The 7th Ghost Story

by Frank Belknap Long

  “You kno’, gemmen, dat when de gunboats was in de sound we folks had to travel way back hyar on dese roads outun de range of deir big guns. I was ’gaged by Mr. Harrison in hauling salt from de factory at Mississippi City, on de beach ober to Mobile, an’ I had been making a trip ebery week or so. Dis back country road was neber thought ob by de Federals, an’ we had good times long de way, no shells and no shootin’.

  “De nite, gemmen, I’se speakin’ of was a Friday, dat yous all knows is unlucky. Well, you see, I hitched up Betsie an’ Rose in de lead, an’ ole Fox an’ Blossom at de pole, an’ takes in de biggest load of salt dat team eber carried. I starts out an’ crosses de Biloxi Riber at Han’sboro jes’ as de moon was goin’ down. Yes, boss, dese roads weren’t no better den now, an’ de rain had made ’em mighty rough when yer come to de holes.

  “I sat in de seat whistlin’ ‘De Cows is in de Pea Patch,’ and a-thinkin’ of Sarah Jamison, what was afterwards my wife, when I felt de off fore wheel go ‘kersush’ in a hole up to de hub. I’d made seventeen miles out ob Han’sboro. I did some cussin’, an’ den went to de fence, about twenty yards off, an’ took out a rail to prize up de wheel. Den I saw I was at Mister Gibbet’s place. I sez to myself, I’ll go up to de house an’ get old Mr. Gibbet to give me a turn. I had done gone by dar two weeks afore an’ seed de old man.

  “Now, gemmen, yer listen to me, for what I’se tellin’ yer is as sure as Jinny’ll blow de horn on de las’ day. I walked up to de house an’ dar I saw a bright light inside. It showed out froo de windows, an’ I saw shadders of Miss Gibbet and Mrs. Gibbet on de window curtain—shore, honeys, shore. De front do’ was shet, an’ I steps up on ter de gallery an’ knocks wid de butt end of my whip. I didn’t knock loud, needer. God bless us all, gemmen, de lights went out like dat, an’ I hears set up a laugh, ha-ha-ha-ha. How dat set my knees a-shakin’. I opens de do’, an’ dere was no sign of anybody. I struck a match an’ all de furniture was moved out, an’ de old red curtain dat I fought I seed was in rags. De whole family was gone, for shore. I didn’t kno’ ’zactly what to think ’bout dem strange voices, but I started back to de wagon, when it lightened, an’ bress God, dar in de front yard was six graves jes’ made. Somefin’ wrong here, sed I; an’ I builds a fire by de wagon an’ digs de wheel out. Jes’ den old Squire Pasture kem along de road from Mobile, an’ he tells me de news. Ole man Gibbet cut de froats of his wife and fore chillerns an’ shoot hisself in de head outun jealousy of his wife. Dey was all buried in de front yard, an’ de house was deserted ten days befo’.

  “Gemmen, when I hear dat, dem mules make de quickest time to Mobile eber seed; an’ youse can tell me dar’s no ghosts, but yo’ don’ catch me roun’ dat log house of Gibbet’s ’ceptin’ sun’s an hour high.”

  Jack looked suspiciously over his shoulder into the darkness and crawled into his blanket, muttering:

  “It scares dis nigger eben now to tell ’bout dat night.”

  Sleep soon fell upon the camp, but the impression of old Jack’s story survived the night, and the next day he still asserted its truth.

  THE PHANTOM HAG, by Anonymous

  Taken from Twenty-Five Ghost Stories (1904).

  The other evening in an old castle the conversation turned upon apparitions, each one of the party telling a story. As the accounts grew more horrible the young ladies drew closer together.

  “Have you ever had an adventure with a ghost?” said they to me. “Do you not know a story to make us shiver? Come, tell us something.”

  “I am quite willing to do so,” I replied. “I will tell you of an incident that happened to myself.”

