|
"Fairhaven is in an uproar over
the visitation of an alleged ghost. Ghost or mortal spook, spirit, real or
unreal, whatever the phantom is that Mr. William Westgate has seen in the
tenement he rents, he cannot be hired, compelled, or in any way induced to
again enter the habitation after nightfall.
The tenement house in question is
situated on Chestnut st., and has for several months past been acquiring a
reputation as a haunted house. But not until the events of the past few
nights would Mr. Westgate give in to the popular assertion that the real
trouble was a visitation or a series of visitations from an inhabitant of
another world.
Wednesday evening last Mr. Westgate
first became thoroughly aroused to a profound conviction that the strange
noises and queer sights which he had come to recognize as intermittent
adjuncts to his tenement were the mysterious and frightful workings of evil
spirits.
He heard some one outside of his
chamber door knocking for admittance and shaking the door angrily because
not allowed to enter. Mr. Westgate asked the stranger wanted, but received
no reply. The door shaking continued and the apparition of a man danced
about in wild endeavor to enter. This frightened Mr. Westgate, who has the
reputation of being a God-fearing, hard-headed person, with no foolishness
in his composition and plucky withal.
He ran to open the window and
screamed for help. Several Fairhaven gentlemen of repute were sitting on the
steps of the residence of Mr. J.J. Tripp, nearby, and Mr. Westgate's excited
cries of "help," "murder," "police," aroused them, and they ran on the jump
to the tenement house and up to the upper rooms which alone are occupied by
Mr. Westgate.
As they approached, the windows of
the house set up a tremendous [noise] and rattling. Three neighbors, Mr.
Tripp, Mr. Dellingtoham, and Mr. Coggershall searched the house inside and
out when Westgate explained the situation, but nothing in the way of a trace
of the unknown could be discovered. The angry man at the door had vanished
with the air leaving four perplexed men, one of them badly frightened.
Mr. Westgate positively refused to
longer reside in that home, and now it stands empty, all others have refused
to rent it out months ago, and thereby hangs a tale more thrilling than the
simple facts of which determined Westgate's hasty retreat.
The lower tenement of the Chestnut
st. house has been unoccupied for months past, but Mr. Westgate lived in the
upper rooms with his family, defying the spook. Several months back, in cold
weather, as the family were sitting about the room at evening, one of them
burst out in a thrilling scream, "the ghost." She saw the face of a man
distinctly as he opened the blinds to the windows where she slept in an
upper room.
The man, ghost or devil, whichever
it may have been, after opening the blinds quickly slammed them together and
faded from view. Mr. Westgate rushed out-doors to search for the intruder
but could find nothing of him. It was bright moonlight. He hunted in the
snow and could not find the slightest trace of the intruder's feet.
The neighbors were at first inclined
to laugh at the story as the freak of somebody's disordered mind, but after
that no one would stay in that side of the tenement house. They all found it
convenient to sleep at night in other rooms within that dwelling.
Mr. Westgate and his family have
accepted the kind of invitation of their neighbor, Mr. Tripp, and have moved
out of the haunted house, vowing never to return again.
The ghost has an inordinate desire
to get inside the house at night, just after twilight has set in, and is
always furious because he is baffled in his attempts, and shakes himself and
rattles the doors, windows, blinds and everything at hand to show his anger
and [frustration]. This is the tale the neighbors and the dwellers therein
tell. Mr. Tripp, the nearest neighbor, is firmly convinced that the house is
haunted, as he says he cannot account for the frequent disturbances therein
in any way.
Some of the Fairhaven people
pooh-pooh the idea of a spook, but none of them volunteer to go to the house
at night to attempt to sleep and to prove that there is no ghost. Fairhaven
bids fair to be the possessor of a new candidate for investigation by the
members of he Society for Psychical Research. |
