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Title: Was it a ghost? The murders in Bussey's wood
        An extraordinary narrative

Author: Henry Johnson Brent

Release date: February 4, 2023 [eBook #69955]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Loring, Publisher

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAS IT A GHOST? THE MURDERS IN BUSSEY'S WOOD ***

  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




  WAS
  IT A
  GHOST?

  THE MURDERS
  in
  BUSSEY’S WOOD

  AN EXTRAORDINARY
  NARRATIVE.

  LORING, Publisher.

  BOSTON
  1868.

  _PRICE, 75 CENTS._




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[Illustration: THE GHOST.]




  WAS IT A GHOST?


  THE MURDERS IN BUSSEY’S WOOD.


  An Extraordinary Narrative.


  LORING, Publisher,
  319 WASHINGTON STREET,
  BOSTON.




  Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
  A. K. LORING,
  In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District
    of Massachusetts.


  ROCKWELL & ROLLINS, STEREOTYPERS AND PRINTERS,
  122 Washington Street, Boston.




DEDICATION.


I dedicate this book to that philosophy which can argue without
anger, can have a disbelief without sustaining it by insolence; which
can pause on the brink of a chasm, and, because there happens to be
no bridge by which it can cross over, will not proclaim to all the
world that no bridge can be built; to the philosophy which sees as
much beauty in a doubt as in a solution, and has not ventured, or
mayhap will never venture, to affix a limit to human thought, or
define the prerogatives of our Lord and Creator. I do not dedicate it
to the Free Thinker, but to the Just Thinker. The highest reverence
exists oftener than otherwise in the humblest soul, and the night of
our ignorance is lit by stars to accustom us to the effulgence of the
dawn. The future is the poetry of our hope; the present our rest,
from which we extend the wings of memory for the longer and more
glorious flight toward the end. My work will be found to look faintly
but fondly to those things, if it is read aright; and so in all and
everything I humbly say that I have no higher ambition than to serve
my Master.




PREFACE.


I take advantage of this antique form of literature to make a
statement.

The murders of which I shall have to speak in the following pages
have been misunderstood. There was only one species of crime in their
perpetration, and this I have from the highest authority. If I had
thought it advisable, I could have pointed out the progress by which
the assassin reached his determination, his peculiarity of character,
and his motives; but such a course would have detected justice to the
culprit, not the culprit to justice. Whenever he shall be discovered,
the evidence will be ample justification for my assertion with regard
to the character of the crime, and reveal the darkest, wickedest, and
most deliberate murders with which the history of humanity has been
cursed.

I am indebted to my friend, THOMAS HILL, Esq., the eminent landscape
painter, for the singularly appropriate adaptation of weird figures
to letters on the cover of my book, and also for the very felicitous
representation of the “Ghost.” His magic pencil masters the alphabet
as well as the higher regions of art, and I feel assured that my
readers will be pleased that I had, in my need, so able an assistant
in helping me to make my humble effort acceptable.

                                                                J. B.




  CONTENTS.


                                                                  PAGE

  Preliminary Remarks                                                9

  I. The Roads                                                      11

  II. The Incidents                                                 18

  III. The Scene                                                    22

  IV. The Brook                                                     25

  V. The Dogs                                                       30

  VI. The Flat Bridge                                               34

  VII. Suspected                                                    41

  VIII. The Murder-Rock                                             45

  IX. Suspicion                                                     49

  X. Was it a Ghost?                                                57

  XI. The Tests                                                     67

  XII. Tests                                                        75

  XIII. The Doctor’s Story                                          94

  XIV. My Plan of Punishment                                       101

  XV. The Children                                                 110

  XVI. Ghosts                                                      113

  XVII. Manifestations                                             123




PRELIMINARY REMARKS.


The main circumstances that form, in part, the topic of my recital,
excited, at the time of their occurrence, a feeling of unprecedented
horror. They came upon the public sensibility with a force that
even the previous recital of the bloody events of the civil war
could not lessen. Habituation to horror had not deadened the public
susceptibility; for there was around the incidents a belt of mystery
and affright that defied the approach of justice, and baffled private
speculation.

No necessity, even in the tortuous excuses of crime, was apparent
for the deed; for the victims had had no opportunities to establish,
individually of themselves, hostile relations with any one, and
their condition placed them beyond or beneath the chance of social
importance. They were claimants to no estate in litigation, stood
in no man’s way to advancement, could have produced no rivalry, had
inspired neither revenge, nor jealousy, nor love. They had, in fine,
none of those means that men and women have to incite to crime; for
they were children, and yet they were subjected to a fate that few,
if any, children, had confronted before.

The commission of the deed was a barbarity; its motives, apparently,
a paradox.

Everything, indeed, about the transaction was unusual. The hour, the
circumstances, and the locality, all contributed to inspire a greater
horror of the act; and yet, up to this moment, no man’s name, of
high or low, bears a blemish of continued suspicion. Justice seems
to rest, after the excitement of the instant search,—a search that, I
have every reason to know, was intricate and thorough; but, at the
same time, it is well to know that the intelligent Chief of the
police department has only seemed to pause. His eyes have never been
entirely withdrawn from the contemplation of the subject; and I feel
assured, from what I know, that his vigilant and nervous grasp will,
at the appointed time, be placed upon the shoulder of the atrocious
criminal. The murderer may have perhaps, ere this, caught glimpses,
from his abode of gloom in another world, of those two spirits whose
bodies he hacked so butcherly. If that be so, the Chief will have
naught to do; but if he be alive, wandering a desolate path through a
desolate world, it may be that justice will not have waited with an
energetic patience in vain.




THE NARRATIVE.




I.

THE ROADS.


There are two roads direct by which the scene I am about to describe
can be reached from Boston. One is the steam-car road, passing
through Roxbury, and dropping way-passengers at Laurel Hill Station.
The other is the horse-car line, that, for some portion of the
route, runs parallel to the steam. The third, and more picturesque,
is another horse-car line, which passes through Jamaica Plain, and
drops the passengers some several hundred yards west, and farther
removed from the official terminus of the two other routes. It was by
the second of these routes, that, on the 12th day of June, 1865, two
children, Isabella and John Joyce, started from their home in Boston,
where they were temporarily boarding, to spend a few hours in May’s
wood, intending to return, according to the elder one’s promise,
in time for her brother to attend his afternoon school. Thus it is
established that the sister never intended to go farther than the
wood first proposed; and in this we have the first glimmering of the
series of mysterious circumstances in which the wretched affair is
enveloped from the beginning to the end.

This girl was not sixteen years old.

The boy was barely eight.

Whatever happened after they took their seats in the car, and who
accompanied them, or joined them afterward, is a matter simply of
conjecture; and yet, as they sat there, these two young things, who,
of all the rest of the passengers that looked upon their fresh,
pleasure-anticipating faces, could have dreamed that, in a section
so civilized, a community so guarded, a population so abundant, in
the marginal outlines of a great city, that ere the sun went down,
within a few short hours, indeed, that girl and boy would be lying
stiff and stark, pierced,—the one, the girl, by twenty-eight poniard
stabs, and the boy by enough to have killed the captains of a full
regiment; the girl dead in the hollow of a rock within thirty feet
of a public road, the boy less than a quarter of a mile away, in the
dense shrubbery, by a tiny stream that flows through the shades of
Bussey’s wonderfully beautiful woods!

Now, this wood of Bussey’s—at present in the possession of Mr.
Motley, one of the heirs by marriage—is a subject of frequent thought
to the writer of this narrative. It was so before it became the
witness to the murder of these two children; after that, while of
course losing in sentiment and by association some of its innate
and sympathetic loveliness, it ever wore the weird aspect of a
mystic realm; but now is added that terrible consciousness of a
fright, a terror, pervading all its recesses. The wood lies about
six or seven miles southward of the Boston State House, on a county
road, and its summits are lofty enough to afford a view of the city
and the rattlesnake infested Blue Hills back of the Mattapan, more
southwardly yet.

The wood, as you approach down the road from Mr. Motley’s gate,
presents the aspect of a hill of pines, dark and massive; but,
crossing the fence that keeps it from the highway, you are almost at
once in the midst of a mingled growth of birch and beech and willows;
beneath these passes the brook, near to whose bank was found, farther
up, the body of the boy. Old Mr. Bussey, it would seem, was a man of
droll, yet picturesque fancies, mingled with a sturdy sense of the
useful; for no sooner are you free of the pasture land, and in among
the trees, than you discover traces of his handiwork. The path you
are upon is broad and well constructed, leading to a solid bridge
of masonry; and well may you pause here to take in the full effect
of the scenic entanglement. On your right is a fish-pond, fringed
with the swamp willow, and of sufficient capacity to contain fish
enough for a council of cardinals during the abstinent days of Lent;
and near by a spring of water, so cold that ice is never needed by
those frequent picnic parties that, up to the period of the murders,
sought these delicious retiracies for holiday festivals, or love’s
deeper and sweeter plans of recreation. Crossing this lower bridge,
and passing over a road with velvety grass borders, you turn to your
left, and if you have the time from sandwiches and other condiments,
or are not too absorbed in emotions that beat marches to the field of
matrimony, or much elaboration of flirtation, you will see the steep
ascent, bearded with huge pines, and covered with abutting rocks,
looking like the base of a minor incident of Alpine precipice. If
you choose, there is a wild pathway made among the zigzags, and this
you can pursue until the summit meets you, with the recompense of a
noble prospect, but with your muscles somewhat demoralized. Did those
children take this route?

Along the ridge, a broad walk leads to the spot where the
wounded-to-death body of the unhappy girl was found. But, if you
think otherwise, in your humor of unsettled choice, you can turn to
your right, and, winding around the base of the hill, through dwarf
pines at first, and heavy timber afterward, stroll on until you
reach the scene of the primal tragedy. Did they go by this way? The
wildness, the solemnity, and total seclusion of the place, even in
the broad daylight, are oppressive to the imagination, if you happen
to be alone. Company in a graveyard, at midnight, destroys in some
measure the unpleasant sense of other than human propinquity; and
it is the same in a modified form, in this umbrageous condensity.
By all but hilarious picnic parties, the solitude and seriousness
of a wood is admitted; and this wood is one of the most unique I
have ever visited. But, since then, it is no simple congregation of
trees and rocks and mysterious paths,—no longer a sylvan asylum of
perfect repose, inviting to reverie, to pleasure, or the interviews
of love, sweetened by the security that shadows of leaves throw upon
the blushing hieroglyphic of the cheek, or the deeper and softer and
better understood language of the eyes. A gloom is here established
forever. It is a witness of that most terrible of tragedies to which
our human condition is liable. The knife of the murderer has gleamed
here,—the cry of the victim been uttered. It is haunted! Haunted
by what? Who can tell? By ghosts, or the idea of ghosts? It makes
no difference which. In such cases, where logic is shattered over
a catastrophe, imagination lifts up the fallen form of contracted
reason, and ministers to its inability. Man does not always demand
facts; or, rather, in the solving of the many difficult problems
that are suggested by special and eccentric occurrences, he does
not demand an iron-clad testimony,—a testimony not in accordance
with the fact under inquisition. The existence of a thing is to be
proved by evidence that can apply to the nature of its existence.
The intention of Byron’s brain cannot be proved by the same process
you would take to prove that the ocean over the Banks of Newfoundland
is not so deep as in its centre. If we waited for facts in proof of
what we cannot directly understand, we should starve mentally, or go
mad. Air is invisible, but it exists. It is here; it is yonder. It
is more keenly felt by animals whose skins are thin. The armadilla,
possibly, doubts its existence, unless he has the gift of seeing
it; but the hairless dog of China is no sceptic on the subject of
atmospheric changes and attacks. Man, exposed to the blast, feels
it more sensibly than the elephant placed in the same current. The
_opinion_ of the armadilla, or of the elephant, has nothing to do
with the fact of the air’s existence. The former animal recognizes a
tempest, not by what he feels, but what he sees; and if he sees wind,
then I give up my illustration, but not my argument. He sees a vision
of flying dust, broken branches, prostrate trees. Possibly he draws
his deductions from the theory of the sliding faculty of sand,—which
phenomenon he has, perhaps, suffered from; and he has seen trees
overturned by sand-slides, and, as the tempest beats unfelt upon his
adamantine scales, he thinks the sand-power is at work, and would
debate all day with any thin-skinned animal who would assert that it
was done by a tempest of air. “I never saw it, I never felt it,”
Signor Armadilla would perpetually growl forth; and, so far as he
was concerned, the air would be sand, and his neighbor a credulous,
half-crazy believer in a thing perfectly intangible. He never could
attribute the results of a tempest to any force which is not within
the range of his experience. He is where he was, but the oak is where
it was not. He stood upon a sound place, the oak upon a slide,—that’s
all. There was no hurricane. Thus it is that while a thing may exist,
it may not always be apparent, and if apparent, only to a few.
Men take views according to the texture of their mental cuticle,
mercurial or otherwise, thick or thin; and can decisions based upon
such capricious contingencies be accepted as a philosophic solution
of a doubt, or a truth? But I shall, farther on in my recital, have
to deal more practically with this topic, because I shall be drawn
to its revelation by the inevitable force of circumstances and
incidents.




II.

THE INCIDENTS.


Two months previous to the murder of the Joyce children I had been
residing at the house of an acquaintance, a mile away from the
village of Jamaica Plain. The front of the house looked out upon the
road leading from Boston and passing through the village of Jamaica
Plain far away into the back country, and onward,—a pleasant drive
for those city dwellers who had only afternoon opportunities for
rural inhalation. The rear of the house gave view of a meadow watered
by a tiny rivulet and up to the woods of Bussey. This rivulet was
the one that went by the body of the boy, and where it was concealed
by its woods and weeds. The distance from our back porch to the spot
where the body of the boy was found, was about four hundred yards,
and to where the body of the girl was discovered, probably twice or
thrice that number; so I was rusticating near the footlights of the
theatre, little dreaming that, when the curtain rose, how terrible
would be the drama that would drip the stage with blood.

I have long since made up my mind that the most extraordinary
events transpire from a condition of repose, else we would never
be startled. The first earthquake is the terror; the residue are
but affairs of mercantile and architectural speculation. Whatever
is striking is struck quick. The practice of the prize ring is
the theory of wonders. The shoulder of a man propels a complex
system of muscles, and a man in front has his countenance smashed.
The suddenness of the experiment accounts for the surprise at its
result. Preparations for great deeds are not always apparent. A coup
d’etat is such because it is a coup. The killing of Mr. Lincoln was
more astounding as a positive deed than the beheading of Charles
the First, or the razoring of Louis the Sixteenth and his Queen,
daughter of the Cæsars. In the case of the President, silence and
mystery kept pace with the public confidence in his personal safety;
in the case of Charles and Louis, the politics of a people had long
been disturbed and outraged with regard to the traditional sanctity
of kings, and there was preparation almost evidently looking to
the final result, and the prelude, from the very nature of those
governments, admitted of hardly any other epilogue; but with Mr.
Lincoln it was different. He sat in his box at the theatre, secure,
in a war brought to a result suitable to his designs, with pleasant
painted scenery before him, a comedy of brimming humor in course of
acting, altogether in the very last place he or any one expected
that the blow upon his life would fall; but it fell, and the world
was astonished. Thus,—with the meadow and its brook before me, with
the grand belt of woods bowing over the fence, with the soft air of
summer in the boughs, with the mowers in the grass, with the sunlight
blinking through flower-stems and vegetables of homely nomenclature,
but admirable qualities,—I sat in the porch of my summer dwelling;
and while I sat there, musing and idling, a deed was done, so wicked,
so ruthless, so hideously unessential, that even now, after the
lapse of so long a time, I feel the need of a new word,—a word with
the thunder and the lightning in it, with the curse of man and the
anathema of God in it, to express the sensation it produced.

Those woods were to me a delight beyond all computation. To look
at them, to go into them, to sit underneath them, to watch by
the hour the veins of moss and the bark of the tree boles, to
follow the curvature of the limbs as they grasped at the white
clouds passing, to see the blue eyes of the sky peeping at me as I
stared at them, to listen to the nothings of sounds that all men
have heard in the sylvans, to forget in the balm of the scene the
bitterness of memories and knowledge,—furnished me a mighty feast
of harmless and negative enjoyment. With these feelings which I
have not exaggerated,—keeping in view this sanctity of nature,
for so many centuries uninvaded by any crime, save and except that
doubtful one, of lovers meeting there to love outside of domestic
parlors,—I perhaps more than anybody else was personally outraged
at the act which not only destroyed human life, but smote the peace
of the presence which Heaven had bestowed upon the scene, sublime
in its ministering to a waif out of the wreck of revolution. I
feel confident that to those persons who indulge in the faculty of
thought beyond counters and desks, I need make no excuses for these
digressions; for they will at once perceive that I am at least
exhibiting one phase of the prelude to those terrible atrocities.
The incident of my vicinity to the spot has great weight with me in
the writing of this narrative, as it would be to those persons, who,
though not being able to witness the actual battle, see the smoke of
the conflict and hear the reverberation of the dread artillery.




III.

THE SCENE.


