gh not a little disturbed by incidents so
unaccountable, and rendered by the interruption quite unfit to pursue my
occupation further, I deliberately undressed, said my prayers, put out my
candle, and went to bed. It was a bright starlight night, and the two
windows of my chamber made objects within indistinctly visible. No sooner
had I laid my head upon the pillow, than through a door at the foot of my
bed appeared a slowly moving figure, turning the corner of the bed and
approaching the side of it upon which I lay. I could distinctly see its
outlines, and it seemed to me apparelled like a monk, with a hood drawn
over its features, and long trailing garments. As Eliphaz the Temanite,
under similar circumstances, has related,--'the hair of my flesh stood
up.' But I did not quite lose my self-possession. As the figure came
nearer, I instantly threw off the bedclothes and jumped towards it into
the middle of the room,--and it was gone! Though startled enough at so
strange an occurrence, I reflected that it must be an illusion produced
by some casual disorder of the natural faculties, and returned to bed
and slept as usual until morning. But the next day I was much more
disturbed in recalling the several circumstances of this extraordinary
visitation. The repeated previous heavy blows upon the floor, and their
apparent consummation in the vision I supposed myself to have seen, made
me, as Othello says, 'perplexed in the extreme.' On that day I told my
mother the story; she laughed at the idea of supernatural appearances,
perhaps to quiet her son's emotion; but she said she was afraid of no
ghosts, proposed an exchange of chambers, and this accommodation at once
took place. But though I finished and delivered the poem in question, I
continued to muse by myself upon what had occurred, unwilling to speak to
any one about it. It was many months before I recovered from the shock to
my nervous system. Reflecting upon it at the time, again I summoned
whatever philosophy I had at command, as well as I could. I conceived
that possibly in the excitement of verse-writing, in the silence of the
night, some tenseness had affected the drum of my ear; that hearing, or
imagining that I heard some unusual sound, amid the perfect stillness
around me, a continuous disordered state of physical functions had
produced a similar effect at a correspondent hour; and that this
experience not unnaturally culminated in the spectral visitation."

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