supposed to walk. I
remember when a child hearing from the lips of a relative how in her
girlhood she had screwed up the courage to shut herself in a dark room
on All-Hallows E'en and had eaten an apple in front of the mirror; and
that instead of seeing the face of her future husband peering over her
shoulder, she had seen a quantity of earth falling. She was informed
that this was a prognostication of death, and, surely enough, within the
year her father died. I have heard, too, of a girl who, on All-Hallows
E'en, walked down a gloomy garden path scattering hempseed for her
future lover to pick up, and on hearing someone tiptoeing behind her,
and fancying it was a practical joker, turned sharply round, to confront
a skeleton dressed exactly similar to herself. She died before the year
was out from the result of an accident on the ice.

I have often poured boiling lead into water on All-Hallows E'en and it
has assumed strange shapes, once--a boot, once--a coffin, once--a ship;
and I have placed all the letters of the alphabet cut out of pasteboard
by my bedside, and on one occasion (my door was locked, by the way, and
I fully satisfied myself no one was in hiding) found, on awakening in
the morning, the following word spelt out of them--"Merivale." It was
not until some days afterwards that I remembered associations with this
word, and then it all came back to me in a trice--it was the name of a
man who had once wanted me to join him in an enterprise in British West
Africa.

On New Year's Eve a certain family, with whom I am very intimately
acquainted, frequently see ghosts of the future, as well as phantasms of
the dead, and, when I stay with them, which I often do at Christmas, I
am always glad when this night is over. On one occasion, one of them saw
a lady come up the garden path and vanish on the front doorsteps. She
saw the lady's face distinctly; every feature in it, together with the
clothes she was wearing, stood out with startling perspicuity.

Some six months later, she was introduced to the material counterpart of
the phantasm, who was destined to play a most important part in her
life. On another New Year's Eve she saw the phantasm of a dog, to which
she had been deeply attached, enter her bedroom and jump on her bed,
just as it had done during its lifetime. Not in the least frightened,
she put down her hand to stroke it, when it vanished. I have given
several other instances of this kind in my _Haunted H