It was on Sunday evening, the 18th of June, that we had the first
intimation of what had been going on in those great shadows opposite
to our house. I was sitting on the eastward porch,—which I said
before gave a lookout toward the wood,—and had been sending up my
quota of cloud to mingle with the fraternity of vapor around the
setting sun (my pipe, my laboratory), when, as the shades grew
purplish down in the ravine by the brook, I heard repeated shouts.
When an ordinary stillness is violently broken, there follows a
shock to the nervous system, repeated upon it by sympathy with the
divinity of silence whose reign has been disturbed. Sometimes terror
commences at once her frantic flight over all the barriers of reason;
and again, anger beats back the blow with imprecation. But when the
long-continued hush of a great forest, the mystic sleep of rocks and
trees, of air itself pervading a radius of miles, is suddenly and
sharply interrupted by that peculiar intonation of human outcry,
which declares an event out of the ordinary train of circumstances,
and when those outcries reach us out of thick concealment, wonder
and dread assume control of our faculties, and make us pause almost
in our breathing, to catch some other cry of different character by
which we can determine the cause and nature of the first. I had heard
from the paths and shades of those woods, during the summer, various
kinds of human noises; but none of them ever reached the mad gamut
of the one which had smitten the air but a moment since. Those other
cries came from children, grown and ungrown, romping in happy energy
along the glades,—from picnic parties calling to each other and
replying as they separated after the feast of sandwiches,—and I had
got to understand them all; but here was a yell that had in it the
modulation of groan and spasm, uplifting of hands and straining of
eyes, relaxing of muscles and whitening of faces, with stops put upon
it by the fluttering pulses of the frightened heart; and imagining
nothing of anything terrible that could have happened under that so
pleasant roof of waving foliage, I sat paralyzed in the abruptness
and terror of the interruption. But I was not kept long in such
suspense. The news now came up from the dell that the body of the
missing boy was found. The search of police and citizens had been
conducted on the principle of an open fan with the handle held by the
chief at the house where the children had been living. Thus the whole
region on either side of the route known to have been taken by them
was thoroughly gone over and examined, until the pursuit, almost
despairing of success, reached the Bussey wood, expanded around the
base of the hill, leaving no clump of bushes unexplored, until, upon
that quiet Sabbath evening they found the poor boy lying dead in the
midst of a thick screen of alder-bushes. Soon afterward the girl was
discovered, but not, I believe, by parties actually engaged in the
search. Two men unsuspectingly, perhaps unknowing of anything about
the missing ones, strangers, it is to be supposed, and in the woods
for a Sunday’s stroll, came upon a group of rocks lying a little off
from the path at the southern terminus of the hill, and overlooking
the common road of the county that leads to Dedham. Here, stretched
in the rugged fissure of the rock, or rather in a basin at its base,
lay the stabbed corpse of the sister. Another alarm, and the second
part of the drama was concluded.




IV.

THE BROOK.


So this much of the mystery was explained.

These children had left their home a week before, purposing a little
trip, that was to last only a few hours, to May’s wood, midway or
thereabout between their starting-point and Bussey’s wood, where
they were subsequently found dead. During all that week of vigorous
and unwearied search by the police of Boston and Roxbury, joined
in by that of the rural localities; while the sun shone so bright
and peace seemed so perfect over and within that green glory, while
hundreds of people as usual, suspecting nothing, came into and went
out of old Bussey’s groves; these two dumb humanities lay,—the girl,
with her poor fright-marked face towards the sky, appealing to it
for testimony and redress, the brother prone to the earth by the
sly little running stream, both stabbed over and over again,—for
thirty-four times did that mad arm rise and fall,—their bodies rough
with the clotted gore of their hideous wounds. The public stood
awe-struck in the presence of this spectacle, and parents trembled
when they saw such evidence of duty neglected in allowing these
waifs to wander so far away from home. (Or were they accompanied,
and by whom, when they went away?) For a time the junior members of
families had to confine themselves to a more restricted sphere of
locomotion, and the thought of murder haunting them drove them like
curfew to their homes at dusk. The latitude heretofore extended to,
or wrenched by, Young America underwent a revision, and the juvenile
eagles and doves of the social roosts were forced to bend to the yoke
of a new dispensation, the justification of which was found in the
fate of those two hapless wanderers who had been found slaughtered
in the woods of Bussey. Seldom, in the annals of crime, was there
so great an excitement as was manifested, not only in Boston, but
throughout the entire country, when the fate of the lost children was
made known by the public press. In one week afterward the woods were
daily crowded by people from the city and the suburbs, with parties
from the distant towns, and I met one man, wandering about in a white
state of nervousness, who said he had come from Maine to look at the
localities. An artist of one of the New York illustrated papers, with
whom I went over the woods, in company also with a policeman who had
been detailed for the purpose of pointing out the spots to the man
of wood-cuts, told me that in New York the murder of these children
had caused a greater excitement than the killing of Mr. Lincoln. I
could well understand that,—for the one was in its chief features, a
political event, while the other appealed to the commonest sensations
of our nature, through the avenues of mystery. On one Sunday alone, I
was told by one of the rural officers, that more than twelve hundred
people, men, women, and children, had visited the blood-stained
places of the murders.

One great misfortune was inevitable from this sudden and continued
irruption, and that was the total extinction of any foot-track of the
murderer, or any vestige of his garments which might have been torn
from him in the struggles with the stronger girl, or the conjectured
chase he made in pursuit of the fleeing boy; for strange it was,
that the bodies were found separated by several hundred yards of
distance, an interval of dense wood and shrubbery closing in in all
directions.[1] The one, as I said before, was killed on the summit
of the hill; the other, at its base. As strict an examination as it
was possible to effect was instituted, by the police authorities,
of all the paths leading to the two spots of deepest interest, of
every brake and shaded place; and very useless was it soon found
to be in the vicinity of the death-scene of the girl,—for there the
ground was dry and rocky; but where the boy was found the soil was
moist, and had not the paths been constantly travelled over during
that silent week and afterward, it was there that some clue might
have been found, the footsteps of the assassin evident, kept there
by that inscrutable and puzzling fatality that frequently attends on
such events. The party of discovery, however, not having the police
presence of mind at the moment when they came upon the desolate
object, obliterated, by an unconscious complicity with the assassin,
and demolished, in their eager rush, any marks he might have left;
for at least to that body no one had approached, and the footmarks
of the only living witness and actor must have kept company with the
bloody corpse throughout that interval. Thus everything tended to
shield the doer of the deed. The dry ground and flints around the
girl; the very solitude of the boy’s last asylum, to whose protection
he had fled with the breath of his pursuer hot upon him; the rain
that fell afterward, and that fatal week’s concealment,—gave him
ample time to perfect his plan of evasion; and well did the demon
use his opportunities; for, up to this moment, the public is in
possession of no clue by which he can be brought to the expiation, if
human expiation be possible, of his unparalleled offence. Whatever
may be known to the mysterious agent of legal vindication, the
keen-eyed chief, we cannot discover; possibly there is nothing to
discover, though I do not agree to that; he may be waiting for one
of those redressing incidents by which the chain of evidence is
united,—incidents simple of themselves and reaching forward out of
doubt and difficulty, and helping the law to a fulfilment of its
intentions.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Since I finished writing my narrative, a friend has informed me,
that, visiting the wood sometime after the discovery of the bodies,
and while searching for the exact spot where Isabella Joyce was
discovered, he picked up a portion of an old green coat, or some
other habiliment, and carried it out in the road to his friend, who
was waiting in the carriage the issue of his search, to show her, in
joke, as a relic of the murderer’s dress. His friend instantly grew
serious over the matter, and to this day believes it to have been
worn by the man who did the murders.




V.

THE DOGS.


And during all that week I had pursued my usual monotonies, happy
that they were such, tired to death of battles, and the bulletins
of newspapers, which had added such a tangle of falsehood to the
wickedness of slaughter; happy that I was where I could see the sun
rise and go down without touching with his ray, so far as my rustic
horizon was concerned, a soldier’s tent or a soldier’s grave; moping,
in the very licentiousness of laziness, with my seraphic pipe between
my teeth, over a thousand trifles, such as ingoing and outcoming
of shadows on the leaf-domes of the woods; enjoying the soothing
spasm with dinner of green peas, fresh pulled from vines that in my
airy fancy called back old travels through the low shrubbery of the
French vineyards; having now and then a townsman’s visit to cheer me
back, if cheerful it be, to a consciousness of taxes and municipal
street-sweepings, of city lamps lit up as regularly as the night
came down,—a visit that in its way was as pleasant to me as the old
trees or the gray rocks crowding around their base; a friend to sit
with me in the old back porch and look at the grand wooding of that
desecrated hill, to sip with me the test of hospitality, and smoke
the pipe of peace in the peaceful air that takes no offence at the
indulgence of any method by which honest men earn the recompense
of honest living; avoiding all topics of scandal, blessed in that
rural asylum in the absence of all objects of scandal; going into
the woods now and then and often, out of which, like Peter the Czar,
I had built my city and peopled it with my own people; and all the
time so ignorant of the two dead children who lay within easy range
of my vision. There they lay all that festering week, and here was I
so near to them, following out the idle purpose of a perhaps useless
life,—they perhaps of no greater use to all the world in their dead
slumbering than I in my grand philosophy of lethargy.

My host was blessed with two dogs, and, very oddly, they bore the
same name, Jack. One was a bull-dog, but, strange to say for his
breed, of a sweet and even, more than common, Christian disposition,
inasmuch as I never knew him to turn from the person he had once
elevated to his friendship. In his firm, calm old face, there was
nothing of deceit. Making his protestations of love to you in his own
way of muscular revelation, you might be sure of his proffer, and
that he never would trick you out of your confidence. I have known
bipedical bull-dogs do otherwise; and they turned out afterwards
to be such arrant cowards that even my solemn Jack, could he but
have become acquainted with their behavior, would have swept them
out of the sphere of respectable personalities by the vigor of his
superhuman sincerity. The other dog was a fighting character, and
as such I had not much sympathy with him,—war on a larger and more
brutal scale had sufficed me,—and yet about him there was a geniality
and honesty and pluck, that forced you, while you recognized his
“belligerent rights,” to offer him your respect,—at least I did;
and so there were times when he was allowed to accompany my placid
Jack and myself in our woodway journeys. Friendly as they were
with me, there was another whom they loved with the fervor of
canine Abeilardism, and that person was their master, my host. I
mention this fact now because it bears upon an incident of a very
extraordinary nature, and which I will state in its proper place.

At present I have but to add a few words about these dogs. Though
they bore the same name, they perfectly understood when they were
separately called; that is, they comprehended their own individuality
as we individualized them. I never knew them to make a mistake.
Thus it was, Jack the gentle was never addressed, or had his name
called, except in just such terms as we would use to a human being
gifted with his rare qualities. Jack the fighter, hard-biter, great
cat-worrier, knew when he was spoken to well enough; for the manner
of the family was such as they would use to a retired or active
member of the prize ring, a tone half of uncertainty and the other
half of admiration. They were, in fine, two distinct characters,
bearing the same name; but our voices being adapted to their peculiar
idiosyncrasies, they sensibly drew the line of distinction in sound,
and understood us.

It would be worth any one’s while to get two such distinctly
different dogs in character, and try the experiment of similar names.
It might at least afford Mr. John Tyndall, LL.D., of England, some
hints to his theory of sound.




VI.

THE FLAT BRIDGE.


So one week had passed since the committal of the murders and
the discovery of the bodies,—and the bodies lying in a wood so
frequently, indeed so constantly and largely visited. One would have
supposed that they would have been discovered half an hour after the
deeds were done; but, to understand why it was so long concealed,
you must visit the wood itself in the leafy month of June, and then
you will find out what a hiding-place it can be turned into. Now the
spot where the boy was found was a few feet from the little stream
frequently mentioned, and this stream was spanned by a flat bridge
just enough elevated from the surface of the water to allow it to
flow freely underneath. This bridge led over to a half-obliterated
path that you could with a little care follow until it brought you to
the regular path that led from the lower bridge, and which I before
observed conducted you to the rock where the girl was found, and
farther on to a spot which I am soon to speak of. This lower part
of the forest is composed of open spaces filled with low shrubbery,
small and close-growing pines, and by the brook-way with densely
thick alders. There is a wall running west from the brook, dividing
the property of my host from that of Mr. Motley. Mr. Motley’s
property, along the wall to the north-west, is composed of a wood of
great beauty. The path to which I have alluded connects with the main
county road that circles Bussey’s wood to the east, and it was by
this path that my host was in the habit of returning from his daily
city business, sometimes a little after sunset, but generally not
earlier than nine at night, and frequently later. Relative to this
circumstance I have hereafter something of an extraordinary character
to make mention of; so it may as well be remembered.

The low, flat bridge was about fifty feet from the corner of the
dividing line, and less that distance from the scene of one of the
murders. Near to it ran the path my friend had to pursue on his
return at night. In my walks, before the murders, I had passed over
this bridge almost daily, and afterward, during the sealed week,
I had not interrupted my habit, though probably I did not go that
route as often as before, for the weather was getting intensely hot,
and kept me to the woods nearer the house. In these walks, however
frequent or seldom, I was accompanied by old Jack; and though the
body of the boy, at one part of the track, lay not more than ten or
fifteen feet away on our left, hidden in the shrubbery, the dog never
attempted to approach it. I remembered afterward, when everything
was revealed, that as soon as we got over the bridge, he would walk
quietly at my heels, keeping as close to me as possible; but when I
had advanced to the denser wood, that clothed the base of the hill,
he was all alive, plunging in every direction, and opening with a
courageous vigor upon the up-tree, defying squirrels. I blamed him
much for his reticence; for I felt assured that both he and his
namesake had, before that, perhaps on the very day of the deed,
gone into that dense mass and gazed upon the slain. Be it as it
might, his manner changed completely whenever we passed by that red
resting-place.

On the morning of the murders—the 12th of June—I had prepared myself
for sketching (I have that gift, moderately to be sure, but yet
with wonderful kindness extended to me by a beneficent Providence),
intending to make a memorandum in oil colors of a group of rocks a
hundred yards or so beyond (eastward) the murder-rock, and to which I
have already referred. These gray rocks, that I intended to sketch,
can be seen from the road leading up to the hill, by which you reach,
from the direction of the railroad, the outer scarp of the ridge
behind which the girl was found. And this is the route by which the
children may have reached the wood.

As the sun rose higher in the heavens the heat increased in
proportionate intensity, and when I was ready to start, say about
half-past ten o’clock, I was glad to second the persuasions of my
friends not to venture out in such seething weather. Probably it was
providential, or possibly a great error, that I did not accomplish
my original design. To reach my objective point—the picturesque
rocks which had so fascinated my sense of the beautiful—I would have
been obliged to follow the path, first over the low bridge, and
subsequently within six or seven feet of the spot where the body of
Isabella Joyce was first seen. Now, it is a well-ascertained fact,
that the children left their home by the cars sometime about eleven
o’clock on that morning. Their intention was simply to go to May’s
wood, nearer to Boston than Bussey’s. What induced them to change
their purpose, and advance as far as the latter, is _partially_ a
mystery; and though I have a well-digested theory upon that very
important—indeed, all-important—point, I must withhold it; for well
I know that if he is alive, one of the first persons to read this
narrative, on its publication, will be the murderer himself, and I
cannot afford to give him farther chance to plot explanations and
arrange evasion by any word of mine. Leaving home at about eleven,
in three-quarters of an hour, or less, they could reach Bussey’s
wood (for I take it for granted they did not tarry at May’s wood,
persuaded by _some one_ to go farther off from Boston), say, about
twelve o’clock. Give them time to gather leaves and wreathe them, as
they did,—a wreath being found around the boy’s hat, and portions
of wreaths about the murder-rock, where the girl had evidently been
employed in such amusement,—and we reach half-past twelve, or perhaps
a little later; and that is the time I have fixed as the epoch; for
after that, whatever of garlands were woven, were made by hands we
cannot see, but only hope to see. Now, had I not changed my intention
to sketch that forenoon, I would have passed by the path beyond
which, hidden by the woody screen, the girl was afterward sitting,
and also grazed the spot whither the boy had fled, or been thrown;
but it would have been before they had entered the wood; but I would
have been at work at the moment of the killing, or, mayhap, passing
within a few feet of the place where Isabella Joyce was murdered, or,
after being murdered, concealed.

If, in passing at the moment when the deed was in the act of
accomplishment, and I had heard a cry ever so feeble, I would,
unquestionably, have proceeded to inquire into its cause; and had
I come upon the brute, and been at the instant in possession of as
much pluck as I had weapon,—an iron-clasped, well-seasoned, heavy
camp-stool,—he would have fared badly; for, once up, my arm is one
of very admirable development, and my temper not the best calculated
for easy martyrdom, and I might have saved her life at least, and in
doing which, an incident might have happened which the fiend would
not have had time to remember—in the flesh. Or, if I had not passed
at that exact exigency of time, but was engaged in my sketching,
I possibly might have been startled by her outcry for mercy from
him, or appeal to others, and by the manhood that is systematized,
for the defence of the weak and wronged, in this six-foot carcass
of mine, I would have gone with utter ferocity to the rescue; but
with what success crowning my enterprise, is only known to the Great
Inscrutable. However, had the murderer accomplished his bloody
purpose on the girl, and was following the boy, and I had passed
downward to the level bridge, I might have seen that supplemental
tragedy, or arrested it, and taken the culprit red-handed in his
course. I would, under any of these circumstances, have been more
happy in my life, had I been the means of saving two other lives, or
even one, though I question much if it would not have been at the
expense of another life as yet unclaimed by the gibbet.

Barring all these contingencies, and taking it for granted that I
had passed in and out of the wood without detecting anything of
those terrible occurrences, it might have fared ill with me in the
subsequent phases of the affair, for there was a strict investigation
made as to who was in that wood during that day; and beyond a
question, as I would not have attempted to conceal the fact of my
presence, my friends of the police would have laid their justifiable
hands upon me, and placed me in the black category of the suspected.
In mentioning this idea since to my friend the logician of judicial
mystery, the tall chief of the force, he assured me that I would not
have been interfered with, as I did not come in the least within the
principles of his theory of the murder. But that did not exempt me,
as I shall proceed to state.




VII.

SUSPECTED.


Keeping in view the fact of the week’s concealment, my reader will
readily understand that I had no inducement to change my usual
habits, so far as the woods were concerned, and I consequently kept
up my visitations; but as the heat was growing daily more severe, I
did not stroll far from the house, but confined myself in the main
to the wood that reaches from the brook to the westward road in our
front. I avoided thus pretty much my former walks, which included all
that space lying between the flat bridge and the old gray rocks it
had been my intention to make a memorandum of. Now and then, when the
heat of the day had subsided, I went as far down as the stream; for
exceedingly cool and pleasant was it there, and quiet, too, in the
shady evenings. Sometimes I took my sketching apparatus, but oftener
went without it; but it seems that, however I might go, I was not to
do so without creating a terrible suspicion.