  Toward the close of the autumn of 1858 I visited one of my friends, sub-prefect of a little city in the center of France. Albert was an old companion of my youth, and I had been present at his wedding. His charming wife was full of goodness and grace. My friend wished to show me his happy home, and to introduce me to his two pretty little daughters. I was feted and taken great care of. Three days after my arrival I knew the entire city, curiosities, old castles, ruins, etc. Every day about four o’clock Albert would order the phaeton, and we would take a long ride, returning home in the evening. One evening my friend said to me:

  “Tomorrow we will go further than usual. I want to take you to the Black Rocks. They are curious old Druidical stones, on a wild and desolate plain. They will interest you. My wife has not seen them yet, so we will take her.”

  The following day we drove out at the usual hour. Albert’s wife sat by his side. I occupied the back seat alone. The weather was gray and somber that afternoon, and the journey was not very pleasant. When we arrived at the Black Rocks the sun was setting. We got out of the phaeton, and Albert took care of the horses.

  We walked some little distance through the fields before reaching the giant remains of the old Druid religion. Albert’s wife wished to climb to the summit of the altar, and I assisted her. I can still see her graceful figure as she stood draped in a red shawl, her veil floating around her.

  “How beautiful it is! But does it not make you feel a little melancholy?” said she, extending her hand toward the dark horizon, which was lighted a little by the last rays of the sun.

  The afternoon wind blew violently, and sighed through the stunted trees that grew around the stone cromlechs; not a dwelling nor a human being was in sight. We hastened to get down, and silently retraced our steps to the carriage.

  “We must hurry,” said Albert; “the sky is threatening, and we shall have scarcely time to reach home before night.”

  We carefully wrapped the robes around his wife. She tied the veil around her face, and the horses started into a rapid trot. It was growing dark; the scenery around us was bare and desolate; clumps of fir trees here and there and furze bushes formed the only vegetation. We began to feel the cold, for the wind blew with fury; the only sound we heard was the steady trot of the horses and the sharp clear tinkle of their bells.

  Suddenly I felt the heavy grasp of a hand upon my shoulder. I turned my head quickly. A horrible apparition presented itself before my eyes. In the empty place at my side sat a hideous woman. I tried to cry out; the phantom placed her fingers upon her lips to impose silence upon me. I could not utter a sound. The woman was clothed in white linen; her head was cowled; her face was overspread with a corpse-like pallor, and in place of eyes were ghastly black cavities.

  I sat motionless, overcome by terror.

  The ghost suddenly stood up and leaned over the young wife. She encircled her with her arms, and lowered her hideous head as if to kiss her forehead.

  “What a wind!” cried Madame Albert, turning precipitately toward me. “My veil is torn.”

  As she turned I felt the same infernal pressure on my shoulder, and the place occupied by the phantom was empty. I looked out to the right and left—the road was deserted, not an object in sight.

  “What a dreadful gale!” said Madame Albert. “Did you feel it? I cannot explain the terror that seized me; my veil was torn by the wind as if by an invisible hand; I am trembling still.”

  “Never mind,” said Albert, smiling; “wrap yourself up, my dear; we will soon be warming ourselves by a good fire at home. I am starving.”

  A cold perspiration covered my forehead; a shiver ran through me; my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and I could not articulate a sound; a sharp pain in my shoulder was the only sensible evidence that I was not the victim of an hallucination. Putting my hand upon my aching shoulder, I felt a rent in the cloak that was wrapped around me. I looked at it; five perfectly distinct holes—visible traces of the grip of the horrible phantom. I thought for a moment that I should die or that my reason should leave me; it was, I think, the most dreadful moment of my life.

  Finally I became more calm; this nameless agony had lasted for some minutes; I do not think it is possible for a human being to suffer more than I did during that time. As soon as I had re
covered my senses, I thought at first I would tell my friends all that had passed, but hesitated, and finally did not, fearing that my story would frighten Madame Albert, and feeling sure my friend would not believe me. The lights of the little city revived me, and gradually the oppression of terror that overwhelmed me became lighter.

