"Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "it is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day." The doctor's day included the rising of 1745 and of the Wesleyans, the seizure of Canada,...
Sir Walter Scott, writing about the disturbances in the house occupied by Mrs. Ricketts, sister of the great admiral, Lord St. Vincent, asks: "Who has seen Lord St. Vincent's lette...
Mark was smoking his cigar outside the door of his house when he saw a man, a stranger, approaching him. Suddenly he ceased to be visible! Mark, who had long desired to see a ghost...
A physician, as we have seen, got the better of the demon in Mrs. Shchapoff's case, at least while the lady was under his care. Really these disturbances appear to demand the atten...
Fishing in Sutherland, I had a charming companion in the gillie. He was well educated, a great reader, the best of salmon fishers, and I never heard a man curse William, Duke of Cu...
A naval officer visited a friend in the country. Several men were sitting round the smoking-room fire when he arrived, and a fox-terrier was with them. Presently the heavy, shambli...
"I have had a strange dream about your ring" (a "medallion" of Anthony and Cleopatra); "it is very valuable." Major Buckley said it was worth 60 pounds, and put the ring into his f...
In 1854, General Barter, C.B., was a subaltern in the 75th Regiment, and was doing duty at the hill station of Murree in the Punjaub. He lived in a house built recently by a Lieute...
The variations in the narratives of Sir George Villiers' appearance to an old servant of his, or old protege, and the warning communicated by this man to Villiers' son, the famous...
"Mr. Rutherford, of Bowland, a gentleman of landed property in the Vale of Gala, was prosecuted for a very considerable sum, the accumulated arrears of teind (or tithe) for which h...
Herr H. V. Hilprecht is Professor of Assyriology in the University of Pennsylvania. That university had despatched an expedition to explore the ruins of Babylon, and sketches of th...
My friend, as a lad, was in a strait between the choice of two professions. He prayed for enlightenment, and soon afterwards heard an _internal_ voice, advising a certain course. "...
"There is at Curraghmore, the seat of Lord Waterford, in Ireland, a manuscript account of the tale, such as it was originally received and implicitly believed in by the children an...
[Some years ago I published in a volume of tales called The Wrong Paradise, a paper styled "My Friend the Beach-comber". This contained genuine adventures of a kinsman, my oldest a...
In 1867, Miss G., aged eighteen, died suddenly of cholera in St. Louis. In 1876 a brother, F. G., who was much attached to her, had done a good day's business in St. Joseph. He was...
[Jerome Cardan, the famous physician, tells the following anecdote in his De Rerum Varietate, lib. x., 93. Jerome only once heard a rapping himself, at the time of the death of a f...
Mrs. Weiss, of St. Louis, was in New York in January, 1881, attending a daughter, Mrs. C., who was about to have a child. She writes:-- "On Friday night (Jan. 21) I dreamed that my...
I had given a glass ball to the wife of a friend, whose visions proved so startling and on one occasion so unholy that she ceased to make experiments. One day my friend's secretary...
A lady very well known to myself, and in literary society, lived as a girl with an antiquarian father in an old house dear to an antiquary. It was haunted, among other things, by f...
"About the month of November in the year 1682, in the parish of Spraiton, in the county of Devon, one Francis Fey (servant to Mr. Philip Furze) being in a field near the dwelling-h...
On 16th November, 1870, Mr. Shchapoff, a Russian squire, the narrator, came home from a visit to a country town, Iletski, and found his family in some disarray. There lived with hi...
Swooning, or slight mental mistiness, is not very unusual in ghost seers. The brother of a friend of my own, a man of letters and wide erudition, was, as a boy, employed in a shop...
Miss C., a lady of excellent sense, religious but not bigoted, lived before her marriage in the house of her uncle D., a celebrated physician, and member of the Institute. Her moth...
"Here is a strange story that the Duc d'Orleans told me one day in a tete-a-tete at Marly, he having just run down from Paris before he started for Italy; and it may be observed th...
The sheriff writes: "The Devil at Hjalta-stad was outspoken enough this past winter, although no one saw him. I, along with others, had the dishonour to hear him talking for nearly...
Mrs. Ogilvie of Drumquaigh had a poodle named Fanti. Her family, or at least those who lived with her, were her son, the laird, and three daughters. Of these the two younger, at a...
The author's friend, Mr. Rokeby, lives, and has lived for some twenty years, in an old house at Hammersmith. It is surrounded by a large garden, the drawing-room and dining-room ar...