The search, prompted by public duty, or instigated by private
curiosity, had apparently worn itself out, when, upon a sweet
morning, some two weeks after the discovery of the bodies, I stepped
out of the front door, and saw, sitting under a shady tree in the
stable-yard, holding converse with my host’s father, a member of
the polician fraternity. Naturally enough, thought I, this vigilant
is wandering round to see what he can pick up of stray hints and
suggestions that may lead to the discovery of the criminal, and the
obtaining of the large rewards that had been tendered by public and
private liberality. I recognized the policeman at once, having often
rode in the car on Tremont Street which he conducted. Circumstances
then induced quite an acquaintance of great kindness between us.
He had been left for dead after one of the great battles in the
Chickahominy, slaughtered by four or five bullets of the Southern
rifles, but picked up and cured, and fated in after days to have the
high prerogative of being put upon my track as one of, if not the
bloody villain of all, concerned in the killing of the Joyce children.

I went over to where the two were chatting under the
bee-laden lime-tree, and, after hand-shaking with the ex-dead
soldier-policeman, I helped to keep up the conversation, which flowed
naturally upon the subject of the universal curiosity. He smiled a
very peculiar smile when he saw me coming to him, and the farmer
smiled, too; but that passed in my mind for nothing more than the
fact of his meeting with an old friend. Ah! little did I think,
while I smoked my pipe and gossiped so sociably with that placid
friend of justice, that it was especially to find who the tall, dark
stranger was, who, with a bowie-knife in hand, and great firing of
his revolver, roved those haunted woods of Bussey. I did not know
until he had shaken hands and gone away; when the farmer told me that
the policeman had come to inquire who it was that was living with
the family, and what my habits were, and where I was on the day of
the murders, etc. My coming out of the house had interrupted this
diabolical inquisition, and, upon seeing me, they both had looked at
each other and exchanged a knowing smile, which, interpreted into
English, could be spelled out thus: “Oh, I know him!” on the part
of the policeman; and “You’re sold this time,” on the part of the
farmer. The fact was that a youth, with his head full of ghosts and
shrieking children, had seen me in the vicinage woods before and
after the murders, and, frightened at my pallette knife and my ball
practice, had hastened to the station at Jamaica Plains and made
report of the terrible bandit and assassin. My friend of the police
has often since laughed with me over the adventure, and I have almost
grown to look upon myself as a gentleman of rather a forbidding
and ferocious cut, and feel prepared to let myself out to some of
my friends at the Studio Building as a model for any species of
brigand, of Italy or Wall Street; or, if it be not treason to say
so, of State Street, Boston. There is something, after all, in being
remarkable. However, it so happened that in one way or another I
became a satellite to the sanguinary meteor that had swept over those
woods, and, had I allowed it, I would have grown into a morbid mass
of melodramatic idiosyncrasy. But the worst had not come yet.




VIII.

THE MURDER-ROCK.


In the mean time, the inquest had been convened, and their verdict of
murder, with the words, “Done by some one unknown,” blazoned to the
world, and stating that twenty-eight stabs had been planted in the
body of the girl, and also announcing a grievously erroneous theory
of the deed. The wounds upon the girl were chiefly in the back, as if
the first assault had been made while she was stooping over her work,
her wreath, perhaps; but afterward, as she despairingly confronted
her assailant, the remaining stabs were given, while she could yet
see the rapid lifting and falling of his arm. It is not an assured
belief in the police theory of the deed, that she was killed upon
the spot where she was discovered; and what specific reasons they
have on that point, I cannot readily get hold of, unless it be based
upon the fact that, had she been attacked only a few paces from a
frequented road, her cries would have exposed the culprit to the risk
of detection, and of that he naturally would have considered; and in
that view the theory has some force, for it certainly was a better
place in which to conceal the body dead, than attack it living. All
around this spot, the trees, as I have previously described, grew
densely, and a new visitor could easily lose his way, so that the
deed may have been perpetrated in the wood, and the corpse drawn to
the concealing formation of the rocks, as they were away from the
path, and not very likely to be visited. However near the truth may
be the theory of the police, there was evidence discovered at the
time the body was revealed of a struggle, and a violent one, at that
very spot among the rocks. There was a sapling bent and broken at the
westward end of the rock, and its breaking was recent,—not done by
any strong current of air, for there had been none, and if there had
been, no wind would break that pliant stem and leave the vulnerable
trees untouched. Had nothing of importance happened at this very
spot, we would have to look for an explanation somewhere else, if
we deemed it of importance. It evidently had been broken within a
few days. Was it broken by some one who had visited the spot ere it
was invaded by the two strangers on that Sunday when the body was
discovered? That is hardly possible, for if it had been so, the body
would have been seen, and the fact disclosed at once of her murder.
Was it broken in the struggle that ensued between the murderer and
his victim? How could she break so tough a bough? Why should he? But
at all events, there it was, some four feet from her body. I saw it,
and testify to its being there, and to the fracture being of recent
date. It might have been broken by the man as he ascended from the
road to the rock, for it stood where he might grasp it in his ascent;
but that could hardly be; and there was no need to break it to give
passage to her body if it was drawn from the spot where she fell,
farther off. It was evidence of something that had happened, but a
testimony of nothing that could properly and naturally attach itself
to the murder. Cattle could not have done it, for they never were
permitted in these woods, though a lad, who guarded a drove down on
the pasture lands below the hill, was examined upon the idea that
a madman had committed the deed in his frenzy, and he happened to
be not of the sound order of brains. He was exempted from further
suspicion, as well he might be.

The spot on which she lay was the convexity of an abrupt whale-backed
rock, running some fifteen feet east and west, and guarding any
object at its base from the sight of persons passing along the road.
Crumbled flints abounded thereabout, and a hard and cruel bed it was
for a sleeper, dead or alive. When I first visited it there were
no marks of so terrific a scene as must have been enacted in her
killing, save the doubtful sapling that lay broken and prostrate; but
above the spot where her piteous head had fallen, some pious visitor
had placed a cross, with a card affixed, that informed the public of
the name of the poor sufferer, and a prayer in her behalf.

One week after the discovery of the body of the boy, the thick
coppice and bushes that had concealed him were stripped away as
memorials of the incident, and the ground about trampled by more than
a thousand people; while the slimy mud oozed up as if eager to suck
in more of the ghastly nutriment that had flown so freely in the
first and final struggle of his death.




IX.

SUSPICION.


As a matter of course, several arrests were made after the delivery
of the verdict by the coroner, and rumor plied her busy trade with
an increased variety of tones. Our rural neighborhood rose at once
into the importance of a public spectacle; and full-orbed curiosity
roved the highways, questioning all kinds of people with all kinds of
interrogatories.

There is always a plentiful supply of ready-made murderers in almost
every well and long-established settlement,—men who look cross and
act cross; who come home at mysterious hours and in mysterious
ways, with slouched hats and shabby shirt-collars; who are not
often if ever seen in church; suspicious fellows; just the sort of
fellows to be talked about whenever anything bad has happened; but,
perhaps, after all said and done, as good as their neighbors, indeed,
sometimes better than the gossips who prate so lavishly about them.
But they serve a purpose; and to that purpose some of them were
put at once; and they bore it, and will have to bear it again. It
is pretty much a matter of clothing. One day the whole thing was
out,—the murderer was known. A neighbor’s farm-hand had fallen in
with another neighbor’s farm-hand, steering his ox-cart upon some
errand of slothful industry, and from the ox-driver he had learned
that the said driver, on the noon of the murder-day, had met the boy
and girl (boy and girl described) on the road between Mr. Motley’s
house on the hill and the blood-stained rock, and soon afterward he
was overtaken by, or he met, a swarthy man with a black mustache,
heated and in haste, pursuing the same line of travel on which he
had met the children. Yes, he could identify that man. He looked
eager and fierce, with his dark skin and twisted moustache; and
those were the real children, and he their murderer. He had seen the
lambs, and he had looked upon the wolf. This story bore the semblance
of possibility; and we were all prepared to hear of an arrest and
identification. By night, however, the narrative had undergone some
modification, but not losing in the vigor and picturesqueness of the
original drawing,—rather otherwise. I immediately sought out the
author of the bulletin, intending, if there was any substance in it
after thorough investigation, to report the facts without delay to
the proper authority.

True, the clodpoll had seen two children on that road; but it turned
out, on cross-examination, that he saw them on the day after the
murder; but the portrait of the eager and mysterious swarth, with his
curled mustache, had been inserted by the more imaginative brain of
the man who repeated the intelligence. So all that card-castle of
discovery fell to pieces. Then, again, a gallant and bullet-maimed
officer was put under the ban; and wonderful items grew into robust
legends, that would have delighted the immortal Sylvanus Cobb,
Senior. The bloody tunic of the man of Mars had been washed by the
terror-stricken nymph of soap-suds, and she was, inasmuch as she had
“talked” of that red evidence, forthwith discharged from the wash-tub
of the family. This belief in the guilt of the maimed officer took
such emphasis of accusation as to enforce from his friends a proof
that he was, on the day of the murder, far away in a Virginia city,
engaged, among other things, in writing his name in a lady’s album.
One evening, after the Sunday’s discovery,—it might have been ten
days,—as I was riding up the hill that led to Mr. Motley’s mansion
gateway, and when I had reached the summit, I came upon a young man
standing a little off the main road. He stood there but a moment;
but in that moment I saw that his eyes swept in that section of his
view which embraced the accursed trees of Bussey’s blood-dyed hill,
but with no look of white affright in them; and then, with his one
arm swinging,—the other maimed in some battle-field of the South,—he
went onward to the gate. That was the officer who had with one arm
committed those dual murders, even while he wrote his name in the
album of a lady in the old city down in the Southern country.

From such things does the monster Gossip make up a verdict, driving
in shame the innocent to a defence, while giving to the one of guilt
the benefit of an arrested search, or a postponed accusation. Driven
from this stronghold of suspicion, away went greedy Accusation down
among the shanties of the Irish workmen, along the line of the
railroad; but nothing there was brought to light beyond the existence
of pigs, poverty, and all the other poetries of Hibernian habitations.

In the midst of this confusion of assertion and contradiction, of
hope and disappointment, a luckless house-painter, of a religions
turn of mind, and a taste perhaps of fluidical enjoyment, fell into
the hands of the inquisitors, and, at the time, it must be confessed,
with some circumstances attendant on his movements and position
that gave color to the theory of his criminality. At his house the
boy and girl had boarded last; from his house they started on their
terrible adventure; and it was said that he was engaged on that day
to do some work at or about May’s wood; and so they linked him with
the two pools of blood out in the shades of the fearful woods. There
was a judicial examination; but naught came out of it to warrant
his detention, and so he was sent about his business rejoicing,
with a clear skirt, and a eulogistic letter from the clergyman
of his parish. The incident seemed rather to have worked to the
advantage of the window-sash artist; and, in the full enjoyment of
his acquittal, and the continued performance of his grave religious
duties, this history must leave him.

And yet another. A young fellow was arrested, and lodged in the
county jail at Dedham, of whom there was not the slightest doubt of
his being the man. When arrested, it was proved that he had been
absent from work on the fatal day; that his hands were scratched,
and his clothes spotted with blood; and that he had been drunk on
that night, driven, it was religiously and philosophically construed,
into that beastly condition by the reproaches of his conscience.
Ah, he was the very man! He looked, in his dimness of drunk and
tatterdemalionism of garb, like a real Simon-pure unadulterated
murderer. The rope was ready, and the coming carpenter dreamed of
a gallows on which he was to swing. But the rope had not yet been
twisted, and the carpenter had only dreamed; for it was established
as follows of his biography: He had been absent from work because
he had no work to attend to; he had been drunk because he loved bad
whiskey and good company; he was scratched and blood-tinted because
his valor and his bottle had led him, at an ill-reputed tavern,
some two or three miles up the road, to attempt the vindication or
assertion of his philosophic, philanthropic, political, or religious
opinions and dogmas, by quotations from the library of his fists and
muscles. So he, too, got out of the clutches of the law, and stands,
or staggers, now, ready at any moment to be arrested upon the same
grounds for any similar offence, or other offence, that his neighbors
may think him fit for.

There was one other case of suspicion, but no arrest; and as it
illustrates the uncertainty of circumstantial evidence somewhat,
and is a little singular, I will relate it. A young fellow of
variegated habits worked in a large rifle establishment near one of
the city limits, distant from the scene of the murders some four or
five miles. One of his habits was to rove into the suburbs, seeking
his recreation according to his fancy. This fact was a strong
circumstance against him; for at that time the theory of the twofold
character of the crime had not been relinquished. Up to the period
of the murders, this youth was the life of the establishment where
he was employed, full of tricks, and jokes, and happy, ceaseless
good-humor. On the morning of the 12th of June, he was absent at
roll-call; but at _one o’clock in the afternoon he was there and
answered to his name_. Whatever had happened, a great change had
come over him. He was no more the jubilant and frolicsome madcap of
the day before, but sullen to moroseness, and his face was strongly
sunburnt, and altogether his whole appearance and behavior indicated
a transformation as singular as it was sudden. When questioned,
he admitted that he had been in the woods somewhere, but would
speak no more upon the subject. In search of any, the slightest
clue to the discovery of the mystery, the police soon came into the
possession of these facts, and suspicion fell darkly around him. Upon
farther inquiry, it appeared that he had converted two files into
poniards,—one he had given to a friend, the other he had kept. The
day afterward, while the police were making these investigations,
and keeping him, as they thought, unconscious of the fact, he
disappeared, and has not been heard of from that day to this. One
of the dirks when applied to the wounds fitted exactly. I have seen
the one he had given to his comrade, now in the desk of the chief. A
long, ugly weapon it is, sharp at the point, and double-edged, equal
to a bowie-knife ere yet it has arrived at the point of complete
perfection of destruction.

_But he was not the man._ Why he fled we may conjecture. Doubtless
he had heard of the advance of the authorities upon his steps, and
feeling that appearances were against him on the first blush of the
investigation, and not being logically disposed to examine into the
importance of minutes and hours wherein lay his absolute defence, he
fled affrighted at his dangerous position. He was innocent, because
he answered his name at _one o’clock_. Had he done those murders he
never could have reached his workshop at that hour unless he had
hired the magic of a necromancer, or been mounted on the fleetest
horse that ever won a race; for the murders were accomplished soon
after one o’clock. Had he not answered to his name at the hour
mentioned, he would have been arrested, though still he would not
have been guilty. _It was another man who did those deeds._




X.

WAS IT A GHOST?


And after that a heavy silence fell over the mysterious murders of
the Joyce children. The officers of justice, to whom I spoke during
that time, looked wise and watchful, and held to the belief that the
malefactor would yet be found.

I come now to a portion of my story that I assure my reader is,
in every respect, true. I know that only one-eighth, or even a
lesser moiety of the world, will give me credence; not that they
will directly question my plighted word, but they will question
the philosophy of which my experience is a phase; but who knows
but that it may be an actual substantiation? So assured was I that
no deception was practised upon me, that it was only the other day
that I made a statement of it to Mr. Kurtz, the chief of police, to
whom I had occasion to speak of my design to write a narrative of my
knowledge and experience in relation to the unhappy incidents of the
murder, putting it to his discretion whether I should go on and give
my writing to the public. I had some misgiving as to the propriety of
saying anything of such importance while it remained in its present
apparent quiescence; and though it is not essential to my purpose to
repeat our conversation, I feel at liberty to say that he favored my
design most cordially. But with regard to my revelation to him of
what I shall soon put my reader in possession of, he did not evince
that unpleasant scepticism which so often borders upon the insolent,
and listened to my narration with the evidences of a respect that at
least bore the semblance of belief. I must confess, however, that he
somewhat startled me when, at the conclusion of my recital, he put to
me this practical question: “_Do you think you could recognize the
man?_” That question, the reader will perceive anon, was somewhat of
a staggerer; but I rallied under the belief that the head dealer in
the positive had not quite grasped the peculiar significance of my
revelation, and since then I have seen something—a something which he
has in his desk, and which may appear hereafter—that would, if I deem
it necessary to test my idea, perhaps enable me to say to him, “I
can.”

