here was no lack of dismal legends and superstitions connected with
the mansion, and every trifling circumstance that occurred was twisted
into an omen or presage, whether of good or evil, by the highly wrought
fancy of Miss Patricia. These absurdities, together with the past
grandeur of their house, and the former glories of their religion,
formed the staple subjects of conversation when the family was
assembled; and as I became more intimately acquainted with the state of
my patient, I felt convinced that the atmosphere of gloomy superstition
in which she had been reared had fostered, even if it had not altogether
been the cause of, her morbid mental and bodily condition.

"Among the many legends connected with the mansion, one seemed to have a
peculiar fascination for Miss Collingham, perhaps because it was the
most ghastly and repulsive. One wing of the house was held to be haunted
by the spirit of an ancestress of the family, who appeared in the shape
of a tall woman, with one hand folded in her white robe and the other
pointing upward. It was said, that in a room at the end of the haunted
wing this lady had been foully murdered by her jealous husband. The
window of the apartment overhung the wild wooded side of one of the
'cloughs' common in the country; and tradition averred that the victim
was thrown from this window by her murderer. As she caught hold of the
sill in a last frantic struggle for life, he severed her hand at the
wrist, and the mutilated body fell, with one fearful shriek, into the
depth below. Since then, a white shadowy form has forever been sitting
at the fatal window, or wandering along the deserted passages of the
haunted wing with the bleeding stump folded in her robe; and in moments
of danger or approaching death to any member of the Collingham family,
the same long, wild shriek rises slowly from the wooded cliff and peals
through the mansion; while to different individuals of the house, a pale
hand has now and then been visible, laid on themselves or some other of
the family, a never-failing omen of danger or death.

"I need not tell you how false and foolish all this dreary superstition
appeared to me; and I exerted all my powers of persuasion to induce Miss
Patricia to dwell less on these and similar themes in the presence of
Miss Collingham. But there seemed to be something in the very air of the
gloomy old mansion which fostered such delusions; for when I spoke to
Father O'Connor the pr