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CASE II
THE TOP ATTIC IN PRINGLE’S MANSION, EDINBURGH
A charming lady, Miss
South, informs me that no house interested her more, as a child, than
Pringle's Mansion, Edinburgh. Pringle's Mansion, by the bye, is not the
real name of the house, nor is the original building still standing—the
fact is, my friend has been obliged to disguise the locality for fear of
an action for slander of title, such as happened in the Egham Case of
1904..
Miss South never saw—save in a picture —the house that so fascinated
her; but through repeatedly hearing about it from her old nurse, she
felt that she knew it by heart, and used to amuse herself hour after
hour in the nursery, drawing diagrams of the rooms and passages, which,
to make quite realistic, she named and numbered.
There was the Admiral's room, Madame's room, Miss Ophelia's room, Master
Gregory's room, Letty's (the nurse's) room, the cook's room, the
butler's room, the housemaid's room — and — the Haunted Room.
The house was very old—probably the sixteenth century—and was concealed
from the thoroughfare by a high wall that enclosed it on all sides. It
had no garden, only a large yard, covered with faded yellow
paving-stones, and containing a well with an old-fashioned roller and
bucket.
When the well was cleaned out, an event which took place periodically on
a certain date, every utensil in the house was called into requisition
for ladling out the water, and the Admiral, himself supervising, made
every servant in the establishment take an active part in the
proceedings. On one of these occasions, the Admiral announced his
intention of going down the well in the bucket. That was a rare moment
in Letty's life, for when the Admiral had been let down in the bucket,
the rope broke!
Indeed, the thought of what the Laird would say when he came up, almost
resulted in his not coming up at all. However, some one, rather bolder
than the rest, retained sufficient presence of mind to effect a rescue,
and the timid ones, thankful enough to survive the explosion, had to be
content on “half-rations till further orders.”
But in spite of its association with such a martinet, and in spite of
her ghostly experiences in it, Letty loved the house, and was never
tired of singing its praises.
It was a two-storeyed mansion, with roomy cellars but no basement. There
were four reception-rooms—all oak-panelled —on the ground floor;
numerous kitchen offices, including a cosy housekeeper’s room ; and a
capacious entrance hall, in the centre of which stood a broad oak
staircase. The cellars, three in number, and chiefly used as
lumber-rooms, were deep down and dank and horrid.
On the first floor eight bedrooms opened on to a gallery overlooking the
hall, and the top storey, where the servants slept, consisted solely of
attics connected with one another by dark, narrow passages. It was one
of these attics that was haunted, although, as a matter of fact, the
ghost had been seen in all parts of the house.
When Letty entered the Admiral’s service she was but a bairn, and had
never even heard of ghosts; nor did the other servants apprise her of
the hauntings, having received strict injunctions not to do so from the
Laird.
But Letty’s home, humble though it was, had been very bright and
cheerful, and the dark precincts of the mansion filled her with dismay.
Without exactly knowing why she was afraid, she shrank in terror from
descending into the cellars, and felt anything but pleased at the
prospect of sleeping alone in an attic. Still nothing occurred to really
alarm her till about a month after her arrival. It was early in the
evening, soon after twilight, and she had gone down into one of the
cellars to look for a boot-jack, which the Admiral swore by all that was
holy must be found before supper. Placing the light she had brought with
her on a packing-case, she was groping about among, the boxes, when she
perceived, to her astonishment, that the flame of the candle had
suddenly turned blue. She then felt icy cold, and was much startled on
hearing a loud clatter as of some metal instrument on the stone floor in
the far-off corner of the cellar. Glancing in the direction of the
noise, she saw, looking at her, two eyes—two obliquely set, lurid, light
eyes, full of the utmost devilry. Sick with terror and utterly unable to
account for what she beheld, she stood stock-still, her limbs refusing
to move, her throat parched, her tongue tied. The clanging was repeated,
and a shadowy form began slowly to crawl towards her. She dared not
afterwards surmise what would have happened to her, had not the Laird
himself come down at this moment. At the sound of his stentorian voice
the phantasm vanished. But the shock had been too much for Letty; she
fainted, and the Admiral, carrying her upstairs as carefully as if she
had been his own daughter, gave peremptory orders that she should never
again be allowed to go into the cellar alone.