It was quite three weeks after the blood of the unhappy Joyce
children had been mixed with the leaves and oozings of that
mysterious wood,—when everything was falling back, in our country
side, to the old order of simple occurrences,—that, upon a still and
clear night, I went out of the cottage where I still lived, and,
taking the two dogs with me, strolled down through the stable-yard,
and past the garden, until I came to the brow of the hill that
formed the apex of my friend’s grass-lands. The brow of the hill
was flat all about me, commencing its declension some hundred and
fifty feet eastwardly from where I stopped, and at the base running
off into a meadow, the opposite side of which was overlooked by the
Bussey wood; and, from where I stood, several pines rose out of the
even surface of the forest, marking, as with an uplifted hand spread
out, the place where the murder of the girl had been done. I have to
be particular in my description seemingly to tediousness, but the
singularity of what transpired leaves me no choice; for better, on
such a matter, not to speak at all than not to speak explicitly. I
resume. The grass was short on the brow of the hill, not over a few
inches in length, improving in quality as the descent reached the
valley. There was a tree near me; but that I left behind, putting it
in my rear some ten paces, when I stopped. On my left was Motley’s
wood,—so often mentioned,—drawing up with its intense shadows, close
to the dividing wall. From the wall to where I stood all was clear
and distinct, save where the shadows, or, more properly speaking,
the shade fell over the ground, though in that shade there was a
secondary light which artists and all thorough students of nature
will recognize. The wall and the wood on my left ran down to that
corner at the creek, which was only a short distance, about fifty
feet, from the spot where the boy had fallen. Some two hundred and
fifty yards away, and close to the corner just mentioned, was a
clump of trees, and then straight before me, without an intervening
object, the dark wood and the hand-like pines, that gloomed, in
deeper gloom than night itself imparts, with all her shadows, over
the gory rock of the girl’s death-bed. My purpose was simply to
take the cooler air from the winnowing trees; for the room where
I had been sitting with the family was oppressive with lamp-light
and the encased atmosphere. I had become so accustomed to the dread
localities, that habit had destroyed, with the first surprise and
horror, all the keen sensations of a mysterious and indescribable
neighborhoodism to the scene. Indeed, I had begun to look upon the
whole affair as a story that had been told to me by some such person
as the “Ancient Mariner.” Had it been otherwise, I never could have
been induced to stay another moment in that house. I beg to assure
everybody that when, at that hour of half-past eight o’clock, I left
the parlor to stroll to the brow of the meadow hill, I did not have
one thought in my head that connected itself with the murders. Other
affairs had turned up, in which I was personally interested, and
my mind, though not dwelling upon them at the moment, felt, if it
felt anything at all, the reverberations of mental discussions upon
the topics I have just spoken of as of personal interest. I think
now, remembering everything, that if I had any peculiar sensation,
it was not superior to that of the two dogs who kept close to my
heels,—for I was there to enjoy the sensuous and physical boon of
air; they, indeed, governed by a higher motive, the society of man.
I was, consequently, if I may say so with perfect self-respect,
in a complete condition of animal existence, and not prepared for
or expecting anything beyond the ordinary condition of animal
and vegetable life. I was, in fine, nearly upon a level with the
inanimate existences around and about me. I am unwillingly compelled
to remind the reader that it was the habit of my host, who did
business in the city, of leaving the train at Laurel Hill Station,
at nine o’clock, as a general thing, and keeping the main road until
he got to the bottom of the hill near to where the brook, so often
mentioned, crosses the road, entered the lowlands at the outskirts
of Bussey’s wood, and thence following the path which led by the
boy’s murder-place, and up the hill-side covered by the Motley wood,
keeping close to the wall until he reached that point of the wall
near which I was standing, passed over it, and was home. It must
also be borne in mind that the two dogs loved their master with a
steadfast affection; in the case of the serene Jack it was a very
jump-about, capering, stump-tail, demonstrative love. Whenever they
saw him in the distance nearing home, or knew by instinct that he was
approaching, though for the moment hidden by the intervening trees
or rocks, they would break away from my minor and only temporary
bonds, and rush to meet him exultingly, and then ensued a scene of
wild confusion and barbaric dog-taming. These two facts remembered, I
will advance with my narrative.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE LOCALITIES.

  1. Steam-Car Line.
  G. Horse-Car Line.
  2. Motley-House.
  3. Gate leading into Pasture and Bussey Wood.
  4, 4, 4, 4. Returning route of my host.
  5. Bridge over public road.
  6. Spot where the Boy’s body was found.
  7. Arch Bridge.
  8. Flat Bridge.
  9. Where I stood.
  10. Where the Apparition stood.
  11. Where the Girl’s body was discovered.
  12. The Gate on Dedham Wood.
  13, 13. Public road to Dedham.
  14, 14, 14, 14, 14. Bussey’s Wood.
  15. Motley’s Wood.
  16. The Wall.
  17. Fence between Bussey’s Wood and the Howard property.
  Arrow. The Creek.
  - - - - - - My route at night to the Murder-Rock.]

Knowing that my host was irregular as to his hours of return home at
night,—sometimes arriving by another than the nine-o’clock train,—I
was not surprised when I saw a figure lean over the wall for an
instant within about twenty feet of me, pause a moment, and then
cross over to the side on which I was. Seeing that he stopped, I
spoke aloud these words, and none other, thinking of none other:
“Hallo, Dan, is that you?”—for, though I could discover the figure
and recognize its movements, there was too great a shade thrown over
the wall to enable me to distinguish even the lineaments of a face so
familiar to me as were those of my friend. To my appeal there was no
reply, and then in an instant the impression came upon me that if it
really was my friend, he was making an essay upon my nerves. So up to
this moment I never had a thought apart from him. I did not notice
the conduct of the dogs, or even think of them, for if I had done
so, _I never would have inquired if it was “Dan;”_ for they would
have been away from me at the first footfall after he had passed
the vicinity of the low bridge down in the hollow of the hill; or,
having not done that, they would have been at the wall the moment
his face looked over it. Nor did I observe that they kept unusually
close to me. I did not even think that, if it was not him, it was
extraordinary that the dogs did not, without more ado, make their
assault; for as a vigilance committee they were extremely zealous in
the discharge of their duty, and woe betide the trespasser upon those
limits after dark if they once got scent of him! That sedate and
usually almost apathetic Jack was equal to a cherubim with a flaming
sword; and as to Jack the fighter, his mind was strictly judicial
with regard to trespass. It was not till afterward, when the climax
of this abrupt and singular apparition was reached, that my attention
was directed to the behavior of my two companions. While I stood
perfectly motionless, waiting for some recognition of my appeal, the
figure advanced slowly in a direct line from the wall, leaving the
shadow, and stopped before me, and not twenty feet away from me. I
saw at once that it was somebody I had never seen before. When in
the light, without even a weed to obstruct my vision, as soon as he
stopped, I called again: “Speak, or I will fire!” I am not naturally
of a blood-letting disposition, but somehow or other that threat came
from me without any power or will of my mind to arrest it. It was
an unmeaning and perhaps a cowardly speech, for he was alone, while
I was armed with two powerful dogs, either one of whom would have
vanquished him, had I but said the word. Nor had I a pistol to carry
out, had I been so rash as to intend it, my foolish demonstration.
It was at this period I observed especially the behavior of the
dogs. Up to this time they had been quiescent, lying upon the grass
in the full enjoyment of its freshness; but now they both got up,
and I felt on each side of me the pressure of their bodies. They
were evidently frightened, and, by the casual glance I gave them,
induced to do so by the sensation of their touch, I saw that they
were looking with every symptom of terror at the figure that stood so
near us without a motion. And the figure. It never once turned its
head directly toward me, but seemed to fix its look eastward over
where the pine-trees broke the clear horizon on the murder-hill.
This inert pose was preserved but for a moment; for, as quick as
the flash of gunpowder, it wheeled as upon a pivot, and, making one
movement, as of a man commencing to step out toward the wall, was
gone! To my vision it never crossed the space between where it had
stood and the outline of the shade thrown by the trees upon the
ground. One step after turning was all I saw, and then it vanished.
Can I describe this figure you will ask; and my reply is that I can,
but not exactly in such a way as to satisfy the chief’s business-like
interrogatory. Before I go any farther, I must say that, as I had
nothing to do in getting up this apparition, I do not see how any
one can poke fun at me simply because I was there to see it. A man
sees a star fall; he has no agency in the eccentric transaction, and
is he to be ridiculed because there happens to be a tack loose in
the celestial carpet whose dropping out he witnesses and tells of,
and happens not to be astronomer enough to explain? Here was a moral
and physical tack loose somewhere and somehow, and I had struck my
vision on its point. What I saw I relate exactly as it happened, and
nothing more, though I may be induced to meet the usual objections
to the possibility of its occurrence, in a later portion of this
narrative. I could, if I felt so inclined, stop my recital and talk
by the folio about this affair; but it was a very different matter at
the moment when that something, which would not reply to me, stood
in the night light, clear and distinct as a marble statue, and cast
one glance over toward the hill that held among its gray rocks a
stain that would last there forever. But I half promised to describe
this figure, this appearance, this apparition, and a few words will
answer. It looked like painted air to begin with. An artist, sitting
by my side and following my ideas, might render it to the life or
death; but he would have to blend his matter-of-fact pencil with the
vague vehicles of spiritualistic imagination. In the first place,
there was no elaborate toilet; indeed I could not make out the
fashion of the garment, taking it for granted that it was draped in
the usual costume, being too absorbed by the complex and somewhat
agitated train of thought which, commencing with the assumption
that it was my friend, and which was suddenly relinquished, leaving
me exposed to the rapid transitions of intellectual deductions so
singularly called into action and so totally at variance with my
habitual mental or nervous equanimity. I felt as a drowning man might
feel who, admitting the fact that the water has got the master of
him, lets that primary incident take care of itself, and looks only
to some object by whose aid he may relieve himself from the desperate
catastrophe. I was occupied more in the effort to recognize a human
being in the figure that was before me than in making a tailor’s
analysis of his apparel. One thing was evident,—he looked dark-gray
from head to foot. Body he had, and legs, and arms, and a head; but
the face I could not distinctly see, as he turned it from me; but
there was an outline such as can be traced in shadows thrown by a dim
lamp upon a rough-plastered wall,—and that is all I can say about
it. Of course it is unsatisfactory, but I had no means or time for a
fuller diagnosis.




XI.

THE TESTS.


The effect left upon me when I found myself alone was not exactly
that of alarm, but rather a determination to test, if it might be
possible, this appearance or delusion, or whatever it might be; and,
instantly turning from the spot, I walked back to the house. The
presence of persons in the room, the light, the furniture itself,
had an influence to calm whatever of perturbation I was sensible of
from the strange interview through which I had so rapidly passed.
I debated now in my mind with regard to the test I should apply.
Was it a ghost? That was in part the question, but not the entire
inquiry; for I could not come all at once to the conclusion that it
was an undoubted visitant from the dead man’s realm. While pondering
over these doubts, an adventure of my youth came vividly back to my
recollection, and seemed to offer itself as a means by which I should
judge of my present experience; and, thinking it may amuse my reader,
I see no reason why I should not add it to my narrative.

A goodly number of years ago, I was a student at a college in the
State of Maryland, not far from the town of Gettysburg. From the
plateau of the mountain, at the base of which the college was
situated, I have been told, the smoke as it actually poured from the
guns, not after it floated miles away, was seen during the progress
of the great and inexplicable battle that has made the town one of
historic importance.

Upon a certain occasion, it being a holiday, I went over to the
neighboring village of ——, intending to have a free-and-easy time
with smuggled cigars,—smoking being a virtue unrecognized by the
dignitaries of the college, and forbidden under heavy pains and
penalties within the sacred and unfumigated precincts. I had other
objects, perhaps, justifiable to youth, and unnecessary to dilate
upon now. At all events, I was away from college, and away I
remained until the advancing evening warned me that I had somewhat
of a walk before I could get back. There were two ways by which I
could return,—one by the common county road, and a shorter but more
difficult route by a narrow path leading partially over and along the
mountain ridge. I chose the latter. So I bade adieu to the village
and its barber, who was our contraband chief in the cigar smuggle,
and at whose house I had enjoyed a comfortable but uncollegiate
dinner, and with whose pretty daughter (all girls are pretty to
college boys) I had taken a precious lesson in flirtation, almost
engaging myself to marry her after I had graduated and seen my way
clearly to parental acquiescence. Poor barber’s daughter! I wonder
how many other lads made innocent love to her and vaguely hinted
similar magnificent proposals? But away I went up the mountain, under
the trees, in and out with the path, by the rocks, by the torrent,
and ere I had advanced a mile, the moon (did you ever see a Middle
States’ moon?) had stolen into the skies. The wind rose gently with
the moon, as if it would make soft music for her, and the clouds
accompanied her in muslin toilets; and so with the moon and the wind
and the misty clouds I pursued my walk, smoking the last cigar of
that blissful holiday.

My path led by the church, belonging to the college, half way up the
mountain, and afterward by the old graveyard, walled in,—a crumbling
and a neglected wall, over which you could step easily into the
silent city. Arrived at this graveyard, I stopped and looked down
upon the college. The lights were gleaming there; and, upon the fatal
theory that a pleasure enjoyed under ban is sweeter than pleasure
permitted, I resolved to finish my cigar before I made the final
descent. But where could I smoke so near the college and be free from
detection? Lingering on the path I might be detected and reported,
and that would be fatal. In the graveyard? Who ever ventured there
except the dead and the mourners, or a law-breaker? The very place I
thought; and so I crossed over the shattered wall, and, selecting
an entablature that was a sort of mortuary dining table supported
by four brick legs, I stretched myself and fell into that luxurious
enjoyment which only a true smoker can realize,—and of that class I
was then, and am now.

The moon, by this time, was nearly above me, and so bright that a
woman could have threaded her needle by its wonderful effulgence. I
had not been many seconds on the table-like slab, before I heard a
sound that somewhat startled me; but, after a moment’s reflection,
I concluded it was the wind moaning round the old church that was
at the upper end of the cemetery. Quieting myself with this belief,
I pulled away at my cigar, now nearly at its last gasp, when I
heard a repetition of the sound; but this time it seemed to proceed
directly from underneath the slab! The affair was getting peculiar,
and my nervous system was undergoing that singular process so well
expressed by the phrase goose-fleshy; for if the sound did come
from under the slab it could not be the wind, for it was not like
anything the wind could do with such materials. But while I debated
the question, the utterance struck upon my ear again, and this time
it was an unmistakable groan, as if human or inhuman lips had given
it expression. The goose-flesh arrangement continued to develop
itself, but not to such an enormous wrinkle as to prevent my peeping
over the side of the stone to see if I could catch a sight of the
groan or the groaner. I feel convinced, though I did not test it,
that the extraordinary phenomena so often alluded to by novelists
did occur, and that my hair did stand on end, when I saw directly
under me, out in the moonlight, a battered, withered leg covered by
a dingy, mould-soiled piece of cloth, with a boot attached, but such
a boot that no human ingenuity of St. Crispinism could repair. The
boot looked like the skeleton of a boot, as the pantaloons looked
like a skeleton of pantaloons. They were to all intent and purposes
supernatural fractures. While I looked, the groaning was repeated,
and simultaneously another leg, another piece of mould-stained
cloth, another tattered boot was thrown out of the deep shadow and
softly placed crosswise over the other, following the example of
knight-errantry sculpture. I had stretched myself, supported by
my hands, to the edge of the slab, and could see distinctly these
movements and appearances; and my mind was so completely divided
between the physical results and the naturally suggestive idea of the
supernatural, as to leave me in a medium state of amused courage and
inherent superstition.

But it was necessary for me to act, and so, without further
hesitation, I supported my body on my arms reversed, and made a
long leg of it, stretching myself entirely free, of course, from a
contact with the mouldy-looking arrangement that protruded into the
moonlight. Having established my position at a proper distance of
observation, I at first hesitated whether to go away or not,—a vague
and not unnatural fear suggesting the idea of flight; a positive but
artificial conviction determining me to remain and see the matter
out. One of the greatest and best lessons, and for which there should
be a professorship established in every college in the country, is
the lesson of self-command. Make it at the commencement of your life
a speciality, and it will serve you in after years as a guardian of
your honor, and sometimes of your life itself. It makes you well
behaved, careful of the feelings of others, tolerant and independent,
and is the safeguard of a woman’s virtue and the potent spear by
which truth may be distinguished from error. By a strong effort I
reached the point of self-command, and so my legs were as firmly
fixed to the spot, as those limbs of mystery peeping out from the
entablature of the tomb. My next act was to catch hold of the feet
and pull at them,—pull the whole affair into the light and determine
what it was. When I had drawn this moaning body forth, I lifted it
by a vigorous effort, and stood it against the tomb. The head fell
backward and the moon shone full upon the face. The face was swollen
with a livid kind of puffiness, and the eyes closed fast. I placed my
hand upon the forehead and felt the moisture, clammy and revolting.
The hands fell heavily by the sides, and a tremor ran over and
shook the figure as if with palsy, and groans and moans came quick,
and as they came I shook the thing by its shoulders; but there was
no awakening as yet of the closed orbs and apparently dead brain. I
worried myself no longer, but drew the loathsome figure away from the
grave-stone and commenced an advance toward the broken wall. It moved
heavily, but at last we reached the boundary, and with difficulty
got over it. The mass was passive; I was very positive. I went down
the mountain, passed the college, and, reaching a cottage, I rapped
upon the door. A woman opened it, and, giving my ghost a push, he
staggered or fell into her arms, or upon the floor, I know not which,
and this dingy spectre was no more nor less than the hard-drinking
husband of one of the college outside servants. Here, then, was the
test case which came back to me, with all its vivid incidents and
extraordinary suggestions, to help me out of my present dilemma? In
the adventure of my youth there was at first a large supply of the
ghostly element, and, had I fled the investigation, perhaps nothing
would have disabused my mind of its supernatural character. The
man would in all probability have been left until early morning in
undisturbed possession of his unique apartment, and, when restored to
his senses, would have been the very last to initiate a revelation.
It would have been a confession fraught with serious consequences,—in
the first place with regard to his situation under the college,—and
it would not have contributed largely to his domestic felicity.
To peach on me would have been to implicate himself, and, as
drunkenness is morally a worse crime than the smoking of a cigar,
he would have been the first to have suffered decapitation. It was
my self-possession alone that turned one of the most reliable ghost
incidents into a tale of beastly absurdity. If I was so near seeing
a ghost’s legs on that night, which turned out to be no ghost’s legs
at all, why might there not be some chance of my visitor on the brow
of the hill to-night turning out to be some vagrant more wildly drunk
than the drunken college-phantom?




XII.

TESTS.


I again left the house, having tarried there not over ten minutes,
resolved to revisit the locality where the puzzle had presented
itself. After calling the dogs,—for I wished them to be with me to
make the test complete, and also to observe their conduct,—I searched
in every likely place to find out if my friend had not returned;
for I still had a vague suspicion running in my head, that after
all he might possibly have succeeded in some unaccountable way, in
enveloping me in the maze of a ghostly manifestation. But I searched
for him in vain; and, to settle all doubt relative to his agency in
the affair, I will state that he did not return home that night until
ten o’clock or after, driving by the road leading through Jamaica
Plain.

I then went down the garden road, and stood upon the very spot I had
previously occupied. As I said before, I wished to see how the dogs
would act should the figure make its appearance; and even before I
reached my former position I was struck by the reluctant manner in
which they followed me,—but I managed to get them on, and so there we
three were; but where was that eccentric fourth?

