As a rule, the phantom says
nothing; its presence, which is always brief, is but a sort of
silent warning. Sometimes it seems a prey to futile and trivial
anxieties. More rarely, it speaks, though saying but little after
all. More rarely still, it reveals something that has happened, a
crime, a hidden treasure of which no one else could know. But we
will return to these matters after completing this brief
enumeration.
2
The phenomenon of haunted houses resembles that of the phantasms
of the dead, except that here the ghost clings to the residence,
the house, the building and in no way to the persons who inhabit
it. By the second year of its existence, that is to say, 1884,
the Committee on Haunted Houses of the S. P. R. had selected and
made an analysis of some sixty-five cases out of hundreds
submitted to it, twenty-eight of which rested upon first-hand and
superior evidence.[1] It is worthy of remark, in the first place,
that these authentic narratives bear no relation whatever to the
legendary and sensational ghost-stories that still linger in many
English and American magazines, especially in the Christmas
numbers. They mention no winding-sheets, coffins, skeletons,
graveyards, no sulphurous flames, curses, blood-curdling groans,
no clanking chains, nor any of the time-honoured trappings that
characterize this rather feeble literature of the supernatural.
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