boy aged between two
and three years. He lay awake, seemingly in paroxysms of terror, and the
doctors who were called in, set down the symptoms to incipient water on
the brain. Mrs. Prosser used to sit up with the nurse by the nursery
fire, much troubled in mind about the condition of her child.

His bed was placed sideways along the wall, with its head against the
door of a press or cupboard, which, however, did not shut quite close.
There was a little valance, about a foot deep, round the top of the
child's bed, and this descended within some ten or twelve inches of the
pillow on which it lay.

They observed that the little creature was quieter whenever they took it
up and held it on their laps. They had just replaced him, as he seemed
to have grown quite sleepy and tranquil, but he was not five minutes in
his bed when he began to scream in one of his frenzies of terror; at the
same moment the nurse, for the first time, detected, and Mrs. Prosser
equally plainly saw, following the direction of _her_ eyes, the real
cause of the child's sufferings.

Protruding through the aperture of the press, and shrouded in the shade
of the valance, they plainly saw the white fat hand, palm downwards,
presented towards the head of the child. The mother uttered a scream,
and snatched the child from its little bed, and she and the nurse ran
down to the lady's sleeping-room, where Mr. Prosser was in bed, shutting
the door as they entered; and they had hardly done so, when a gentle tap
came to it from the outside.

There is a great deal more, but this will suffice. The singularity of
the narrative seems to me to be this, that it describes the ghost of a
hand, and no more. The person to whom that hand belonged never once
appeared: nor was it a hand separated from a body, but only a hand so
manifested and introduced that its owner was always, by some crafty
accident, hidden from view.

In the year 1819, at a college breakfast, I met a Mr. Prosser--a thin,
grave, but rather chatty old gentleman, with very white hair drawn back
into a pigtail--and he told us all, with a concise particularity, a
story of his cousin, James Prosser, who, when an infant, had slept for
some time in what his mother said was a haunted nursery in an old house
near Chapelizod, and who, whenever he was ill, over-fatigued, or in
anywise feverish, suffered all through his life as he had done from a
time he could scarce remember, from a vision of a certain gentlema