He was not there. Some people will say I had been controlled by the
solemn influences of the night and the ghastly associations blended
with the scene and all its gloomy neighborhood, and consequently
was in a very fit condition to receive a demonstration and accept
it as supernatural; but I will at all times maintain that when I
first went down that garden walk that night, and saw the form that
I took to be that of my friend, I was, as I have previously most
minutely and accurately explained, not in that spiritualistic,
sympathetic condition. But on the second visit I confess that I was
in a better temperament to receive the influences of night and scene
and associations, and to which you may add the incident which gives
such a weird aspect to my narrative. In the first, my condition was
natural and eminently composed, and yet I had the vision; in the
second, with all my nerves stretched in expectancy, I saw nothing.
Now, how was that? I stood still as a living man can stand, and fixed
my eyes upon the wall where the figure had first appeared; but all
was moveless and silent. The old wall and the shadows looked as they
did before. I turned quick as thought, and tried to surprise any
faint glimpse of anything that might have come to the spot where the
apparition had stopped in the interval of my withdrawn attention;
but there was nothing but the short grass backed by the dark wood
where the deeds of blood had been perpetrated. I even looked to see
if anything was lying down to avoid my scrutiny, walked over to the
spot, and then in a straight line to the wall, supposing it was
possible I might find some trace of a presence. I found nothing.

I was therefore satisfied as far as this test was carried; but still
I was not content. A strange desire, which I possibly did not attempt
to check, had taken possession of me to carry my investigation
farther; but it was a wild, and, all things considered, a fearful
experiment; at least I so viewed it when it was first suggested to
my mind. It must be understood that I only submitted even to the
contemplation of this ultimate and extraordinary test after I had
determined that what I had seen was not a visual delusion or in fact
a human being. A sense of profound conviction seized me and impelled
me to admit that something had occurred to my experience beyond my
ability to reconcile by the ordinary rules of explanation. In fine, I
for the first time during the progress of these transactions suddenly
connected the mystery with the murders. I had given common sense and
resolute examination a fair chance to account for that abrupt whirl,
that sudden vanishing, that terror of the dogs, their failure to
recognize their master, or to attack the stranger,—either of which
they would have done under ordinary circumstances,—and now I had no
power to resist the conclusion that was so powerfully forced upon
me. I pretend to no peculiar bravery, though not entirely destitute
of that quality, shared with man by the rat-terrier and the rat
himself, having enough of it for all the needs and purposes of a
very good-natured and non-aggressive man; and the chief feature of
my courage is, my not having a fear of myself; that is, I am not
backward in entertaining myself with proposals to undertake matters
which, to some other men, of abler judgment, might appear a little
too venturesome; and here I was about to attempt a task that possibly
only an animal should engage in, knowing nothing of human mysteries,
or a pauper, for a reward; and even the pauper I think would have
debated longer than I did whether he would not rather steal the
recompense, or starve a little longer. It was no less a thing than to
visit the spot off in those gloomy woods where the body of the girl
was found lying among the rocks.

This fancy was of a twofold character. One was, that since I was in
for testing, I would go over there and test my nerves; the other
was an idea that, since I had been launched into the regions of the
marvellous, possibly it might be made manifest to me there in those
deep seclusions, on that spot,—a revelation that would lift the veil
of mystery that enshrouded the fate of the two unfortunates, and also
unravel the difficult maze in which I had been involved. Perhaps
I would see that figure there,—that figure a parent, or relative
of the girl, who had come to me that night, impressing me to the
interview. I could not but think of the spiritualistic theory of the
sympathies between the living and the dead,—the theory indeed of all
Christian, and, for that matter, of all heathen sects, and there, and
nowhere else, I might have revealed to me the name of the man who had
done those hideous acts. Surely, I was in a singular predicament. I
had either seen a ghost, or I had not, and I felt unwilling to let
things remain in the condition of unsettled doubt, not caring for the
rest of my life to be the prosy relator of a ghost story, which my
listener could accuse me of having left unsettled and unfinished for
the want of nerve to examine to its climax. Determined upon putting
my duplex test into execution, I returned to the house to inform my
friends that I was going out for a stroll,—not an unusual thing with
me,—and to make some little arrangement that I thought personally
needful in case of untoward accidents; for, independent of the
peculiar intention I was about to fulfil, there were reasons why I
should not go unprepared for physical contingencies.

The whole country, it will be remembered, was in a very disorganized
state,—many people thrown out of employment, and others returned from
scenes of strife and bloodshed, with an education habituated to deeds
of violence. So I armed myself with a companion charged to the lips
with a counteracting but defensive species of explosive violence,—a
thing that could speak seven times, and always with effect if the
delivery was good.

On the theory of testing my nerves, in connection with the ghost
theory, I at once resolved to dispense with the dogs, for their
presence would have been companionship and a reliance apart from
my individuality. My pistol was not taken for the ghosts, but for
ghost-makers. Now that I reflect upon it all in my cooler moments,
I must frankly admit that, after what had happened, this trip had
something of the fearful in it, which my placid reader will not have
the heart to deny, and nothing would induce me to repeat it, unless
there were motives of a higher grade than those which ruled me then.
It was, in fact, an enterprise totally at variance with common sense
and common personal convenience and comfort. It was now about nine
o’clock. No change had occurred in the shape of the night,—that is,
no clouds had culminated in the skies, and yet no moon had been
conjured up by astronomy, or by lovers’ incantations. It was a lonely
walk down the hill, over the very spot where my silent visitor had so
lately stood to look at these very woods,—that very spot to which my
steps were now directed. Darker it was down in the valley, with the
hill to my back and the great mass of foliage apparently near enough
for me to touch; but on I went, giving no time for reconsideration,
on to the fence which I crossed, and then I was one of the black
things in the intense gloom of the forest.

Not a sound but the crackling of dead branches under my feet in the
pathway,—sounds that I felt might send the notice of my approach
to whatever was waiting for me by the cross and the immortelle on
the murder-rock. Though the broken branches were sentinelling my
advent, I kept on, with a cold shiver now and then quivering all over
me, but never for a moment going deeper than the skin. Brain and
heart as yet were true to their purpose of folly, that seemed like
madness to me then. It did not take me long to reach the objective
point of my journey. I have described the spot in another part of
this narrative, and therefore will not repeat its topographical
characteristics; suffice to say that it was somewhat different in
sentiment than when I had looked upon it in the sunshine. Then I had
seen a visitor sitting quietly and unconcerned on the ridge of the
rock, looking down, with a cigar between his lips, at the spot—always
a thrilling sight—where the girl had fallen; and I had seen young
girls munching sandwiches around the scene, and jabbering of the
massacre of one of their mates; but now, with nothing there but the
night and the spirit of the event, the weird-looking trees with their
limbs reaching hither and thither in such a way as to make me feel
that I was beneath the dome of an iron-barred prison-room. I hold it
to be utterly impossible for any man, unless he is brutalized and of
a sympathetic nature no higher than a quadruped, to be alone in such
a place, with such a preface as it had been my fate to meet with,
and not experience an accelerated throb of his pulse. I do not say
that he is necessarily bound to be frightened, but something so near
akin to it that only our self-conceit prompts us to draw the line of
difference.

I was there to submit myself to one test, and apply the other to
what I had previously seen. The one I was already undergoing; for it
may readily be believed that an immense amount of subtle pressure
was placed upon me. The accumulated proofs of a lifetime, as to the
existence of unearthly presences and imperfectly disproved legends
of ghostly visitations and adventures, bore down upon me with the
wizard night and spectral forms of trees. And when I placed myself
exactly on the blood-stained spot, I looked around with the certainty
of being confronted by the apparition whose existence I was there to
determine. Now, thought I, is the opportunity,—this the place for a
revelation. What other man will ever come again with so foolhardy a
brain and give the witnesses or the victim a chance so appropriate
and so melodramatic? If any one does venture upon the trial, to a
scene so fresh with gory associations, from my soul I pity him, and
would blame; but this species of curiosity is not generally diffused
throughout society. But I was there and awaited whatever issue might
transpire. I was doubtless in a sublimated condition of rapport,
as the mediumistic philosophers term it; a human instrument of a
thousand strings, that the feeblest ghost might play upon with ever
so withered a hand. But none came to inform or frighten me, and not
a sound other than the low clicking of the wood insects broke the
magic ring of silence that closed in with such profundity of pathos
this terrible situation. To attempt to go away, I found required more
nerve than to get there; for now I must turn my back and place myself
in the traditional position in which cowardice is said to place its
victims; but, with the cold creepings renewed with double energy, I
turned and walked with an excited composure away from the spot, down
the hill, through the gateway that opens eastward into the Dedham
road, and then, with half a dozen sighs of relief, straight home.

“Can you recognize that man again?” from the chief, is always
sounding in my ear. What man? Did I not go to the place where he
should have met me, if he was in any way witness to that murder?
Sometimes I think it was the man himself, but not in the flesh. If in
the flesh, he never would have come so near the scene of his hideous
mischief; if in the spirit, then he had committed suicide, or died
of the disease of terror, and was wandering in the accomplishment
of a curse and an expiation. Who knows but what it may be so, and
who can say it is not so, any more than I can assert it is so? Or
was it the father, who, since I wrote the description above, I have
heard was no longer living? If it was the father’s spirit, then I
have something to say about that matter; and when I said that I
could recognize the man, I meant I might be able to do so if there
is a photograph of him that I could get at. Close and open your
eyes quickly while looking at a person passing by your window, and
you will have some idea of the view I had of the profile of this
vision. I have seen in official possession, filed away among the
other papers appertaining to this case, something that evinced that
this dead father was taking active interest in the search after the
murderer. I am not at liberty to recite the mode of that interest,
nor am I called upon by any logical process to affirm that he does
take an interest, or to deny that he does. I only know that there
are similar circumstances connected with this phase of the subject,
that a very large class of the community would attach importance to,
but all involved in such a labyrinth of mystery as to defy positive
recognition and the ordinary tests of evidence.

Assume as a fact that a spirit, taking to itself the form of a man,
had appeared to me, there at once grows out of that admission this
other question: Why should so extraordinary a circumstance, such a
miracle, in fact, have been developed? For what purpose was that
spirit there? Denying, as I do, that it would have been a miracle, I
take up the question and attempt my reply. In the first place, I am
no sectarian; least of all am I a spiritualist; and if I am anything
of a creed man,—which the Lord grant I am!—I am of a church that
is founded on the system of marvels, as indeed, for that matter,
are all churches, Christian or Pagan. The Saviour of mankind, let
me with all reverence say, is admitted to have been duplex in
character,—mortal for our sympathies, divine for our worship. If
he suffered death,—which some doubt he did, but only the semblance
of death,—his spirit was no more existent after his execution than
before it, and consequently he had power to rise from the sepulchre
where they had laid him and appear to the soldiers and to the holy
women. That he did appear we have the evidence of the great apostles
and the contemporary legends of the Roman narrators. Indeed, it is
not only asserted that he was manifest after death, but that ghosts
walked the streets of Jerusalem, and when the veil of the temple
was rent, the graves gave up their dead. These were the phenomena
of a sublime epoch,—an epoch that in the death of a God was grander
and more inexplicable than the incident of the earth’s formation,
and that of the stars and skies that are over it. All events have
their purposes, and I can see the purpose here that should evoke
these wonders. His mission had reached the point where the spiritual
manifestations must overshadow the recollections of his corporeal
existence, and prove to the world, by tangible exhibition, that
beyond the grave there was a life. The Scriptures teem with the
legends of spirits,—of ghosts, if you like that word better,—and
men of all the known wisdom of those days believed in them, because
they seemed to have seen them. Why should they have been prevalent
then, and not now? Who can dare answer that question, or dare deny,
with proof to back the denial, that such things never did exist,
or, existing, appear to human vision? As well tell me that the same
vegetables did not have life then as now, the same qualities of sand
and superficial soil and rocks; and indeed have not certain plants,
that were for centuries lost to human cultivation, been revived?
Nothing is lost, nothing changes, though we call reproduction change,
and flatter ourselves that we have spoken a great philosophy. Why is
the world full of ghost-stories outside of the Scriptures? Because
ghost-stories have been veritable facts,—these lay ghost-stories
travelling alongside of the clerical ghost-stories of the Inspired
Book, and substantiating to the common appreciation of all mankind
the veritableness of the Bible. Who knows but that they are the
vehicles by which Supreme Wisdom conveys to the intelligence of
the unwise and the unlettered, the solemn truth of a hereafter? Who
so arrogant in his wisdom as to be able to rise to the proof that
it may not be so? The atrocity of self-conceit is more terrible
than the atrocity of ignorance; the one is an active crime, the
other a passive submission. The impossible means the possible. It
is a favorite dogma with the utilitarian doctors, that nothing is
impossible to the genius of man. Is there anything impossible to our
Creator, other than the impossibility of making a mistake? If man
invents a machine which defies all the previous laws, or theories
supposed to be laws because nothing had happened to prove that they
were not laws, are we to reject it on that account, and because it
happens to be beyond our uneducated and unprepared capacity? Is
the Creator of all to be limited and only his creature unlimited?
How often, in the midst of a great accident, has not some mind
suggested a redress totally at variance with the rules by which the
accident was produced, creating a surprise to usual circumstances,
and checking the catastrophe before it could recover its equanimity
and prearranged and understood mode of conduct! Cannot the Maker
interpose at his pleasure such surprises? But we will be told that he
never interrupts the harmonious action of his great rules. Where do
we find these rules so as to enable us to say when they are infringed
or deviated from? How long have we been in possession of the habits
of the beaver and the bee? and yet they were a part of his great
rules and system of order. Every day science is bringing new lights
to bear upon old ant-hills as well as upon old mountains, and the
shadow of a fern-leaf on a rock, the ghost of a fish-bone in a strata
are sufficient for a theory on the momentous and mysterious history
of our own illustrious race. If scattered bones of a mammoth, when
reunited by the wire-work of a naturalist, are evidences of Noah’s or
Deucalion’s flood, where are we to draw the line upon circumstantial
evidence and testimony in substantiation of other facts and
possibilities?

There are more tangible proofs of the existence of ghosts than there
are of the existence of Noah’s ark. The hush of the night, the
solitude of forests, the loneliness of limitless prairies suggest, to
the most unimaginative mind something more than the physical sense of
desertion and isolation; and yet that is no proof that a mystic band
of weird spirits are with you in those dreary hours and wanderings;
but whatever is suggested proceeds from a thing that is able to
suggest, and whatever the mind grapples with of the material or the
immaterial exists in some form or other, intangible, but no less
existent. The opponents of the theory of the existence of ghosts, and
their power to appear, use one word that conveys all their logic,
and that word is the contemptuous vulgarism, Bosh! And then they
will advance with weaker argument the logic of bold contradiction,
as if they had just returned from a trip into the regions of the
future and an examination of the powers and rules and intents of the
Providence, with an exact catalogue of his attributes and short-hand
notes to be written out at their leisure, of all he has done, is
doing, and is going to do. Faraday could analyze vapor, but, with
all his retorts and crucibles and chemicals, he never could weigh a
scintilla of a human thought. Such men grasp vapor in their hand,
and will tell you of what it is composed; and they tell you truly,
and we, though consciously ignorant, have no foothold for a doubt.
The preacher rises in his pulpit, and, from his sectarian books,
and more sectarian training, interprets to you the sublimest dogmas
of the Apocalypse; and woe to the member of his flock who raises an
impious question against his dictatorial assertions. But if your
neighbor,—near whom you have been living all your life, whose word
stands pre-eminent in all matters of business, into whose care you
would place your wife or your daughter, and to whose honor you would
leave it to execute your last will and testament, in behalf of the
loved ones,—was to tell you that he had seen a ghost, and calmly
relate the incident with the proofs and the tests, you would be very
likely to laugh in his face, and tell the next person you met that
you were afraid neighbor so-and-so was a little weak in the upper
story, or was telling what was not true.

The elegant dictators of theory speak of the belief in the existence
of ghosts as the “vulgar belief in ghosts and goblins,” and get rid
of it in that summary manner. But the very fact that it is vulgar,
as they term it, is a strong point against them. If we could get the
Scriptures pure and exempt from mixed and muddled interpretations,
free from the garbage of a host of foreign lingual transformations,
and in its original “Vulgate,” we should not have the world troubled
with more creeds than they can invent gods to preside over, or devils
to operate in. The word vulgar is not to be used always as inclusive
of the “low-born and the uneducated.” The vulgar in this country
believe in the imperialism of the ballot-box; in Russia and Prussia
and England, and elsewhere, of monarchies, in the divine right of
kings; and demagogues in all realms, like dogmatists of all creeds,
have no faith at all, but use the belief of the masses for their own
purposes. With the majority of mankind exists the supreme attribute
of common sense, and yet they all, more or less, believe in the
existence of ghosts. The hair-splitters of theology and other ethics,
for sake of discipline, would drive the old stage-coach where the
people would rush the locomotive; and as in the beginning, fishermen
and carpenters were the recipients of divine truths, or the media of
revelations, so now, while abstract and abstruse sciences occupy the
minds of the enlighteners, the plain truths of Christian doctrine are
held with other beliefs, relatively necessary to our nature, in the
legendary, gossiping, and enduring belief of the masses.

It will be asked, For what purpose do your ghosts appear? To
accomplish what end that human intelligence cannot effect? I say,
again turn back to your Bible, and you will have your questions
answered.

There are other needs now that did not then exist. Society is not the
same; the ordinary laws of justice, of health, of life itself, are
not the same. There are a thousand more appliances now, than there
were, by which human life can be destroyed or preserved,—gunpowder,
steam, machinery, with their countless adjuncts of power, on one
side, and chemistry, with ether, and other discoveries, on the other.
And as science becomes the assistant to the conveniences of mankind,
in the same ratio it becomes his slayer. Events transpire now that
were not dreamed of in former days, because of the increased forces
that act upon latent ideas. Sixty, fifty, forty years ago, though
Death had his ample harvest, he had not the immense scythes of
steamboats and railroads with which to do his work of destruction;
and now and then we have isolated facts published, with all the
details of authenticity, of dreams that warned a voyager from the
water or a traveller from the cars, when afterwards it has proved
that disaster befell both modes of travel. The remedy is to the need,
and who can say that there have not been innumerable warnings, by
visitations and dreams, of which the public never has any account,
owing to the seclusion of the parties, or their natural reticence and
unwillingness to have their stories made the subject of a paragraph
and a sneer?

