The Haunted House

DESPITE the existence of learned societies endeavoring to find some tangible basis of fact in the interesting perplexities of so-called psychic phenomena, comparatively few men and women to-day believe in haunted houses. The ghost that employs its business hours in clanking a chain to make the individual hairs on a listening head stand up like the defensive armory of the angry porcupine appeals no longer to the popular imagination. None of us, to be sure, enjoy hearing anything in the still hours of the night that suggests a ghost clanking a chain; but we all agree by daylight that if there are ghosts they are undoubtedly in better business. Our wide general information, in this day of the Sunday newspaper, tells us that the real danger of the time is the quiet microbe. We could even wish that microbes clanked chains, and then we would know they were about and speed for the prophylactic. The innumerable devils of the Middle Ages, invisible but always somewhere in the neighborhood, have been neatly replaced by the discoveries of bacteriology; and if we had n’t got used to them, living would be an almost impossibly anxious performance. The vacationist, reading the warning issued by his government against the bacterial dangers of simple country living, would stay hopelessly in the city — and then, learning of the bacterial dangers of summer life in town, would eventually be driven to suicide by drowning as the coolest way out of his troubles.

We have, in fact, vastly multiplied the demons whose supposed existence kept the mediæval citizen crossing himself; and having done so, exactly like the mediæval citizen, we get along fairly comfortably in the knowledge that so far they haven’t caught up with us.

But there remains the haunted house, no longer inhabited by the chainclankcr but by something else almost as palpable. There is the house that we visit in perfect comfort. No ghost there, bless you! And again the house that we visit, without being able accurately to define the feeling, with a sense of constant uneasiness and apprehension. The ghost does not disturb our slumbers. It has, apparently, no desire whatever to destroy the neat arrangement of our hair or change it white overnight — a calamity which many would risk cheerfully now that white hair is becoming fashionable and there is no telling how soon we may revert to the old-time fashion of powdering. It is a modest ghost and makes no effort to attract attention. It is there because it can’t help it; and the presence depresses without terrifying. A kind of gloom, unrecognized by the inmates yet palpable to the visitor, permeates such a dwelling. We are glad to pack our bags and be away again; yet we hardly know we are glad, and would certainly be unwilling to confess it.

To see this ghost is out of the question. And yet, in its way, it is far worse than (he old-fashioned kind that mother (at least some mothers) used to make with the pie crust. Morning sunlight dissipated that old-fashioned house-haunter. He was a night-worker and slept in the daytime, possibly getting up to read the afternoon ghost of a newspaper, but not going seriously to work till midnight. His short hours indicate that there must, have been a powerful trade-union among ghosts, to which all spectres belonged, and which had once and for all settled the question of hours of work and provided a perfect equality among male and female, adult and child ghosts. But this more modern house-haunter defies these sensible considerations, makes himself a member of the family, and inserts his invisible (but undoubtedly clammy) person triumphantly into every family gathering.

Sometimes it. is possible to put your finger on him. He is a personal attribute, a worthy characteristic that has been worked to death and is now haunting the premises. Call him Superconscientiousness, emanating from a desire to ‘have things go right ’ on the part of the lady of the house, that has gradually become fussiness and monomania; the expectation that things will not go right, that in turn makes them go wrong by the very self-consciousness that it has introduced into the whole domestic organization. There is the nervous apprehension that something undesirable will happen — which may be no more serious than that the maid will drop a dish in the diningroom — haunting the entire family; and finally enveloping the guest, who, having no explanation at hand, can merely feel the tension without being able to understand it. For the nervousness is there just the same even if the crockery remains undamaged.

Or, again, the emanation may come from the other side of the table. There is the contradictory host, for example, often a well-meaning man but with a wide-embracing capability to make other folk, especially the members of his own family, painfully apprehensive and ill at ease. Here the mildest topic of conversation becomes a menace, for it is not so much the fact that the host contradicts, as the way he does it. You can differ with somebody else without necessarily suggesting that the somebody else is a fool or an ignoramus; on the other hand you can differ in such a manner that everybody within hearing is rendered uncomfortable. It is not t hat offense is intended: rather it is the fear that offense will be taken that brings the skeleton rattling out of his closet.

Or, yet again, our ghost may be a spirit of wider diffusion. Family jars, allowed to become chronic, may be responsible for it; or social ambitions that cannot be realized; or the pressure of keeping up appearances beyond the comfortable resources of the pocketbook. For the ghost of this kind of haunted house is a creature made up in large part of dead opportunities for happiness — the joy, so near and yet so difficult to attain, that comes from the constant practice of the minor amenities of life toward those we live with.

And here, possibly, no less than in the case of the old-fashioned dwelling with the haunted chamber, the ghost in the house becomes a factor in the great Servant-Girl Problem. For it is the peculiarity of this kind of ghost that the creature haunts the whole house, creates an atmosphere that there is no getting away from. It penetrates even the kitchen. At its worst it is a deterrent to song combined with dish-washing. And when we hear of a house where good wages are paid and there is apparently no explanation of an admitted difficulty in keeping servants, is it not possible that the ghost is responsible? Going out to service ourselves, the chances are that we would stay longest in the homes where we have already made the pleasantest visits.

Unfortunately it is one thing to find the ghost and another to lay it. One of the simplest and most sensible pieces of advice in the world is, ‘Don’t worry,’ — but the real difficulty is not to. The accomplishment, in fact, is a task of such dimensions that if Jones murdered Smith for telling him once too often ‘not to worry,’ almost any jury would be tempted to bring in a verdict of justifiable homicide. ‘Being cheerful’ presents the same difficulty, and yet here is the way in many cases to send the ghost in the house packing. Preaching simplicity appeals chiefly to persons who are simple already, unless simplicity can be made expensive, and then there’s a fairly good chance that it can be made fashionable. ‘Not taking one’s self too seriously’ would be another specific to allay the househaunter — the difficulty there is that no man, or woman either, ever seems to know that he or she is sinning in this direction. Applied Christianity, of course, would be an infallible remedy; provided it were applied easily, and the application not made too painfully violent.

Are we, then, reduced to accepting the ghost in the house? It would almost seem so. Yet those who have observed this psychic phenomenon know that there are such ghosts of various sizes; little ones just beginning to grow, big ones firmly established. Perhaps in some homes the little ghost is discovered while it is still weak, and put out of commission before it can get big enough to become, by force of habit, a permanent inmate.