has never once been compromised or questioned, have you, or have
you not, in the foregoing story, a well-authenticated ghost story?

Before you answer the above question, however, it may be convenient to
let you know certain other facts which were clearly established upon
the inquest that was very properly held upon the body which in so
strange a manner we had discovered.

I purposely avoid details, and without assigning the depositions
respectively to the witnesses who made them, shall restrict myself to a
naked outline of the evidence as it appeared.

The body I have described was identified as that of Abraham Smith, an
unfortunate lunatic, who had, upon the day but one preceding, made his
escape from the neighboring parish workhouse, where he had been for many
years confined. His hallucination was a strange, but not by any means an
unprecedented one. He fancied that he had died, and was condemned; and,
as these ideas alternately predominated, sometimes spoke of himself as
an "evil spirit," and sometimes importuned his keepers to "bury him;"
using habitually certain phrases, which I had no difficulty in
recognizing as among those which he had addressed to me. He had been
traced to the neighborhood where his body was found, and had been seen
and relieved scarcely half a mile from it, about two hours before my
visit to the church-yard! There were, further, unmistakable evidences of
some person's having climbed up the trellis-work to my window on the
previous night, the shutter of which had been left unbarred, and, as the
window might have been easily opened with a push, the cold which I
experienced, as an accompaniment of the nocturnal visit, was easily
accounted for. There was a mark of blood upon the window-stool, and a
scrape upon the knee of the body corresponded with it. A multiplicity of
other slight circumstances, and the positive assertion of the
chamber-maid that the window had been opened, and was but imperfectly
closed again, came in support of the conclusion, which was to my mind
satisfactorily settled by the concurrent evidence of the medical men, to
the effect that the unhappy man could not have been many hours dead when
the body was found.

Taken in the mass, the evidence convinced me; and though I might still
have clung to the preternatural theory, which, in the opinion of some
persons, the facts of the case might still have sustained, I candidly
decided with the weight of evidence, "gave up the ghos