There are purposes in the Almighty wisdom which we cannot fathom,
and religion herself, speaking from the misty summits of theological
controversy, cries to her votaries to have faith where they
cannot have comprehension; or, in other words, to believe without
understanding. Do I, a ghost-seer, ask for more?

You ask, for what purpose did this ghost—if ghost it was—cross your
path? I could retort, and ask why that man—if it was a man—crossed
my path? But I affirm that there was a purpose, and though I did not
see it then, I may see it soon. Who can tell but what this revival
of that mysterious horror may not lead to renewed activity in the
police department? Who knows but it may be read by the murderer, and,
awakening in his breast the smouldering embers of remorse, make him
do those eccentric things which lead vigilance to observe and assist
in the detection of the guilty? I never would have written this
narrative if that misty figure had not confronted me on that night,
and perhaps it may have been his intention to excite in me the idea
of writing out these transactions, and thus awakening the slumbering
or pausing authorities to a more active investigation.

Why did he select me, if I was not appropriate to his purpose? And
I will say now, and with all truth, that, from that time to this
moment, I have been haunted with a vague urging to write this work,
and give it to the public; and now that I have done so, it may so
happen that I will see that thing once more coming to assure me,
in some way consistent with his condition, that his intention, so
far as I was concerned as an agent, is accomplished. I shall not be
surprised if it should occur.




XIII.

THE DOCTOR’S STORY.


Let me relate, as briefly as I can, a very singular incident that
happened some years ago in Baltimore. The narrator was a man with
whom I had been brought up from youth to manhood. His father was my
father’s family physician, a doctor of high standing; and the son who
told and acted a part in the story was then a practising physician
in Washington, where he still practises. A party of us were together
at the house of his father, and the ghost subject was introduced. My
friend argued against their existence, as most doctors do; but in the
midst of our conversation he said that, notwithstanding his theory,
he must tell us of a remarkable occurrence that happened within his
own personal experience.

Two years previously he had occupied the professor’s chair of
Practical Anatomy (I believe that is the phrase) in the Medical
College of Baltimore, though then not more than twenty-three or four
years of age. His remarkable skill, systematized by study in the
famous medical schools of Paris, had justified his selection for the
important post. During this period, or some time before my friend
accepted the professorship, the mob had broken into the medical
college, actuated by a sentiment of horror at the idea of the bodies
of their dead friends being stolen from the grave and placed under
the knife, and subjected the faculty and students to great personal
peril. The riot being quelled, it was determined to make such
arrangements as would entirely elude the suspicions of the people.

For this purpose the upper portion of the building was converted into
a large dissecting-room, with the windows hermetically sealed, so
that no light could be perceived from the outside, and consequently
lead to a renewal of an attack. Thus at night the faculty was secure
from observation, and whatever of light was needed during the day
came through glass inserted in the roof. To add to the security,
a private stairway was arranged, so that if the mob did break in
by the only publicly known entrance, the students and professors
would be enabled to escape. The egress to this private stairway from
the lecture-room was by a door, the bolt of which, shooting into a
socket, was within the room, and could not be moved from without.
This private escape-door was at the other end of the dissecting-room.
And this is my friend’s story:—

He had made arrangements with the janitor of the medical college,
who was also a sexton, to have the body of a female on the
dissecting-table on a certain night, as he wanted to make some
specific studies for his lecture of the next day. On the evening when
the body was to be ready for him, he had accepted an invitation to
a small party, at the house of one of the professors, and thither
he went, pre-arranging with one of the students to leave at eleven
o’clock, and go together to accomplish his examination. At the
appointed hour he made a sign to his companion, and they withdrew.
Arriving at the college, he entered by his pass-key, found a couple
of candles on the table in the lower hall, ascended the usual
stairway, and, arriving at the door of the lecture-room at the top of
the building, stopped for a moment to hang up their cloaks and hats.
Then he applied the key to the lock, and entered with the candles
lit, of course. A deep gloom pervaded the dissecting-room,—a gloom
that was increased by the feeble light of the two candles, and upon
the table lay, under the fearful cloth, the subject for the night’s
work.

Without any other thought in their minds save the plain
matter-of-fact idea of work, they advanced to the
dissecting-board,—the doctor towards the head of the corpse, the
student passing round to the other side. As the latter was in the
act of turning, he lifted his candle and exclaimed, “Doctor, who is
that?” pointing at the same time toward the centre of the room.

“I do not know,” replied the doctor, thinking the question applied to
the body before him; but no sooner had he raised his eyes than he
was struck by the attitude of his friend. He was holding the candle
above his head and looking away from the table, and the doctor,
following the direction of his gaze, discovered the figure of a man
standing some twelve or fifteen feet distant. My friend said that
his only impression was that they were in for a row; concluding that
the mob had found out the secret stairway, and got into the hall for
the purpose of breaking up the dissecting operations. With this idea
he turned round the table, and, as he advanced toward the figure,
exclaimed, “Who are you? What do you want here?” In his advance
movement he was joined by the student, neither for an instant having
the idea of a supernatural visitation in their minds. As quickly
as they pushed forward, as rapidly did the figure retreat until
it reached the door leading to the head of the stairway, when it
disappeared. Supposing that the man had passed out as he had come in,
they rushed to the door to follow, but they found the door fastened
and the bolt shot within the staple. With difficulty they forced it
back, for it had never been used since it was put on,—no occasion
requiring it,—and then they descended the steps to the outer doorway,
which they found closed, and from _within_.

Puzzled by these mysteries, they reascended to the room, passed
through, and immediately descended to arouse the janitor, and see if
he could give any clue to the adventure. The janitor inquired of them
if they could describe the appearance. Yes; and they did so; for they
had had a full and accurate view of his face, of his dress, and of
his height. “Then,” said the janitor, “it was a ghost. That man was
the husband of the woman you had upon the table. I buried them both,
and knew them well, and he answers exactly to your description.”

The doctor, when questioned by us, said the figure was that of a tall
man, dressed in ordinary clothes (I forget, now, whether he gave us
a full description or not, but rather think he did not), with a very
severe and stern face, and kept his eyes fixed upon the corpse, one
hand upraised and pointing to it, conveying the impression to his
mind of an order not to touch it,—a gesture of rebuke, or a motion to
forbid.

The doctor and his friend went back to the vestibule of the
dissecting-room, resumed their outer-garments, and retired. The
janitor fulfilled the doctor’s order, which was to remove and rebury
the body, and find him the body of a woman whose husband would not
interfere with his professional occupations.

Now, here is a true ghost story, if there ever was one. _Two persons_
saw the apparition, and a third party verified it. The moral is plain
enough. The husband was there to prevent the disgusting mutilation
of his wife’s body, and his purpose was accomplished.

The doctor said that nothing would have induced him to lay his
hands upon that woman’s form when he remembered the appealing look
of his extraordinary visitor. It was not personal fear or vulgar
superstition, but a higher motive; for inasmuch as no Christian
gentlemen would touch with unholy motive the form of a living wife
in the presence of a living husband, so he could not disturb the
sanctity of her spectral modesty before the face of her suppliant,
dead husband. To those who accept the story of the apparition,
the logic of the motive must be evident; and if so in this case,
why not in all others? Or it may be as it is in life. We meet our
acquaintances every day on the street; they pass us without seeing
us, or without our seeing them; and yet how absurd it would be to
deny their being on the street, walking straight on, absorbed beyond
recognition, simply because they did not stop and explain to us the
motive that brought them there! Ghosts, in like manner, may cross
the clown’s staring vision or the philosopher’s calmer sight, and,
because they do not pause and prattle of their object and tell them
the motive of their appearance, are we to conclude, as a logical
theory demonstrated, that that is a good reason to conclude they
were not there at all? Must all facts be denied until the motives
are discovered? Is a negative so powerful as to overwhelm an
affirmative? If so, the plea of not guilty offered by a criminal
should be enough to justify his discharge, despite of circumstantial
evidence strong enough to hang him or half a hundred like him.

As I stood that night out there in the fatal wood, and thought over
the murder and the murderer, I conceived a plan of punishment by
which, alone, I thought he could appease the outraged sense of human
tenderness for things so young as he had slaughtered.




XIV.

MY PLAN OF PUNISHMENT.


And this is my plan:

Chain him to the rock on which he took her life,—one chain to each
wrist, one chain to each ankle, and an iron hoop locked around his
waist, and this, too, fastened to the rock. Lay him on the spot where
she was found. Then leave him to himself and to the scenery which
he has disfigured so fearfully; but watch that no demon out of the
Davenport or Eddy witchcraft or mancraft boxes help him to unloose
those shackles. Lay him with his face to the avenging skies, and
place food within his reach, but so arrange it that it rests only on
the spots over which the red current of her life had ebbed. Let him
alone with the night, and the night will give him such a tangled and
convulsed spasm of horror as will make his very soul shriek aloud
for two almost impossible things, yet awhile, death or the Lord’s
pardon. And there he should remain until every hair of his head had
become white, and every black spot of his soul livid. Perhaps the
spirit that confronted me in silence and in peace might come to him
and watch him,—watch him till the dawn broke and the eyes of the
bright heavens took its place to look at him. And after that let the
authorities handle him as they pleased.

The reader will observe that in this project of mine I follow out the
classic ideas of the most elegant peoples and refined poets of the
world, who insisted before all things else that the dramatic unities
should be attended to. In that respect my plan would be without a
flaw.

And now, if I am asked for my theory of the murders, my answer
would be, that it might not be politic to give it publicity. This
much, however, I will say, reserving the more probable theory for
future emergencies. There is a link wanting at this time that must
be found before any progress can be made to a conclusive judgment.
The children left their temporary home intending to return in time
for the boy to attend his afternoon school. Their objective point,
as I said before, was May’s wood. This question then arises: What
occurred to make the girl, the senior, change her mind and go
farther away from home,—to Bussey’s wood? Going there would change
her original programme, relative to the boy. Did some one meet them
as if by accident,—_some one whom they knew_,—and did that person
induce her to continue to Bussey’s wood? Were there any evidences
that they stopped at all at May’s wood? But what inducement could
he use to get her to Bussey’s wood? The mother might have been the
inducement. They knew she was employed at Quincy, nearer to Bussey’s
than to May’s wood. They might have been told that she would meet
them at the former, and it would be a pleasant surprise. Another
question presents itself: What could have been the motive to get her
to secluded, distant Bussey? I answer, self-defence. Self-defence
against two children? Yes. The girl was an intelligent, observant
girl, and she may have been cognizant of some crime, the revelation
of which would have brought ruin and punishment upon the perpetrator;
or the perpetrator might, in his consciousness of the possibility of
her having discovered him, come to the resolution to dispose forever
of any chance of her being a witness against him. They were poor
children, and had only money enough to go and come from May’s wood;
and yet that money was found upon the girl. Consequently, she had not
been at any expense in getting to Bussey’s wood by the cars. _The
murderer paid their fare!_ After reaching the thick shades around
the rock, and giving her time to become confident of his integrity
and friendship,—so much so as to be sufficiently at ease to commence
the weaving of leaf chaplets, waiting the promised interview with
her mother,—he sent the boy down to the brook for water, and where
he was subsequently found. Then he turned upon the girl; for if the
boy had been near by, his cries could not have failed to arouse
assistance, for there were men working within three hundred yards of
the place where her body was discovered. He must have brought about
a separation between the children, and at that spot; for he could not
have murdered them together, and there, in that broad sunlight, with
the swirl of the mower’s scythes down in the near meadow evident to
his ear, carried the body of the boy to the brook at the foot of the
hill, and thrown it among the alders. He killed the girl as soon as
the boy was out of sight, and then he followed the little fellow to
the place where he had sent him, and slaughtered him in the gloom of
those thick bushes.

Now, who was that man whom she would have exposed? With whose acts
could she have by locality and association of daily life become
acquainted? Was he from Lynn, or its vicinity,—where she had been
living before she came to Boston? Or was the discovery, or the
imagined discovery, of a crime made in Boston, and of some one living
in Boston? The girl was simply murdered,—no duplex crime,—attacked
while she was sitting with leaves and wreaths in her lap, and the
first blows were delivered upon her back and sides, and after that
in front and in great confusion. The boy was killed, not because he
saw the murder done upon his sister, but because he could have told
who it was that accompanied them from Boston, or joined them at May’s
wood, where they were expected, or anywhere along the first part of
that terrible journey. There was no other motive for his death. If
the man had not been seen by the boy, and known personally to the
boy, he would have been alive now. Consequently it was some one who
was intimate with those children and who could not allow the boy to
live any more than he could allow the girl to live. It was a double
self-defence.

Then who was that man? I think he lives; I think that he walks these
streets daily. I think that some of us at some time or other have
sat beside him in the cars going to and fro the city roads. I think
that now, as I sit here writing, he is sitting somewhere hereabouts
with his face dropped over upon his clenched hands, looking at that
dark rock out there in the woods and wondering if he will yet reach
the end of his life by the common methods of disease. I think that
he often passes by the police station, with a frightened look in his
eyes, and turns a corner quickly when one of the big police guards
stalks like a blue-coated and silver-plated Nemesis toward him. I
see him, in my mind’s eye, when he meets a girl and boy upon the
sidewalk,—how he stares at them with a fixed gaze, wondering how
those two whom he killed out yonder, in the old woods, are looking
now!—and, when this book is advertised, I can watch him wondering
what it is like; and then I trace him in his stealthy and frightened
step to the bookstore to buy it; and, when he turns these leaves and
comes to this sentence, I hear him curse me, and know that he would
like to have his hand upon my throat for recalling the memory of his
deed. But I tell him that he will not escape. He may pretend to pray
when others pray, to hide his wicked past in the garb of piety; he
may mutter his wrath on all of us who seek him for his punishment;
he may fly now the advancing steps of justice: but, as he flies,
the feet of justice may become inactive, while it sends over every
railroad and steamboat line of travel, by every wire that vibrates
to all the remotest places of retreat, the command of his arrest.
Wherever he is now, and wherever he may be then, he is doomed; and
at this instant he knows it and feels it so in every fibre of his
accursed carcass, even to those blood-stained hands beneath whose
nails there yet remains the red record of his crime. I have given one
theory, without in the least asserting it to be the correct one; but
it is as good a theory as the public can get hold of outside of that
mysterious room in the City Hall wherein the tall chief of police
weaves his webs.

There being nothing else but murder in the girl’s death, we must
seek for some motive that could have driven that man to so terrible
a necessity. What other than the one I have suggested? Was it
monomania for human blood? That could have been gratified among a
denser population than he would be likely to find in Bussey’s wood.
And monomania of that kind is not common, nor is it of sudden growth,
striking and slaking but once. It seeks its victim anywhere, without
plot and without care of consequences, anywhere and everywhere. It
is a madness that has no fear and is destitute of prudence. But here
was deliberate, deep-plotted murder. It required skill to induce
the girl to go farther away from home and her pledged duty to her
brother. The filial sense was invoked as paramount to the fraternal.
It required skill to separate the children. It was done. Does all
that look as if the man was crazed for blood, or blind by drink? I
think there was neither here. I cannot give my other theory; for,
if it did not detect in this case, it might suggest an excellent
method of repeating just such another crime, should any such be in
contemplation. The enemy of society and law studies the tactics of
justice, and frequently the plan of detection, if penetrated by
the culprit, becomes his surest chart of escape. There may, after
all,—but I don’t think so,—have been two persons engaged in this
series of murders; and in that light read the short recital that
follows, and perhaps, when the mystery shall be resolved by judicial
precision, you may turn back to this singular incident and compare it
with the concluding scenes of the catastrophes I have been treating
of. If truth be stranger than fiction, then the marvels of the
veritable make larger drafts upon our credulity than the fabrications
of the imaginist, and there can be no harm done if we prepare
ourselves for revelations that in time may be made to us, and whose
mysticism, enlightened by the practical test of law, will stand
forever in the dry tomes of jurisprudence, subduing the impertinence
of our dogmatical self-conceit, and establishing the fact that truth
is a principle that can traverse the air, as well as walk arm in arm
with us in our daily habits. This is the incident.

Dr. Binn relates in his book, published some years ago, the
following:—

“A young and beautiful quadroon girl named Duncan, and residing in
Jamaica, West Indies, was murdered in a retired spot _a few paces
from the public highway_. [Such was the case in the murder of
Isabella Joyce.] Upon discovery of the deed, and investigation by the
coroner, a reward, amounting to a large sum of money [similar in the
Joyce case], was offered for the detection of the guilty party, but
without avail. A year passed over with no light from the judicial
lantern illumining the black mystery of the deed, and the case was
in process of lapsing into oblivion, when two negroes named Pendrill
and Chitty were arrested for some minor thefts and lodged in prison.
One was placed in the Kingston penitentiary and the other in Falmouth
jail. The distance between these two places was eighty miles. It must
be borne in mind that these two men were ignorant of their mutual
arrest and confinement, though as it turned out afterward were well
acquainted with each other. In the course of their imprisonment they
became restless and talked in their sleep, and then conversations
were addressed to a young girl who, it would seem, stood by and
upbraided them with her murder. They would then entreat her to go
away. This happened so frequently as to lead to inquiries which
resulted in the conviction of those two haunted men, of the murder
that had so long baffled the detection of justice.




XV.

THE CHILDREN.


In a court of justice, if I was put upon my oath, I could not swear
that it was a ghost that I saw when I stood at the end of the garden
on that luminous night; nor would I swear that it was a man with his
vitality in force; but I would swear that I saw something that looked
like a man, but might have been a ghost. It acted as if it might have
been either,—but if a man, like a crazy one, and who had a charm to
subdue, upon the instant and without effort, the temper of two severe
watch-dogs, one a mastiff, the other a bull, and also to suspend for
more than a second my power of vision.