But now that Letty herself had witnessed a manifestation, the other
servants no longer felt bound to secrecy, and soon poured into her ears
endless accounts of the hauntings.
Every one, they informed her, except Master Gregory and Perkins (the
butler) had seen one or other of the ghosts, and the cellar apparition
was quite familiar to them all. They also declared that there were other
parts of the house quite as badly haunted as the cellar, and it might
have been partly owing to these gruesome stories that poor Letty always
felt scared, when crossing the passages leading to the attics. As she
was hastening down one of them, early one morning, she heard some one
running after her. Thinking it was one of the other servants, she turned
round, pleased to think that some one else was up early too, and saw to
her horror a dreadful-looking object, that seemed to be partly human and
partly animal. The body was quite small, and its face bloated, and
covered with yellow spots. It had an enormous animal mouth, the lips of
which, moving furiously without emitting any sound, showed that the
creature was endeavouring to speak but could not. The moment Letty
screamed for help the phantasm vanished.
But her worst experience was yet to come. The spare attic which she was
told was so badly haunted that no one would sleep in it, was the room
next to hers. It was a room Letty could well believe was haunted, for
she had never seen another equally gloomy. The ceiling was low and
sloping, the window tiny, and the walls exhibited all sorts of odd nooks
and crannies. A bed, antique and worm-eaten, stood in one recess, a
black oak chest in another, and at", right angles with the door, in
another recess, stood a wardrobe that used to creak and groan alarmingly
every time Letty walked a long the passage. Once she heard a chuckle, a
low, diabolical chuckle, which she fancied came from the chest; and
once, when the door of the room was open, she caught the glitter of a
pair of eyes —the same pale, malevolent eyes that had so frightened her
in the cellar. From her earliest childhood Letty had been periodically
given to somnambulism, and one night, just about a year after she went
into service, she got out of bed, and walked, in her sleep, into the
Haunted Room. She awoke to find herself standing, cold and shivering, in
the middle of the floor, and it was some seconds before she realised
where she was. Her horror, when she did discover where she was, is not
easily described. The room was bathed in moonlight, and the beams,
falling with noticeable brilliancy on each piece of furniture the room
contained, at once riveted Letty’s attention, and so fascinated her that
she found herself utterly unable to move. A terrible and most unusual
silence predominated everywhere, and although Letty’s senses were
wonderfully and painfully on the alert, she could not catch the
slightest sound from any of the rooms on the landing.
The night was absolutely still,, no breath of wind, no rustle of leaves,
no flapping of ivy against the window; yet the door suddenly swung back
on its hinges and slammed furiously. Letty felt that this was the work
of some supernatural agency, and, fully expecting that the noise had
awakened the cook, who was a light sleeper (or pretended she was),
listened in a fever of excitement to hear her get out of bed and call
out. The slightest noise and the spell that held her prisoner would,
Letty felt sure, be broken. But the same unbroken silence prevailed. A
sudden rustling made Letty glance fearfully at the bed; and she
perceived, to her terror, the valance swaying violently, to and fro.
Sick with fear, she was now constrained to stare in abject helplessness.
Presently there was a slight, very slight movement on the mattress, the
white dust cover rose, and, under it, Letty saw the outlines of what she
took to be a human figure, gradually take shape. Hoping, praying, that
she was mistaken, and that what appeared to be on the bed was but a
trick of her imagination, she continued staring in an agony of
anticipation. But the figure remained—extended at full length like a
corpse. The minutes slowly passed, a church clock boomed two, and the
body moved. Letty’s jaw fell, her eyes almost bulged from her head,
whilst her fingers closed convulsively on the folds of her night-dress.
