so that the necessary permission to include the stories in the present collection should be secured, the editor and publishers desire to offer their apologies in any possible case of accidental infringement.
My best thanks and all acknowledgements are particularly due to the following for generous permissions so courteously accorded: To Miss Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) and Messrs. John Lane for Amour Dure and Oke of Okehurst ; Miss Rosalie Muspratt (Jasper John) and Messrs. Henry Walker for The Spirit of Stonehenge and The Seeker of Souls ; Mr. John Guinan for The Watcher O' The Dead ; Messrs. Routledge for The Judge's House ; Messrs. Burns, Oates & Washbourne for De Profundis, The Astrologer's Legacy , and A Porta Inferi ; Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson for The Story of The Spaniards, Hammersmith, The Story of Konnor Old House, The Story of Yand Manor House ; Messrs. John Lane for Brickett Bottom ; Messrs. William Heinemann for Thurnley Abbey ; Messrs. George G. Harrap for Tousell's Pale Bride.
I am further much indebted to Mr. H. Stuart-Forbes for his invaluable help in the collection of material, as also for his spirited and discerning criticisms of Ghost Stories, suggestions which have gone far to make my task easier and (if possible) more interesting.
M.S.
I: HAUNTINGS AND HORROR
J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand
from THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCHYARD
Tinsley, 1863
***
I'm sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is—marvels, fabulæ, what our ancestors called winter's tales—which gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth—an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can't.
Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.
I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular as well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his veto; and I believe he is right. The worthy old lady's letter is, perhaps, too long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.
That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr. Alderman Harper, of High Street, Dublin, and my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir's mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the Tiled or Tyled House—for I find it spelt both ways—stood.
This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it, and put up hangings, and otherwise went to considerable expense. Mr. and Mrs. Prosser came there sometime in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castlemallard, and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease because the house was subjected to annoyances which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law's family had suffered there, not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.[Pg 58]
Lord Castlemallard filed a bill in the Equity side of the Exchequer to compel Mr. Alderman Harper to perform his contract, by taking
My best thanks and all acknowledgements are particularly due to the following for generous permissions so courteously accorded: To Miss Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) and Messrs. John Lane for Amour Dure and Oke of Okehurst ; Miss Rosalie Muspratt (Jasper John) and Messrs. Henry Walker for The Spirit of Stonehenge and The Seeker of Souls ; Mr. John Guinan for The Watcher O' The Dead ; Messrs. Routledge for The Judge's House ; Messrs. Burns, Oates & Washbourne for De Profundis, The Astrologer's Legacy , and A Porta Inferi ; Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson for The Story of The Spaniards, Hammersmith, The Story of Konnor Old House, The Story of Yand Manor House ; Messrs. John Lane for Brickett Bottom ; Messrs. William Heinemann for Thurnley Abbey ; Messrs. George G. Harrap for Tousell's Pale Bride.
I am further much indebted to Mr. H. Stuart-Forbes for his invaluable help in the collection of material, as also for his spirited and discerning criticisms of Ghost Stories, suggestions which have gone far to make my task easier and (if possible) more interesting.
M.S.
I: HAUNTINGS AND HORROR
J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand
from THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCHYARD
Tinsley, 1863
***
I'm sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is—marvels, fabulæ, what our ancestors called winter's tales—which gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth—an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can't.
Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.
I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular as well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his veto; and I believe he is right. The worthy old lady's letter is, perhaps, too long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.
That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr. Alderman Harper, of High Street, Dublin, and my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir's mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the Tiled or Tyled House—for I find it spelt both ways—stood.
This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it, and put up hangings, and otherwise went to considerable expense. Mr. and Mrs. Prosser came there sometime in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castlemallard, and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease because the house was subjected to annoyances which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law's family had suffered there, not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.[Pg 58]
Lord Castlemallard filed a bill in the Equity side of the Exchequer to compel Mr. Alderman Harper to perform his contract, by taking
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