After I had finished writing my narrative, and thought that I had
nothing further to do in this business besides giving my manuscript
into the hands of the printer, I became possessed of two photographs
kindly lent to my curiosity by the chief of police. They are the
portraits of Isabella and John Joyce. My first idea was to have them
multiplied and affixed somewhere in my pages, but then I thought of
the illustrated papers with their abominable attempts to illustrate
by the pencil every spasm to which human nature is incident, and was
stopped at once from that design.

The face of the girl is bright, expressive, and, in a degree, pretty.
Had she lived to womanhood she might have grown into what is called
a _fine_ woman. The features are large and regular, the eyes full of
vivacity and good temper, the nose prominent and well shaped, the
mouth pleasant, and indicative of resolution. Altogether the girl had
a generous and loving kind of lookout, and not rare in the species at
her budding and buoyant age. She looks like a child beginning to see
the vague outline of the sea on which she must voyage with the rest,
and not at all having such quick destruction in her thoughts, as came
to her ere she heard the breakers of human experience sobbing on the
shore. She was not too young to die, but too young to be slaughtered.
The boy’s face is that of a child; but a bright and reflective little
fellow, with a large development of brain, and, by the extreme
innocence of his expression, casting a deeper shadow of crime upon
the wretch who took away his life. Taking the photograph as a test,
he seems to be about eight years old and no more, and with such a
face that it must have been a sad thing for those who found him, to
look upon with the mask of murder stamped upon it.

I have also seen a bundle of papers, written over in large,
straggling chirography, and said to be communications of spirits,
through mediums, upon the topic of the murders. There is one-half
page written, so those say,—his wife, for instance,—who knew his
“hand of write,” by the dead father of the children. Their testimony,
whatever it may be, has as yet been of no special advantage in
directing investigation, at least as far as I know; probably on the
theory that if the souls of the departed undertook to interfere
in the proceedings of our courts, they might produce embarrassing
predicaments, being so far as we are instructed in such matters
incapable of appearing bodily on the witness-stand to testify to
facts within their knowledge; and, besides, it would be exceedingly
inconvenient for our judicial officials to serve a summons upon them,
as their places of special abode cannot, at present, be determined
upon with any exactness outside of a graveyard directory. Cases are,
however, upon the record wherein ghosts have pointed out such lines
of proceedings as finally led to the proper adjustment of contested
property and estates. Perhaps the day may reach us when not only the
spirit of the law, and the spirit of the past, but the spirits of
the dead, will have large control over the vexed condition of our
temporary existence here.




XVI.

GHOSTS.


Will it be impertinent if I say that I am no advocate of the
spiritualistic doctrines? Will it be less out of place, if I add
that I am no direct opponent of that wonderful creed,—new creed,
some people call it; but, in fact, as long established as the
first death,—as old as man’s first doubt, or his first impulse to
worship the unseen, or investigate the first difficulty? I assume
no dictatorship of judgment, adhere to no prejudice or formula of
education, or habit of social or sectional condition, but place
myself in that grand philosophic pause of suspended opinion. There
have been good Turks, there are good Turks; there have been good
Jews, there are good Jews. One of the latter, leaving his old
traditions, rules now the destiny of a great so-called, and properly
so-called I believe, Christian Empire; but because in our youth
we have been led to think hard of bloody Mahomet, and the Jewish
unbelievers of the first Christian era, when mysteries assumed the
prerogative of logical religion, and faith was not as quick to
conceive as it has been since, we are not justified in believing that
the Turk and the Jew are beyond the pale of our sympathies, and, for
old deeds done under peculiar pressure, are to be anathematized from
our human charities. There are members known, of the spiritualist
belief, to be as pure and spotless as any equal number of any other
God-believing sect; and while we cannot but look with feelings akin
to pity at some of the phases of their peculiar practice, it behooves
no man, limited as we all are in our claim to exact knowledge, to
condemn the whole because some of their people do certain things,
that, in the performance, border upon the absurd.

The mystery of life is more mysterious than the mystery of death. In
the first we would, if not governed by the subjection of judgment
to certain rules and discipline of faith, be led to believe in a
thousand things that appeal to us daily by the miraculous condition
of their nature. Science, while it reveals, establishes materiality;
and the farther it advances into the realms of air, the more it
fills that air with material substances. Dare it go higher yet, and
rob the firmament of all its poetry, its vague spirit of religious
spirituality, and, sweeping away the dreams of the tenderest
imaginations, build up the steps of the Eternal throne with granite
boulders, and form of the Almighty a statue of specific gravity, with
needs like our own, and humanly dependent on the vegetation and the
atmosphere of these terrestrial regions which astronomy with its
supernaturally endowed telescope has established as fact?

It may be an objection, founded upon some basis of common sense,
that I have introduced what I call a veritable ghost into my work.
I cannot help that. In fact I never would have written my book if
I had not had that interview with what now, in all the sincerity
that is left to a man in these abominable days, I believe and assert
was a ghost; a real ghost,—no dramatic shade made up of an off-duty
carpenter with an actor to speak his part,—a ghost arranged for the
nonce with a screen between us, of vapory muslin; but a solemn, a
meaning, a power to move, but not a power to absolutely affright,
ghost. In fact I see no reason to be frightened by them. Grant that
they exist,—you never have heard of one that did harm to anybody.
They have, it is to be supposed, thrown off the passions of the
flesh, with the flesh,—the passion of anger, the passion of mischief,
and all the low and base adjunctives that adhere to us in our state
of usual visibility. They are not monsters, but symbols, or aerial
realities of our former friends. Even the ghost of Robespierre,
of Nero, or Jeffrey, would be harmless, bad as they were when
encompassed in their fibrous shells of flesh. Ghosts, as a general
rule of logic, cannot be as bad as those of earth with whom they have
their interviews. And it is not to be supposed that they always
have a sublime or important mission to accomplish. If the rule holds
good that Providence allows them to flit hitherward, the ghost of
a washerwoman has as much right to appear to her successor of the
soap-suds, as the ghost of Cæsar to his slayer before the battle that
settled the destiny of half a world. And the washerwoman’s ghost
could not do that, or would not even think of doing that, and yet she
might have her homely mission, as important to her friends, as ghosts
of a higher rank. But they all have their mission, the ghosts of
demi-gods as well as the ghosts of plebeians. They easily establish,
what otherwise could not be practically proved, the vexed question
of the immortality of the soul. A testimony of a dead man would be
as valuable to me, with regard to that matter, as the wire-drawn
assertions of a man paid a large salary to keep good, and say that we
turn into ghosts after all,—for they all say that.

Now I most respectfully ask what harm does it do to believe in
ghosts? Is it weakness? Then St. Paul was weak to idiocy, for he was
the apostle of the supernatural, as the Bible will prove, if you
choose to consult his record. Was our Saviour weak? It was he,—that
supremely blessed, that uncontradictable authority, either in
assertion or suggestion—who took upon himself the spectral character,
and asked Thomas to test him, by placing his hands upon the image
of his wounds. Or, if he was not a ghost, but a substantial form
of flesh after his crucifixion, death then makes no difference
in our condition, and is but a process without a change. Had his
apostles and disciples disbelieved in his appearance after death, and
hooted at the story told of his ghost wandering toward them, where
would be the Christian church to-day, and where the theory of the
resurrection? We disbelieve now, and scoff at what the Saviour did,
and his apostles saw, unless he was an impostor, and they liars.
Do we in our churches, when we read the biblical narrative of the
innumerable appearances, sneer at the book that tells us its contents
are the result of divine inspiration, and every word is true? That
man or woman would not be a church-member long who dared to do a
thing so impious.

If fault be found with me for writing a narrative with such a
spectral thread of ghastly tissue running through its woof, what
should they say of the king of the ink-plume, Shakespeare himself?
He fairly revels in ghosts. In the second part of “King Henry the
Sixth,” Bolingbroke, the conjurer, invokes a spirit. In “Julius
Cæsar,” Brutus has his celebrated interview with the ghost of Cæsar.
In “Macbeth,” the ghost of Banquo comes to the king’s table and nods
between the libations, frightening the king out of his royal wits;
and in the “witch scene” we have the bubbling caldron, the armed
head, a bloody child, a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and
“eight kings,” who pass across the stage, the last with a glass in
his hand. What would the play of “Hamlet” be without the father’s
spirit wandering on the moonlit battlement, or the interview with
the queen-mother, known as the miniature scene? In “Richard the
Third,” crowds of ghosts stalk through the tent of the hunchback
king, and start him from his sleep; and Richmond, too, holds converse
with them. The ghosts of Prince Edward, Henry the Sixth, Clarence,
Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, the two young Princes, Queen Ann,
and Buckingham, stalk before the tyrant’s vision, and curse him as
they pass. Otway makes use of ghosts in his “Venice Preserved,” and
Sir Walter Scott welded them in the machinery of his novels; and
the ponderous-brained Sam Johnson religiously believed in them.
The ghosts of Shakespeare were born of the poetic faculty, and the
legendary creed of the world’s experience. Place a rose, the sweetest
you can find, under a glass case, and you shut out the odor that
belongs to it. Is that odor dead and imperceptible because you have
raised a barrier between it and your senses? Does it not exist, even
more potently, within its crystal prison? Because you do not perceive
that sweetness, would you say it is not? Are our direct senses to
settle all points of doubt and difficulty? Or, let a man enter, then,
who had never seen a rose, and you were to tell him of the great
fragrance of the flower of which bards have sung and Scriptures made
similes,—would you not scoff him if he said such things were not
possible to a plant like that, that looked like painted paper? Then
how can you say anything about it who have never seen a ghost? To
your senses it may be as yet hidden by a barrier stronger than glass,
but yet as transparent to others. But I do not write to argue, but
only to suggest. I admit my own weakness and confess to doubts, and
cannot place myself with indisputable certainty on any solid basis
of logic, and therefore must allow great scope to others; but since
I have ventured to tell my story, I had a strong and natural desire
to stand, as well as it was possible upon the platform of rational
opinion, and felt that I had a right to attempt to place myself
there. If any man can prove that I did not see exactly what I say I
saw, let him do so, but let him not attempt to “pshaw” me out of the
evidences of my senses, and proclaim from his stolid pedestal, called
the “impossible,” that I am a dreamer, a madman, and all that sort
of adjectiveness which grows from ignorance of the noun substantives
of reason. When he can come to me and show me the authority, not
derived from his metaphysics or his sectarianism, or his prejudice,
by which he is empowered to deny the possibility or the probability
and actuality of ghosts, and settle then and forever that such things
cannot be, I will admit that I was crazy; bereft of reason; at one
moment gifted with eyesight, and the next deprived of it: things
which, by the way, would be more at variance with the “order of
Heaven,” and more extraordinary, in fact, than the assumed appearance
of that thing we call ghost; and which, after all said, and done,
and laughed, and sneered at, is that idea of the human hope baptized
in our dreams and our theology, by the name of “Immortality.” You
cannot prove to a drowning man that he is not surrounded by water.
You may tell him that he can swim; but he will tell you that, though
he can, he has the cramp. You may tell him that a ship without
volition can float where he is struggling; but he will tell you that
the ship has nothing to do with it. He believes in the things that
he feels and sees around him, but which you do not experience, and
he will not take your arguments and suggestions as the embodiment
of an infallible life-preserver. I saw what I saw; prove to me that
I did not see it,—for the question is with me and nobody else,—and
prove it without the usual insolence, if you can; remembering, in
your endeavor to convince, that insult is more of an offence than an
argument; indeed, it is only used when argument is exhausted.

The composing of an epic poem is held to be the highest achievement
of the human mind. Ideality, or imagination, is the means used
in the performance of the work. Ideality is the inspiration of
religion, and without it religion would simply be a form of law,
to be broken like other laws, and to be vindicated by penalties and
processes similar to those imposed and employed in the vindication
and substantiation of any other law. The ecclesiastical synonym for
ideality is faith.

If ideality be the source of the highest results of intellectual
effort, and of religious belief, who can venture to fabricate a chain
with which to bind and circumscribe its flights? If man in power, for
the supposed benefit of the man out of power, does so, it is merely
the result of policy, or passion, or human prejudice, or selfishness;
and no man that ever lived, from the Pope of Rome to the backwood
preacher, and from the preacher to the ethical moralist, has had that
right inherent in his particular nature, to tax as a royalty the
patent of the human mind to the grand prerogative of thought.

Canute, the king, tried an experiment of mastery with the tide.
What other despot of school theory will make the same effort with
the tidings of the brain of man, hoping for better success than
the Danish fool? If there be such, so sure as the first known
madman of the Hamlet race was driven from the beech, will the
other be overwhelmed by the resistless force of that great wave of
intelligence which has already grappled with the lightning, and
taught it the babel language by which man expresses his endless
wants. Man, when he seizes upon the great faculties of electricity,
does not stultify himself by establishing a limit to its capacity.
At first it was a rod upon a chimney that drew a spark from the
thunder-storm; then the galvanic battery, to draw paralysis from
limbs; then the wire from city to city; and now it passes beneath
the throbbing bosom of the sea, and whispers the price of stocks or
the policy of cabinets into the ear of a man who sits at his table,
like a musician at his piano, taking out of the thunderbolts of Jove
a language and a spirit that ignorance would deny the possibility of
being there. And what more will be accomplished by electricity? We
stand upon the threshold of its domain, enlightened by flashes that
invite and illumine to farther experiments.

Doubt is the genius of discovery, but, at present, with regard to
the supernatural, there is nothing proved except what we believe;
otherwise, the world would have but one creed.




XVII.

MANIFESTATIONS.


As may be well imagined, a subject so conspicuous and mysterious
as the dark deeds done in Bussey’s wood, would not be allowed to
pass over without some professional attempts on the part of the
spiritualistic community to discover their hidden secret. “Seances”
were called, and the force of mediumistic power enlisted and put in
operation to extract the terrible revelation from some detective
spirit among the dead; with what result the police are best able to
judge, and the culprit, too; but it occurred to me that it might
possibly amuse my readers to read some of the communications relating
to the topics I have been treating of, from the spirit world, through
what is called trance mediums. The two or three that I shall take
occasion to abridge were sent to the police head-quarters, and
I have no doubt they were sent in good faith. The result of the
incantations is of little moment, but I have understood that it
was said somewhere by a presumed spirit, that they would tell all
about the murders, and expose the culprit, if a sum of money would
be raised competent to the support of the bereaved mother of the
children. The fact that there were large rewards offered—and I
believe they have not been withdrawn—should have satisfied them that
if, through their agency, the murderer was detected, they could make
over the amount to Mrs. Joyce. I do not vouch for the truth of the
rumor, but think it improbable, because it was an unnecessary demand
under the circumstances. The occasions when, actuated by a mixed
motive of curiosity and a desire to examine, I have witnessed the
proceedings at these sittings of the faithful, have not had a very
strong tendency to convince me that good spirits put their feet under
the mahogany. To be sure my experience has been limited, but it has
been definite up to this period. I have not attended the public or
professional seances; but there are many persons who are sceptics,
yet strongly mediumistic, and able to make the table move across the
room by the mere imposition of their hands. I have heard the alphabet
repeated at my own room, where only one gentleman was present beside
myself; and this gentleman, an involuntary and unprofessional medium,
was of considerable power, and used that power for the purposes of
investigation. Answers I have there witnessed to questions, that
astonished me,—direct, satisfactory, and going back into the far
and dim years of childhood, astonishing to my friend, as well as
to myself,—facts that my own mind had entirely lost in the lapse
of years, but which came up to my recollection as vivid as if of
yesterday’s happening. Sometimes my recollection has been corrected,
and in such a way as to convince me that my idea of the circumstance
had been erroneous. And then again, a something of intelligence would
move the table, in answer to the alphabet, and tell such self-evident
lies, with so enthusiastic a vivacity as to startle me into the
belief that he had been the writer of bulletins for some newspaper
during the late Southern conflict. And this assumed spirit would
pass himself off as a deceased member of my family, staggering me
with his knowledge, and from which bewilderment I confess I can find
no present means of rational escape. I have, however, come pretty
nearly to the conclusion that the spirit, or whatever it is, that I
have alluded to above, has been our only visitor; but the imagination
cannot conceive a scheme so subtle as his has been to deceive us
into the belief that those persons, whose character he pretended to
represent, were in fact the very individuals themselves; and under
ordinary circumstances few men could have been blamed had they been
credulous of his representations.

I have frequently tried by the most determined exercise of will,
to force the responses into the channel I had mentally prepared
for them; but in no case, I must candidly confess, could I command
obedience. This fact shook my theory of sympathetic influence, and
settled in that small sphere of experiment the vexed question of
the power of mind to operate upon matter. My friend, who has the
mediumistic faculty, made similar attempts, and always with like
result. Let wiser heads than mine unravel and explain, by cogent and
irresistible logic, these eccentric incidents, for I must admit my
utter inability to explain them by any rules outside of those adopted
by the spiritualist. But though I may have been a witness of these
phenomena, it does not follow that I am a spiritualist, any more than
I am of the mythological faith of pagan Greece, because, forsooth, I
take delight in the statue of Minerva, go into raptures over that of
Venus, and read with unfeigned enjoyment the poems of that prince of
old idolaters, blind but immortal Homer.

I have before me a package of manuscript purporting to have been
written by inhabitants of another world,—by hands that have felt the
pressure of the hand of death, and yet, it would seem, are able to
express thought with the intelligence usually attributed to life. One
of these communications purports to have been written by Isabella
Joyce, the murdered girl, and another by her father, Stephen Joyce.

The manuscript of the girl strikes me as of a better order of
chirography than is usually to be found in that of children of her
age; while the father’s is large and roughly emphatic, and bears the
impress of a passionate desire to discover the murderer and avenge
the deaths of his children. Friends of Stephen Joyce assert that the
formation of the writing is unmistakably similar to his; but, as I
have not been able to compare the dead man’s penmanship with anything
done by him while on earth, I cannot pass judgment either of denial
or verification.

It would appear that, speedily after the murders were discovered,
meetings were called of the spiritualists, in the hope that some
revelation would be made that might lead to the arrest of the party
or parties engaged in the atrocious deed.

Not later than a month or two ago, I read in a spiritualistic paper,
of the city of Boston,—conducted, by the way, with great editorial
ability,—a communication from the boy murdered; but which contained
no clue that could direct detection safely and judicially to any
desired result.

