Ghosts I Have Met | Page 2

do, however, I do not hope ever to convince you--though it
is none the less true-- that on one occasion, in the spring of 1895, there
was a spiritual manifestation in my library which nearly prostrated me
physically, but which mentally I hugely enjoyed, because I was
mentally strong enough to subdue my physical repugnance for the thing
which suddenly and without any apparent reason materialized in my
arm-chair.
I'm going to tell you about it briefly, though I warn you in advance that
you will find it a great strain upon your confidence in my veracity. It
may even shatter that confidence beyond repair; but I cannot help that. I
hold that it is a man's duty in this life to give to the world the benefit of
his experience. All that he sees he should set down exactly as he sees it,
and so simply, withal, that to the dullest comprehension the moral
involved shall be perfectly obvious. If he is a painter, and an
auburn-haired maiden appears to him to have blue hair, he should paint

her hair blue, and just so long as he sticks by his principles and is true
to himself, he need not bother about what you may think of him. So it
is with me. My scheme of living is based upon being true to myself.
You may class me with Baron Munchausen if you choose; I shall not
mind so long as I have the consolation of feeling, deep down in my
heart, that I am a true realist, and diverge not from the paths of truth as
truth manifests itself to me.
This intruder of whom I was just speaking, the one that took possession
of my arm-chair in the spring of 1895, was about as horrible a spectre
as I have ever had the pleasure to have haunt me. It was worse than
grotesque. It grated on every nerve. Alongside of it the ordinary poster
of the present day would seem to be as accurate in drawing as a bicycle
map, and in its coloring it simply shrieked with discord.
If color had tones which struck the ear, instead of appealing to the eye,
the thing would have deafened me. It was about midnight when the
manifestation first took shape. My family had long before retired, and I
had just finished smoking a cigar--which was one of a thousand which
my wife had bought for me at a Monday sale at one of the big
department stores in New York. I don't remember the brand, but that is
just as well--it was not a cigar to be advertised in a civilized piece of
literature--but I do remember that they came in bundles of fifty, tied
about with blue ribbon. The one I had been smoking tasted and burned
as if it had been rolled by a Cuban insurrectionist while fleeing from a
Spanish regiment through a morass, gathering its component parts as he
ran. It had two distinct merits, however. No man could possibly smoke
too many of them, and they were economical, which is how the
ever-helpful little madame came to get them for me, and I have no
doubt they will some day prove very useful in removing insects from
the rose-bushes. They cost $3.99 a thousand on five days a week, but at
the Monday sale they were marked down to $1.75, which is why my
wife, to whom I had recently read a little lecture on economy,
purchased them for me. Upon the evening in question I had been at
work on this cigar for about two hours, and had smoked one side of it
three-quarters of the way down to the end, when I concluded that I had
smoked enough--for one day--so I rose up to cast the other side into the

fire, which was flickering fitfully in my spacious fireplace. This done, I
turned about, and there, fearful to see, sat this thing grinning at me
from the depths of my chair. My hair not only stood on end, but tugged
madly in an effort to get away. Four hairs--I can prove the statement if
it be desired--did pull themselves loose from my scalp in their insane
desire to rise above the terrors of the situation, and, flying upward,
stuck like nails into the oak ceiling directly over my head, whence they
had to be pulled the next morning with nippers by our hired man, who
would no doubt testify to the truth of the occurrence as I have asserted
it if he were still living, which, unfortunately, he is not. Like most hired
men, he was subject to attacks of lethargy, from one of which he died
last summer. He sank into a rest about weed-time, last June, and
lingered quietly along for two