or. Abbotsford Noises. Legitimate Haunting by the
Dead. The Girl in Pink. The Dog in the Haunted Room. The Lady in
Black. Dogs Alarmed. The Dead Seldom Recognised. Glamis. A Border
Castle. Another Class of Hauntings. A Russian Case. The Dancing
Devil. The Little Hands.

Haunted houses have been familiar to man ever since he has owned a
roof to cover his head. The Australian blacks possessed only shelters
or "leans-to," so in Australia the spirits do their rapping on the
tree trunks; a native illustrated this by whacking a table with a
book. The perched-up houses of the Dyaks are haunted by noisy routing
agencies. We find them in monasteries, palaces, and crofters'
cottages all through the Middle Ages. On an ancient Egyptian papyrus
we find the husband of the Lady Onkhari protesting against her habit
of haunting his house, and exclaiming: "What wrong have I done,"
exactly in the spirit of the "Hymn of Donald Ban," who was "sair
hadden down by a bodach" (noisy bogle) after Culloden. {188a}

The husband of Onkhari does not say _how_ she disturbed him, but the
manners of Egyptian haunters, just what they remain at present, may be
gathered from a magical papyrus, written in Greek. Spirits "wail and
groan, or laugh dreadfully"; they cause bad dreams, terror and
madness; finally, they "practice stealthy theft," and rap and knock.
The "theft" (by making objects disappear mysteriously) is often
illustrated in the following tales, as are the groaning and knocking.
{188b} St. Augustine speaks of hauntings as familiar occurrences, and
we have a chain of similar cases from ancient Egypt to 1896. Several
houses in that year were so disturbed that the inhabitants were
obliged to leave them. The newspapers were full of correspondence on
the subject.

The usual annoyances are apparitions (rare), flying about of objects
(not very common), noises of every kind (extremely frequent), groans,
screams, footsteps and fire-raising. Imposture has either been proved
or made very probable in ten out of eleven cases of volatile objects
between 1883 and 1895. {188c} Moreover, it is certain that the noises
of haunted houses are not equally audible by all persons present, even
when the sounds are at their loudest. Thus Lord St. Vincent, the
great admiral, heard nothing during his stay at the house of his
sister, Mrs. Ricketts, while that lady endured terrible things. After
his departure she was obliged to recall him. He a