In the written communication, signed “Isabella Joyce,” to which
I have alluded, there are references to parties that had been
previously arrested or suspected. She, however, distinctly exonerates
the young man of the factory, whose flight is as yet unaccounted for;
but whose innocence is beyond all question. She speaks, also, of
that inebriated unfortunate to whom Dedham jail has become a matter
of practical and suggestive recollection. The name of that eminent
individual known to the police and the public by the euphonic
appellation of Scratch Gravel, makes no figure in her revelations;
though he confessed to many circumstances that would have led in
ordinary cases to his implication in the deed. His admissions were
tortured by over-zealous detectives into positive confession; but
after strict comparison of his statements, made under the pressure of
prison and terror, or rum reaction, with the exact incidents of his
maudlin staggerings and stutterings, he was given up as not worthy of
belief, though he madly made the attempt to get himself hanged.

It is my intention to give merely the pith and essence of these
strange writings,—having placed the original papers in the hands of
my publisher,—where any person, curious in such matters, can examine
them.

The girl commences by appealing to her mother, and declaring that
she cannot be happy until they have found that “terrible man.”
She cries frequently to her mother, as if under some great spasm
of alarm,—hints at certain persons,—exonerates others, who were
suspected, and in such manner as to remind us of the terrible ravings
and charges of the “afflicted children” who figured as the juvenile
fiends and denouncers of the Salem Witchcraft tragedies.

In her outcries she speaks of a returned soldier, and checks her
mother’s suspicions, that appeared to have gone astray in the
wrong direction, and then directly charges the crime upon our poor
dilapidated young friend, whose greatest misfortune it was to have
been drunk on that fatal day, and been whipped or blackeyed in the
evening.

The girl proceeds with repeated exclamations of Mother! Mother! and
emphasizes the sufferings through which she passed. Be it remembered
that she speaks only of murder throughout her disclosures, if
disclosures they can be called.

Her second declaration is more minute and connected, but still it
is a jumbled and very unsatisfactory narrative, or rather child
gossip, of the circumstances and incidents as they occurred previous
and up to the instant of the catastrophe. She again speaks of a
soldier,—_the one whose hand was cut_; says she saw him in a garden
as they passed along,—the garden across the brook; that he followed
them into the woods. She now goes back to her trip out of Boston
toward the wood, and tells that they got out at Burroughs Street,
walked up the plain or plank (hard to decipher), till they came to a
juncture of the road where it crosses the track of the steam cars,
then to the right, and round a store or stone house to the left, over
the brook to the other side. She expressly and suddenly declares, at
this point of her recital, that _she does not remember him_. After
they climbed over the gate (supposed to be the gate very near where
she was found, and which opens from the Dedham road; there is another
gate between the murder spot and Mr. Motley’s house), they saw the
man. He followed, but up to that moment had not spoken to her. He now
seems to have turned back, but, changing his mind, returned quickly
and addressed her. At this she became alarmed and fled; he pursued.
There is much confusion here,—a scuffling and tussling of sentences
as if a mimic was giving to the life some quickly whirling scene of
trouble and irritation and surprise, wherein there was the essence of
a great danger.

It is a confused statement of Johnny’s having spoken of the sheep
(Mr. Motley’s sheep down in the valley grazing at the time, watched
by a vagrant boy, afterward examined by the authorities, and found
to be no wiser than the flock he watched). She says she does not
remember exactly—speaks of a knife which she tried to get hold of—of
his cutting himself with it—of his throwing it into the wood. (If
he did, he must have gone back for it and rescued it, for no such
knife was found after a vigilant search over the whole locality.) She
exclaims, “He murdered me!”—that he was scratched on the face and
neck, and bears the marks “now,”—at the time of her manifestation at
the spiritual sitting. At this point the paper is filled with wild
and alarming cries to her mother. The idea presents itself again of
a mimic reacting a scene in which the soul is driven to the very
verge of madness by that dread fiend called Terror. The voice seems
to pierce the air in its shrill proclamation of intense and terrible
agony, and anon it subsides into stifled sobs and ejaculations of
how much she suffered while the black deed was done,—how “sick” she
was. After that outburst of mad appeal and piteous mourning she
resumes her narrative, and describes her murderer. He wore blue
clothes, and looked like a soldier; but not a soldier just from the
wars. (A soldier loafing after his laurels had withered in bar-room
atmosphere, I suppose.) She fixes his nationality distinctly,—an
Irishman. It was one o’clock, she says; but the writing here is
blurred and crossed, and very difficult, if not quite impossible, to
make out and determine whether it is one or two o’clock. Her brother,
she says, ran for help, and the man ran after him and killed him and
came back to her. This statement is signed “Isabella Joyce.”

The other portions of the page of foolscap, on which her hand
appears, is covered with a lively display of all sorts of
penmanship,—the idle signatures of a small party of the other world’s
inhabitants, who, it would seem, were in Isabella’s company.

Again she resumes control over the writing medium’s hand, and says,—

“Johnny was dead, and the man went off after I died. He went down
the other way to Boston. He will be found.”

We have nothing more from the spirit of the girl (I speak now
without entering into any question of the authenticity of these
communications, leaving my reader to dispose of that enigma, as may
best suit his temper and convenience), but the father makes his
appearance on the scene and endorses his daughter’s testimony; but
singularly neither witness offers to give the name of the designated
soldier. The spiritualistic theory is that they could not do so,
because he was a stranger to both of them, and consequently while
they could see his face and clothes, they could not tell his name.
The case is similar to our own daily experience in our transient
meeting with people on the street,—a passing and silent interview, in
which nothing is discovered save the recognition of a person and no
more.

The revelation of the father is to the effect that he knows where the
man is, and will follow him to the end.

One part of his statement I suppress, because it comes directly
within the province of the law officers, and might direct suspicion
upon a possibly innocent man.

Three years ago, it is asserted by those who believe in this
extraordinary doctrine of the power of the dead to express themselves
through the living, this man, Stephen Joyce, declared that by the
fifth of the month of July, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, the
murderer would be in the hands of justice; and how many months have
come and gone since that spirit entered the mystic witness-box, and
foretold such sequence to the tragedy, and yet without fulfilment? I
am sorry that he was no true prophet,—no wiser in a ghostly form than
in the fleshly substance. He is not half so good a ghost as Hamlet’s
father was. The Dane went straight to the point, and told the truth
and nothing but the truth, while here we have the spirit of the girl
upon the stand, and she rambles in her talk without the aid of the
great legal screw of cross-questioning, designating nothing that is
tangible, indeed giving false clues to the murderer, and screaming,
“Mother! Mother!” as if she would pour into the listener’s ear some
faint echo of those dread cries that rang amid the gloomy woods when
the soul of her was stabbed out of her.

The ghost of the murdered King of Denmark spoke the truth, as
other ghosts by judicial testimony have done; but they were the
old-fashioned ghosts, standing by themselves without the aid of
human machinery, without the table or the easily assimilated trance,
responsible for their coming and for what they told or what they
desired to be done by their informing. They came and made short work
of it, impressing belief by solemn utterances or majestic gestures.
In this case again, the man, who should have been interested more
than any other man, comes through the arm and fingers of a stranger,
a living being, and is assumed to have written out, at that solemn
investigation, a deposition,—not made upon the Holy Book, holier than
all books, but with lips sanctified by the kiss of death,—and vaguely
points to some unfortunate, and declares with all the potency of
his supernal condition that ere the fifth of the approaching month
the discovery would be made, and the hands of the law laid upon
the person of the murderer of his children; and the fifth of that
long-passed month lies strewn with the leaves of several autumns,
buried far back in the dead annals, and no revelation has confirmed
his prophecy. How is this? Or was it, as I have said before, left to
these pages to revive that miserable event, and glare it to those
eyes that have so often seen the vision of the dead; to awaken in
that drowsing conscience the phantoms that he had half lulled to
sleep, and force him to some act by which the law may be able to
read, without the farther aid of business mediums, the mark of Cain
that God has put upon his brow?

Who knows, and who can tell as yet, the meaning of my ghost that came
to me upon the hill?

It was not with any sinister design that the doctrine of
spiritualism, or its practices, has been introduced into my
narrative. It formed no portion of my original intention; but I
found it impossible to refrain from giving publicity to documents
that had been found of sufficient importance to attract the
attention of the authorities. The spiritualist is able to take care
of himself and his belief. Such communications might be used to a
fearful and fatal purpose. The criminals engaged in the perpetration
of a crime could, if such testimony was of any judicial weight,
arrange a circle, produce the manifestations, or the similitude of
manifestations, and direct attention to certain innocent parties,
when suspicion would give time for the real culprits to escape. Every
one knows how easy it is to work through the agency of a religious
sentiment, and a very large class of people, habituated to the
belief in spiritual revelations as inculcated by the spiritualists,
receiving impressions in that way, would be hard to believe otherwise
than as the spurious spirits asserted. Crime would thus become more
dramatic, and the consequences of such interference on the part of
a religious organization might lead to the overthrow of all the
purposes and powers of civil authority. Happily, I am confident no
such construction can be placed upon the operations and revelations
of the authorized spiritualistic media. I do not know exactly what
view they take of the knowledge presumed to be possessed by the
murdered regarding the murderer. To reveal simply the name of the
person, taking for granted that the power exists according to the
doctrine of spiritualism, would be of no use, unless a train of
circumstantial evidence could be intimated, by which the law could
develop a legal connection between the accused and the crime. There
have been several instances, in this country, in which testimonious
ghosts have enacted important parts. Some of these are upon the
public record; others in private circulation. There was a case some
fifty years ago in Virginia, when, if I recollect correctly, the
ghost of a Mr. Clapham met a man upon the path in the mountain,
nearly opposite to the famous Point of Rocks, on the Potomac, and
told him where his will could be found,—the absence of which had
involved his widow in vexatious and tedious litigation. The will
was found and the question of right established in her favor; and
I myself have partaken of the hospitality of that generous lady in
the years gone by, when peace and plenty abounded in those beautiful
valleys. As a matter of curiosity, I will give in brief, a singular
case that happened in Scotland, and which goes to establish my theory
of the injustice that may be perpetrated by the assertions of persons
using the simulated spiritualistic agency for the detection of crime.
The Scotch rebellion of 1745 compelled a larger amount of vigilance
in preventing its recurrence than it possibly had taken to subdue it
in the first instance. Troops were scattered among the highlands,
for the purpose of arresting all persons using arms, and enforcing
the orders of the British authorities against the wearing of the
clan tartans. Among these troops was Sergeant Arthur Davies, who is
described as a bold and reckless man, careless in exposing himself
openly in those wild and hostile glens, and among a people conquered
but not won. Davies was in command of a squad of four men, and was
stationed at Dubrach, near Braeman, then a desolate and dangerous
district.

On the 28th of September, 1749, Davies left his barracks, with his
command, to meet the troops posted at Glenshee. The sergeant never
returned from that expedition; for, wandering off alone to hunt in
his usual careless and defiant mood, he was murdered.

Two men Duncan Terig, alias Clerk, and Alexander Bain MacDonald were
suspected, but, for five years, owing to the disaffected temper of
the people toward the foreign troops, no steps were taken to arrest
these suspected men; but at length on the 3d of June, 1754, nearly
five years afterwards, Clerk and MacDonald were tried at Edinboro’
for the murder of the sergeant. This singular evidence was adduced
upon the trial.

Some time after the murder, Donald Farquharson, living in Glenshee,
had been informed by his neighbor Alexander MacPherson, that he
(MacPherson) had been visited frequently by an apparition. It was the
ghost of Sergeant Davies, who insisted upon having a burial of his
remains. This MacPherson had declined to have anything to do with. On
this the spectre had bidden him apply to Donald Farquharson. Together
they visited the spot where MacPherson said the remains were lying;
Donald giving as a reason for going his fear of being troubled by the
grave-seeking ghost of the slaughtered Saxon.

The witness described the finding of what was left of the skeleton of
the unhappy warrior. They were satisfactorily recognized by certain
incontestable signs.

MacPherson’s description of the ghost as it appeared to him was
this: A figure clad in blue. He appeared at night; he was in bed; he
rose and followed it to the door. “I am Sergeant Davies,” said the
spectre; and then he related the facts of the murder, and pointed out
the place where his body or his relics could be found. The witness
had asked the names of the murderers. The ghost declined, upon the
ground that he could not reply to a question, but would have told
if he had not been asked. The ghost had visited him again, but this
time totally denuded of clothing,—but always desiring to have his
body buried. The body was subsequently properly interred. Again the
ghost had come to him and had announced his murderers,—“Duncan Clerk
and Alexander MacDonald,”—the prisoners then at the bar. The witness
was asked by Mr. Macintosh, counsel for the prisoners, what language
the ghost spoke. “As good Gaelic as ever he heard in Lochaber,”
said MacPherson. “Pretty well,” commented McIntosh, “for the ghost
of an English sergeant.” The facts turned out to be that MacPherson
had been in the employment of Clerk, and a disagreement had arisen
between the two men. MacPherson had often charged Clerk with the
murder, and on this Clerk had promised to do everything for him if
he would only keep his suspicions secret. But stronger evidence was
produced against the prisoners. A man named Cameron had seen the
murder perpetrated. He saw Clerk and another man fire simultaneously
at the soldier, and he saw him fall; but he was deterred from
making these facts known to the authorities for fear of incurring
the animosity of the Highlanders, who thought it no great harm, but
perhaps a merit, to shoot down one of the hated invaders.

Curious to relate, the prisoners were acquitted. The evidence against
MacDonald was not clear; but no doubt existed as to the guilt of
Clerk. MacPherson was prompted to the accusation against Clerk by
motives of personal malice, and, having become possessed of Clerk’s
secret, he was anxious to gratify his hatred. Fear of the popular
hatred, if he lodged a simple accusation against his victim, on
account of the abhorrence in which an informer was particularly
held at that time, and the more so if the information was directed
against a native in favor of the dominant race, he was obliged to
invent his ghost-story, and, thus appealing to popular belief in the
supernatural, effect his purpose. But the jury would not believe his
story, for it was known that he had discovered the sergeant’s remains
before he told of the ghostly visitations, which proved that the
marvel was an afterthought.

Sir Walter Scott edited an account of the murder for the Bannatyne
Club, and Mr. Hill Burton has included the story in his narratives
of Criminal Trials in Scotland. Sir Walter, relating another trial
where a ghost attempted by a second party to affix his murder upon
a certain person, gives the following remark of the presiding judge
upon the responsibility of the ghost testimony: “Stop!” the Judge
interrupted, gravely; “this will not do. The evidence of the ghost
is very much to the purpose, no doubt, but we can’t receive it
second-hand. None can speak with a clearer knowledge of what befell
him during life. But he must of course be sworn in the usual way.
Call the ghost in open court, therefore, and, if he appears, the
jury and I will give all weight to his evidence; but in case he does
not come forward, I cannot allow of his being heard, as now proposed
through the medium of a third party.” Up to this date it is not known
whether the bailiff has made a return of the summons or not. We
presume not.

But was it a ghost that confronted me?

That question, now that time is progressively dimming the vividness
of the impression that I received when first I saw that something on
the brow of the hill, rises to the tribunal of my own investigation.
I am as anxious to have the mystery solved as my reader possibly
could be; indeed I am more anxious than any other person could be.
Dim as it sometimes appears to my mind’s eye at times, there are
occasions when it assumes all the exactness of an incident that
transpired but a second since. I see it cross the wall, advance out
of the shadow into the light, stand still, then whirl or wheel, make
one human-looking step, and vanish. Will I ever see it again? That
is another question that disturbs me some. I cannot do but wait; but
with what feelings, wait? You, in your fair room with gas a-lit, or
reading in the broad-falling down of sunlight on this page, cannot
conceive. Put out your light and let the room grow dark, and pause
and think, and then perhaps, despite the adamantive philosophy of
your unbelief, you may recognize the sentiments I have; or on some
still and luminous night, moonless, drive out to that old wood and by
yourself, even now, with such great washings of rains and cleansing
of snows and storms of wind, go to the rock where the girl was found
and see how your nerves will quiver, or how your heart will throb;
or, passing down the road, draw rein at the cottage where I stopped,
and, saying naught to any one, place yourself where I stood and wait.

I myself would not willingly try that visit over again, not that
I dread anything of harm from such an act, but because I have
been there once before and have had enough. But if I never see
that strange visitor again, I will see the murderer. Of that I am
convinced. I have firm reliance in law when it is honestly employed
to detect crime or protect the wronged. I have faith in that subtle
sympathy, which connects us with the dead. I feel that without it,
love would be but a thread broken by the last breathing of our lungs,
and memory nothing but an intellectual frigidity, to be melted into
mist as we approach the haven of the hereafter. The dead appeal to us
by the mesmeric agency of their immortality; they throw out, through
every movement of the world’s circumstances and events, a suggestion
of their needs, their condition, and their destiny. They are like the
history of the past sublimated by the eloquence of immutable truth,
and are sanctified by a sleep that has eternal life within its closed
lids. They have, too, a sympathy in retort with us. As naught of the
material can suffer annihilation, so the soul, being indestructible,
permeates the air we breathe as do those revived plants of perfume
that last fall we might have fancied dead and beyond all chance of
life again. If that vision was a ghost, its purpose will be revealed;
for it is impossible to suppose that the Ruler of the Universe, who
says a sparrow shall not fall without his knowledge, would permit
so strange an occurrence to happen without having an intention. What
that intention was, I for one, if only one, shall wait patiently to
see.


THE END.




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg vii Changed VIII. The Murder Rock to: Murder-Rock
  pg 10 Added word that after: instant search,—a search
  pg 16 Removed comma after: changes and attacks. Man, exposed
  pg 62 Changed My route at night to the Murder Rock to: Murder-Rock
  pg 111 Changed She looks like a child begining to: beginning
  pg 130 Changed trouble and irritation and susprise to: surprise
  pg 141 Changed despite the adamantive philosphy to: philosophy



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