The unmistakable sound of breathing now issued from the region of the
bed, and the dust-cover commenced slowly to slip aside. Inch by inch-it
moved, until first of all Letty saw a few wisps of dark hair, then a few
more, then a thick cluster; then something white and shining —a
protruding forehead; then dark, very dark brows; then two eyelids,
yellow, swollen, and fortunately tightly closed; then—a purple
conglomeration of Letty knew not what—of anything but what was human.
The sight was so monstrous it appalled her; and she was overcome with a
species of awe and repulsion, for which the language of mortality has no
sufficiently energetic expression. She momentarily forgot that what she
looked on was merely superphysical, but regarded it as something alive,
something that ought to have been a child, comely and healthy as
herself— and she hated it. It was an outrage on maternity, a blot on
nature, a filthy discredit to the house, a blight, a sore, a gangrene.
It turned over in its sleep, the cover was hurled aside, and a grotesque
object, round, pulpy, webbed, and of leprous whiteness—an object which
Letty could hardly associate with a hand— came grovelling out. Letty’s
stomach heaved; the thing was beastly, indecent, vile, it ought not to
live ! And the idea of killing flashed through her mind. Boiling over
with indignation and absurdly forgetful of her surroundings, she turned
round and groped for a stone to smash it. The moonlight on her naked
toes brought her to her senses—the thing in the bed was a devil! Though
brought up a member of the Free Church, with an abhorrence of anything
that could in any way be contorted into Papist practices, Letty crossed
herself. As she did so, a noise in the passage outside augmented her
terror. She strained her ears painfully, and the sound developed into a
footstep, soft, light, and surreptitious. It came gently towards the
door; it paused outside, and Letty intuitively felt that it was
listening. Her suspense was now so intolerable, that it was almost with
a feeling of relief that she beheld the door slowly—very slowly—begin to
open. A little wider—a little wider—and yet a little wider; but still
nothing came. Ah! Letty's heart turned to ice. Another inch, and a
shadowy something slipped through and began to wriggle itself stealthily
over the floor. Letty tried to divert her gaze, but could not—an
irresistible, magnetic attraction kept her eyes glued to the gradually
approaching horror. When within a few feet of her it halted; and again
Letty felt it was listening—listening to the breathing on the bed, which
was heavy and bestial. Then it twisted round, and Letty watched it crawl
into the wardrobe. After this there was a long and anxious wait. Then
Letty saw the wardrobe door slyly open, and the eyes of the cellar—
inexpressibly baleful, and glittering like burnished steel in the strong
phosphorescent glow of the moon, peep out,—not at her but through
her,—at the object lying on the bed. There were not only eyes, this
time, but a form,—vague, misty, and irregular, but still with sufficient
shape to enable Letty to identify it as that of a woman, tall and thin,
and with a total absence of hair, which was emphasised in the most lurid
and ghastly fashion. With a snakelike movement, the evil thing slithered
out of the wardrobe, and, gliding past Letty, approached the bed. Letty
was obliged to follow every proceeding. She saw the thing deftly snatch
the bolster from, under the sleeping head; noted the gleam of hellish
satisfaction in its eyes as it pressed the bolster down; and watched the
murdered creature's contortions grow fainter, and fainter, until they
finally ceased. The eyes then left the room; and from afar off, away
below, in the abysmal cellars of the house, came the sound of
digging—faint, very faint, but unquestionably digging. This terminated
the grim, phantasmal drama for that night at least, and Letty, chilled
to the bone, but thoroughly alert, escaped to her room. She spent her
few remaining hours of rest wideawake, determining never to go to bed
again without fastening one of her arms to the, iron staples.
With regard the history of the house, Letty never learned anything more
remarkable than that, long ago, an idiot child was supposed to have been
murdered in the haunted attic—by whom, tradition did not say. The
Admiral and his family left Pringle’s Mansion the year Letty became Miss
South’s nurse, and as no one would stay in the house, presumably on
account of the hauntings, it was pulled down, and an inexcusably
inartistic edifice was erected in its place. |
