necessary before she would relate her experience. At last it was extracted from her in some such shape as this:

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“I couldn’t sleep. Towards two in the morning I heard a noise. I thought it was rats. I sat up in bed to feel for the matches: couldn’t find them. There came a light, on the opposite wall. I stared. I saw a monk in it. He began to move. He didn’t look alive: he looked like a magic lantern. He went out of the room through the closed door. I got up, opened the door, looked out into the passage. Yes, Mary, the light was there, and the figure in it, too. It moved along the wall. I followed it. It disappeared before the cross doors. I went back to bed. No, I’m not frightened, but I haven’t slept. I’d like another room, please. No, I wasn’t asleep—it wasn’t a dream. I can’t explain it. Nor you either, I suppose.”

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The hostess pondered. It was true she couldn’t explain. She had heard of that apparition before—perhaps had seen it. It was certainly very annoying. She promised her friend to give instant orders for the preparation of another room; and then made a request that the matter should not be mentioned to her daughter—an impressionable, imaginative girl of eighteen.

The maiden lady snorted. It wasn’t likely.

Rosamund, the daughter, had of course known all about it long ago; while, after the fashion of her kind, keeping her counsel demurely before her elders, she had discussed freely the thrilling appanage of her new home with all the companions of her own age who came to stay at the Abbey.

It was she who was destined to lay the ghost. One rainy afternoon later in the same summer, the young members of the house-party found themselves stranded together in the great hall, and Rosamund cheerfully suggested table-turning and spirit-rapping to while away the time till tea. It is a never-failing amusement.

Having produced a satisfactory condition of lurching, and elicited several quite distinct raps from the round mahogany table, she cried out:

“Let us call up the ghost.”

Responsive knocks came, loud and marked. A system of communication was promptly established. Two raps for yes, one for no. Then the questioning began.

With much laughter and some agreeable tremors, it was ascertained that the monk-ghost belonged to the community which had dwelt so long at the Abbey; that he was dissatisfied with his present place of burial, which was outside the old monks’ burying-ground, now a part of the actual garden.

It is always safe, as I have said, to question a ghost on this point. Now, however, some difficulty ensued when, through the limited medium, the rapping spirit endeavoured to specify the spot of its present abode, and the field was too wide for exactness—until a young sailor cousin intervened. He had been playing, in mere idleness and utter scepticism, the rather gruesome game. But at this point he roused himself, interested to put the matter to the proof. He fetched pencil and paper, and drew up a scheme of latitude and longitude with reference to the garden walls; and finally determined the position where the discontented ghost announced that his bones were actually reposing.

With professional neatness he made a plan of the shrubbery, marked the grave thereon, and the whole party resolved to sally forth with spades “to see if the old ghost spoke the truth.” The sailor cousin was particularly jocose in unbelief.

Yet truly, the next day, in the very place designated, they came upon bones—to be exact, upon a skeleton complete save for the skull. The sailor was the first to rush back to the Abbey and collect a circle for a fresh séance. And once more the phantom monk rapped out latitude and longitude in connexion with his skull; once more he was found to be a ghost of the most complete veracity. And the end of this true story is that the skeleton, complete with its cranium, was laid duly and reverently in the old consecrated ground in the garden. And the monk appeared no more in the Lavender Room.

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XXXV