he miller "carried off the unconscious victim".

Mr. Shchapoff also saw a small pink hand, like a child's, spring from
the floor, and play with Mrs. Shchapoff's coverlet, in bed. These
things were too much; the Shchapoffs fled to a cottage, and took a new
country house. They had no more disturbances. Mrs. Shchapoff died in
child-bed, in 1878, "a healthy, religious, quiet, affectionate woman".

CHAPTER X
Modern Hauntings

The Shchapoff Story of a Peculiar Type. "Demoniacal Possession."
Story of Wellington Mill briefly analysed. Authorities for the Story.
Letters. A Journal. The Wesley Ghost. Given Critically and Why.
Note on similar Stories, such as the Drummer of Tedworth. Sir Waller
Scott's Scepticism about Nautical Evidence. Lord St. Vincent. Scott
asks Where are his Letters on a Ghostly Disturbance. The Letters are
now Published. Lord St. Vincent's Ghost Story. Reflections.

Cases like that of Mrs. Shchapoff really belong to a peculiar species
of haunted houses. Our ancestors, like the modern Chinese, attributed
them to diabolical possession, not to an ordinary ghost of a dead
person. Examples are very numerous, and have all the same "symptoms,"
as Coleridge would have said, he attributing them to a contagious
nervous malady of observation in the spectators. Among the most
notorious is the story of Willington Mill, told by Howitt, and
borrowed by Mrs. Crowe, in The Night Side of Nature. Mr. Procter, the
occupant, a Quaker, vouched to Mrs. Crowe for the authenticity of
Howitt's version. (22nd July, 1847.) Other letters from seers are
published, and the Society of Psychical Research lately printed Mr.
Procter's contemporary journal. A man, a woman, and a monkey were the
chief apparitions. There were noises, lights, beds were heaved about:
nothing was omitted. A clairvoyante was turned on, but could only say
that the spectral figures, which she described, "had no brains".
After the Quakers left the house there seems to have been no more
trouble. The affair lasted for fifteen years.

Familiar as it is, we now offer the old story of the hauntings at
Epworth, mainly because a full view of the inhabitants, the
extraordinary family of Wesley, seems necessary to an understanding of
the affair. The famous and excessively superstitious John Wesley was
not present on the occasion.

THE WESLEY GHOST

No ghost story is more celebrated than that of Old Jeffrey, the spirit
so named by Emily