The Ghost That Sang

1913

I had never seen a ghost, but once in the company of a friend, I heard a ghost sing.

It was in London. I must not mention the house, because to say a house is haunted in London is criminal libel. This house was haunted. I knew it was haunted, but the ghost had never troubled me. It bothered a friend of mine who spent an autumn in the house, by stamping up the stairs in the middle of the night. It troubled my secretary, who used to work alone in the house in the evening sometimes, by opening and shutting the doors. It troubled the police by lighting up the house and giving false alarm of burglars in the middle of the night. It never troubled me. I never saw it. I never felt it never heard it till this once.

It was about 1 o'clock in the morning. I was sitting in my sitting-room with a friend whom I call "X", who is a well-known author. (One generally adds in a ghost story "and who was a hard-headed man of business, utterly skeptical and completely matter of fact," as if that had anything to do with it.) We had just come in and were expecting another friend who lived in the house, and we were sitting up for him. We were talking about Swinburne's verse, and took down the first edition of "Atalanta in Calydon," which I then possessed and which I foolishly sold for a small sum (it was immediately afterward resold at an auction for large sum and went to America and is now in some collector's library), and I read out a passage. As I was reading we heard singing next door. said, "There's Phil," and didn't pay any further attention, as I expected him to come in, and I went on reading.

But the singing continued. It sounded foreign — like Spanish. This didn't surprise us, as Phil was in the habit of singing Provencal songs. The singing went on, and as he didn't come in, we went to meet him and opened the door. The next room was a tiny ante-room opening into another sitting room, and beyond this again was the smallest of bedrooms — not bigger than a cupboard. There was nobody there, but the singing went on; such curious singing, too; strange, alien, faint, tinkly, as if four confused voices were singing the song of an early century; it was unreal and it had a kind of burr in it, as if you were listening to voices on a telephone that is out of order. We walked through the rooms and we walked through the singing, and we heard it behind us still going on; and in the bedroom we found our friend asleep in his bed. Then the singing stopped. Now as we walked through that sitting-room I noticed my friend's hair, in Kipling's phrase, sitting up. I daresay he noticed the name thing about mine, or he would have done so had I any hair to notice. — Maurice Baring in the February Metropolitan.

—Middletown Daily Times-Press, Middletown, New York, February 15, 1913, page 4.