  So soon as we reached home, Madame Albert untied her veil; it was literally in shreds. I hoped to find my clothes whole and prove to myself that it was all imagination. But no, the cloth was torn in five places, just where the fingers had seized my shoulder. There was no mark, however, upon my flesh, only a dull pain.

  I returned to Paris the next day, where I endeavored to forget the strange adventure; or at least when I thought of it, I would force myself to think it an hallucination.

  The day after my return I received a letter from my friend Albert. It was edged with black. I opened it with a vague fear.

  His wife had died the day of my return.

  THE SPECTRE BRIDE, by Anonymous

  Taken from Twenty-Five Ghost Stories (1904).

  The winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous as the Milky Way. The silence that rests upon the solitude appears to be white also. Nature has included sound in her arrestment. Save the still white frost, all things are obliterated. The stars are there, but they seem to belong to heaven and not to earth. They are at an immeasurable height, and so black is the night that the opaque ether rolls between them and the observer in great liquid billows.

  In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is peopled to any great extent. One fancies that Cain has just killed Abel, and that there is need for the greatest economy in the matter of human life.

  The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for Echo Bay he felt as if he were the only man in the world, so complete was the solitude through which he was passing. He was going over to attend the wedding of his best friend, and was, in fact, to act as the groomsman. Business had delayed him, and he was compelled to make his journey at night. But he hadn’t gone far before he began to feel the exhilaration of the skater. His skates were keen, his legs fit for a longer journey than the one he had undertaken, and the tang of the frost was to him what a spur is to a spirited horse.

  He cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He could feel the tumult of the air as he cleft it. As he went on he began to have fancies. It seemed to him that he was enormously tall—a great Viking of the Northland, hastening over icy fiords to his love. That reminded him that he had a love—though, indeed, that thought was always present with him as a background for other thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her she was his love, because he had only seen her a few times and the opportunity had not presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay, too, and was to be the maid of honor to his friend’s bride—which was another reason why he skated on almost as swiftly as the wind, and why, now and then, he let out a shout of exhilaration.

  The one drawback in the matter was that Marie Beaujeu’s father had money, and that Marie lived in a fine house and wore otter skin about her throat and little satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she went sledding, and that the jacket in which she kept a bit of her dead mother’s hair had a black pearl in it as big as a pea. These things made it difficult—nay, impossible—for Ralph Hagadorn to say anything more than “I love you.” But that much he meant to have the satisfaction of saying, no matter what came of it.

  With this determination growing upon him he swept along the ice which gleamed under the starlight. Indeed, Venus made a glowing path toward the west and seemed to reassure him. He was sorry he could not skim down that avenue of light from the love star, but he was forced to turn his back upon it and face toward the northeast.

  It came to him with a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes were a good deal frosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, and at first he thought it an illusion. But he rubbed his eyes hard and at length made sure that not very far in front of him was a long white skater in fluttering garments who sped over the snows fast as ever werewolf went. He called aloud, but there was no answer, and then he gave chase, setting his teeth hard and putting a tension on his firm young muscles. But however fast he might go the white skater went faster. After a time he became convinced, as he chanced to glance for a second at the North Star, that the white skater was leading him out of his direct path. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he should not keep to his road, but the strange companion seemed to draw him on irresistibly, and so he followed.

  Of course it came to him more than once that this might be no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes men see strange things when the hoar frost is on the earth. Hagadorn’s father, who lived up there with the Lake Superior Indians and worked in the copper mines, had once welcomed a woman at his hut on a bitter night who was gone by morning, and who left wolf tracks in the snow—yes, it was so, and John Fontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you about it any day—if he were alive. (Alack, the snow where the wolf tracks were is melted now!)

  Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater all the night, and when the ice flushed red at dawn and arrows of lovely light shot up into the cold heavens, she was gone, and Hagadorn was at his destination. Then, as he took off his skates while the sun climbed arrogantly up to his place above all other things, Hagadorn chanced to glance lakeward, and he saw there was a great wind-rift in the ice and that the waves showed blue as sapphires beside the gleaming ice. Had he swept along his intended path, watching the stars to guide him, his glance turned upward, all his body at magnificent momentum, he must certainly have gone into that cold grave. The white skater had been his guardian angel!

  Much impressed, he went up to his friend’s house, expecting to find there the pleasant wedding furore. But someone met him quietly at the door, and his friend came downstairs to greet him with a solemn demeanor.

  “Is this your wedding face?” cried Hagadorn. “Why, really, if this is the way you are affected, the sooner I take warning the better.”

  “There’s no wedding today,” said his friend.

  “No wedding? Why, you’re not—”

  “Marie Beaujeu died last night—”

  “Marie—”

  “Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she came home chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in it somehow. She got worse and worse and talked all the time of you.”

  “Of me?”

  “We wondered what it all meant. We didn’t know you were lovers.”

  “I didn’t know it myself; more’s the pity.”

  “She said you were on the ice. She said you didn’t know about the big breaking up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore. Then she cried that you could come in by the old French Creek if you only knew—?”

  “I came in that way,” interrupted Hagadorn.

  “How did you come to do that? It’s out of your way.”

  So Hagadorn told him how it came to pass.

  And that day they watched beside the maiden, who had tapers at her head and feet, and over in the little church the bride who might have been at her wedding said prayers for her friend. Then they buried her in her bridesmaid’s white, and Hagadorn was there before the altar with her, as he intended from the first. At midnight the day of the burial her friends were married in the gloom of the cold church, and they walked together through the snow to lay their bridal wreaths on her grave.

  * * * *

  Three nights later Hagadorn started back again to his home. They wanted him to go by sunlight, but he had his way and went when Venus made her bright path on the ice. He hoped for the companionship of the white skater. But he did not have it. His only companion was the wind. The only voice he heard was the baying of a wolf on the north shore. The world was as white as if it had just been created and the sun had not yet colored nor man defiled it.

  HOW HE CAUGHT THE GHOST, by Anonymous

  Take
n from Twenty-Five Ghost Stories (1904).

  “Yes, the house is a good one,” said the agent; “it’s in a good neighborhood, and you’re getting it at almost nothing; but I think it right to tell you all about it. You are orphans, you say, and with a mother dependent on you? That makes it all the more necessary that you should know. The fact is, the house is said to be haunted—”

  The agent could not help smiling as he said it, and he was relieved to see an answering smile on the two faces before him.

  “Ah, you don’t believe in ghosts,” he went on; “nor do I, for that matter; but, somehow, the reputation of the house keeps me from having a tenant long at a time. The place ought to rent for twice as much as it does.”

  “If we succeed in driving out the ghost, you will not raise the rent?” asked the boy, with a merry twinkle in his eyes.

  “Well, no—not this year, at any rate,” laughed the agent. And so the house was rented; and the slip of a girl and the tall lad, her brother, went their way.

  Within a week the family had moved into the house, and were delighted with it. It was large and cool, with wide halls and fine stairways, and with more room than they needed. But that did not matter in the least, for they had always been cramped in small houses, suffering many discomforts; and they never could have afforded such a place as this if it had not been “haunted.”

  “Blessings on the ghost!” cried Margaret, gaily, as she ran about as merry as a child. “Who would be without a ghost in the house, when it brings one like this?”

  “And it is so near your school,” said the mother; “and I used to worry so over the long walk; and David can come home to lunch now, and you don’t know what a pleasure that will be.”

  “It seems to me,” David gravely explained, “that if I should meet the ghost I would treat him with the greatest politeness and encourage him to stay. We shall not miss the room he takes, shall we? I think it would be well to set aside that room over yours, Maggie, for his ghostship’s own, for we shall not need that, you know. Besides, the door doesn’t shut, and he can go in and out without breaking the lock.”