Was It a Ghost? the Murders in Bussey's Wood

Part 1

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WAS IT A GHOST?

THE MURDERS in BUSSEY’S WOOD

AN EXTRAORDINARY NARRATIVE.

LORING, Publisher.

BOSTON 1868.

PRICE, 75 CENTS.

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WAS IT A GHOST?

THE MURDERS IN BUSSEY’S WOOD.

An Extraordinary Narrative.

LORING, Publisher, 319 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by A. K. LORING, In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

ROCKWELL & ROLLINS, STEREOTYPERS AND PRINTERS, 122 Washington Street, Boston.

DEDICATION.

I dedicate this book to that philosophy which can argue without anger, can have a disbelief without sustaining it by insolence; which can pause on the brink of a chasm, and, because there happens to be no bridge by which it can cross over, will not proclaim to all the world that no bridge can be built; to the philosophy which sees as much beauty in a doubt as in a solution, and has not ventured, or mayhap will never venture, to affix a limit to human thought, or define the prerogatives of our Lord and Creator. I do not dedicate it to the Free Thinker, but to the Just Thinker. The highest reverence exists oftener than otherwise in the humblest soul, and the night of our ignorance is lit by stars to accustom us to the effulgence of the dawn. The future is the poetry of our hope; the present our rest, from which we extend the wings of memory for the longer and more glorious flight toward the end. My work will be found to look faintly but fondly to those things, if it is read aright; and so in all and everything I humbly say that I have no higher ambition than to serve my Master.

PREFACE.

I take advantage of this antique form of literature to make a statement.

The murders of which I shall have to speak in the following pages have been misunderstood. There was only one species of crime in their perpetration, and this I have from the highest authority. If I had thought it advisable, I could have pointed out the progress by which the assassin reached his determination, his peculiarity of character, and his motives; but such a course would have detected justice to the culprit, not the culprit to justice. Whenever he shall be discovered, the evidence will be ample justification for my assertion with regard to the character of the crime, and reveal the darkest, wickedest, and most deliberate murders with which the history of humanity has been cursed.

I am indebted to my friend, THOMAS HILL, Esq., the eminent landscape painter, for the singularly appropriate adaptation of weird figures to letters on the cover of my book, and also for the very felicitous representation of the “Ghost.” His magic pencil masters the alphabet as well as the higher regions of art, and I feel assured that my readers will be pleased that I had, in my need, so able an assistant in helping me to make my humble effort acceptable.

Part 2

J. B.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Preliminary Remarks 9

I. The Roads 11

II. The Incidents 18

III. The Scene 22

IV. The Brook 25

V. The Dogs 30

VI. The Flat Bridge 34

VII. Suspected 41

VIII. The Murder-Rock 45

IX. Suspicion 49

X. Was it a Ghost? 57

XI. The Tests 67

XII. Tests 75

XIII. The Doctor’s Story 94

XIV. My Plan of Punishment 101

XV. The Children 110

XVI. Ghosts 113

XVII. Manifestations 123

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

The main circumstances that form, in part, the topic of my recital, excited, at the time of their occurrence, a feeling of unprecedented horror. They came upon the public sensibility with a force that even the previous recital of the bloody events of the civil war could not lessen. Habituation to horror had not deadened the public susceptibility; for there was around the incidents a belt of mystery and affright that defied the approach of justice, and baffled private speculation.

No necessity, even in the tortuous excuses of crime, was apparent for the deed; for the victims had had no opportunities to establish, individually of themselves, hostile relations with any one, and their condition placed them beyond or beneath the chance of social importance. They were claimants to no estate in litigation, stood in no man’s way to advancement, could have produced no rivalry, had inspired neither revenge, nor jealousy, nor love. They had, in fine, none of those means that men and women have to incite to crime; for they were children, and yet they were subjected to a fate that few, if any, children, had confronted before.

The commission of the deed was a barbarity; its motives, apparently, a paradox.

Everything, indeed, about the transaction was unusual. The hour, the circumstances, and the locality, all contributed to inspire a greater horror of the act; and yet, up to this moment, no man’s name, of high or low, bears a blemish of continued suspicion. Justice seems to rest, after the excitement of the instant search,—a search that, I have every reason to know, was intricate and thorough; but, at the same time, it is well to know that the intelligent Chief of the police department has only seemed to pause. His eyes have never been entirely withdrawn from the contemplation of the subject; and I feel assured, from what I know, that his vigilant and nervous grasp will, at the appointed time, be placed upon the shoulder of the atrocious criminal. The murderer may have perhaps, ere this, caught glimpses, from his abode of gloom in another world, of those two spirits whose bodies he hacked so butcherly. If that be so, the Chief will have naught to do; but if he be alive, wandering a desolate path through a desolate world, it may be that justice will not have waited with an energetic patience in vain.

THE NARRATIVE.

THE ROADS.

Part 3

There are two roads direct by which the scene I am about to describe can be reached from Boston. One is the steam-car road, passing through Roxbury, and dropping way-passengers at Laurel Hill Station. The other is the horse-car line, that, for some portion of the route, runs parallel to the steam. The third, and more picturesque, is another horse-car line, which passes through Jamaica Plain, and drops the passengers some several hundred yards west, and farther removed from the official terminus of the two other routes. It was by the second of these routes, that, on the 12th day of June, 1865, two children, Isabella and John Joyce, started from their home in Boston, where they were temporarily boarding, to spend a few hours in May’s wood, intending to return, according to the elder one’s promise, in time for her brother to attend his afternoon school. Thus it is established that the sister never intended to go farther than the wood first proposed; and in this we have the first glimmering of the series of mysterious circumstances in which the wretched affair is enveloped from the beginning to the end.

This girl was not sixteen years old.

The boy was barely eight.

Whatever happened after they took their seats in the car, and who accompanied them, or joined them afterward, is a matter simply of conjecture; and yet, as they sat there, these two young things, who, of all the rest of the passengers that looked upon their fresh, pleasure-anticipating faces, could have dreamed that, in a section so civilized, a community so guarded, a population so abundant, in the marginal outlines of a great city, that ere the sun went down, within a few short hours, indeed, that girl and boy would be lying stiff and stark, pierced,—the one, the girl, by twenty-eight poniard stabs, and the boy by enough to have killed the captains of a full regiment; the girl dead in the hollow of a rock within thirty feet of a public road, the boy less than a quarter of a mile away, in the dense shrubbery, by a tiny stream that flows through the shades of Bussey’s wonderfully beautiful woods!

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