Chapter 3

The next
evening, at about the same hour, accompanied by two others whose names
are not recalled, they were again on the porch of the Harding house, and
again the mysterious phenomenon occurred: the vine was violently agitated
while under the closest scrutiny from root to tip, nor did their combined
strength applied to the trunk serve to still it. After an hour’s
observation they retreated, no less wise, it is thought, than when they
had come.

No great time was required for these singular facts to rouse the
curiosity of the entire neighborhood. By day and by night crowds of
persons assembled at the Harding house “seeking a sign.” It does not
appear that any found it, yet so credible were the witnesses mentioned
that none doubted the reality of the “manifestations” to which they
testified.

By either a happy inspiration or some destructive design, it was one day
proposed—nobody appeared to know from whom the suggestion came—to dig up
the vine, and after a good deal of debate this was done. Nothing was
found but the root, yet nothing could have been more strange!

For five or six feet from the trunk, which had at the surface of the
ground a diameter of several inches, it ran downward, single and
straight, into a loose, friable earth; then it divided and subdivided
into rootlets, fibers and filaments, most curiously interwoven. When
carefully freed from soil they showed a singular formation. In their
ramifications and doublings back upon themselves they made a compact
network, having in size and shape an amazing resemblance to the human
figure. Head, trunk and limbs were there; even the fingers and toes were
distinctly defined; and many professed to see in the distribution and
arrangement of the fibers in the globular mass representing the head a
grotesque suggestion of a face. The figure was horizontal; the smaller
roots had begun to unite at the breast.

In point of resemblance to the human form this image was imperfect. At
about ten inches from one of the knees, the _cilia_ forming that leg had
abruptly doubled backward and inward upon their course of growth. The
figure lacked the left foot.

There was but one inference—the obvious one; but in the ensuing
excitement as many courses of action were proposed as there were
incapable counselors. The matter was settled by the sheriff of the
county, who as the lawful custodian of the abandoned estate ordered the
root replaced and the excavation filled with the earth that had been
removed.

Later inquiry brought out only one fact of relevancy and significance:
Mrs. Harding had never visited her relatives in Iowa, nor did they know
that she was supposed to have done so.

Of Robert Harding and the rest of his family nothing is known. The house
retains its evil reputation, but the replanted vine is as orderly and
well-behaved a vegetable as a nervous person could wish to sit under of a
pleasant night, when the katydids grate out their immemorial revelation
and the distant whippoorwill signifies his notion of what ought to be
done about it.

AT OLD MAN ECKERT’S

PHILIP ECKERT lived for many years in an old, weather-stained wooden
house about three miles from the little town of Marion, in Vermont.
There must be quite a number of persons living who remember him, not
unkindly, I trust, and know something of the story that I am about to
tell.

“Old Man Eckert,” as he was always called, was not of a sociable
disposition and lived alone. As he was never known to speak of his own
affairs nobody thereabout knew anything of his past, nor of his relatives
if he had any. Without being particularly ungracious or repellent in
manner or speech, he managed somehow to be immune to impertinent
curiosity, yet exempt from the evil repute with which it commonly
revenges itself when baffled; so far as I know, Mr. Eckert’s renown as a
reformed assassin or a retired pirate of the Spanish Main had not reached
any ear in Marion. He got his living cultivating a small and not very
fertile farm.

One day he disappeared and a prolonged search by his neighbors failed to
turn him up or throw any light upon his whereabouts or whyabouts.
Nothing indicated preparation to leave: all was as he might have left it
to go to the spring for a bucket of water. For a few weeks little else
was talked of in that region; then “old man Eckert” became a village tale
for the ear of the stranger. I do not know what was done regarding his
property—the correct legal thing, doubtless. The house was standing,
still vacant and conspicuously unfit, when I last heard of it, some
twenty years afterward.

Of course it came to be considered “haunted,” and the customary tales
were told of moving lights, dolorous sounds and startling apparitions.
At one time, about five years after the disappearance, these stories of
the supernatural became so rife, or through some attesting circumstances
seemed so important, that some of Marion’s most serious citizens deemed
it well to investigate, and to that end arranged for a night session on
the premises. The parties to this undertaking were John Holcomb, an
apothecary; Wilson Merle, a lawyer, and Andrus C. Palmer, the teacher of
the public school, all men of consequence and repute. They were to meet
at Holcomb’s house at eight o’clock in the evening of the appointed day
and go together to the scene of their vigil, where certain arrangements
for their comfort, a provision of fuel and the like, for the season was
winter, had been already made.

Palmer did not keep the engagement, and after waiting a half-hour for him
the others went to the Eckert house without him. They established
themselves in the principal room, before a glowing fire, and without
other light than it gave, awaited events. It had been agreed to speak as
little as possible: they did not even renew the exchange of views
regarding the defection of Palmer, which had occupied their minds on the
way.

Probably an hour had passed without incident when they heard (not without
emotion, doubtless) the sound of an opening door in the rear of the
house, followed by footfalls in the room adjoining that in which they
sat. The watchers rose to their feet, but stood firm, prepared for
whatever might ensue. A long silence followed—how long neither would
afterward undertake to say. Then the door between the two rooms opened
and a man entered.

It was Palmer. He was pale, as if from excitement—as pale as the others
felt themselves to be. His manner, too, was singularly distrait: he
neither responded to their salutations nor so much as looked at them, but
walked slowly across the room in the light of the failing fire and
opening the front door passed out into the darkness.

It seems to have been the first thought of both men that Palmer was
suffering from fright—that something seen, heard or imagined in the back
room had deprived him of his senses. Acting on the same friendly impulse
both ran after him through the open door. But neither they nor anyone
ever again saw or heard of Andrus Palmer!

This much was ascertained the next morning. During the session of
Messrs. Holcomb and Merle at the “haunted house” a new snow had fallen to
a depth of several inches upon the old. In this snow Palmer’s trail from
his lodging in the village to the back door of the Eckert house was
conspicuous. But there it ended: from the front door nothing led away
but the tracks of the two men who swore that he preceded them. Palmer’s
disappearance was as complete as that of “old man Eckert” himself—whom,
indeed, the editor of the local paper somewhat graphically accused of
having “reached out and pulled him in.”

THE SPOOK HOUSE

ON the road leading north from Manchester, in eastern Kentucky, to
Booneville, twenty miles away, stood, in 1862, a wooden plantation house
of a somewhat better quality than most of the dwellings in that region.
The house was destroyed by fire in the year following—probably by some
stragglers from the retreating column of General George W. Morgan, when
he was driven from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio river by General Kirby
Smith. At the time of its destruction, it had for four or five years
been vacant. The fields about it were overgrown with brambles, the
fences gone, even the few negro quarters, and out-houses generally,
fallen partly into ruin by neglect and pillage; for the negroes and poor
whites of the vicinity found in the building and fences an abundant
supply of fuel, of which they availed themselves without hesitation,
openly and by daylight. By daylight alone; after nightfall no human
being except passing strangers ever went near the place.

It was known as the “Spook House.” That it was tenanted by evil spirits,
visible, audible and active, no one in all that region doubted any more
than he doubted what he was told of Sundays by the traveling preacher.
Its owner’s opinion of the matter was unknown; he and his family had
disappeared one night and no trace of them had ever been found. They
left everything—household goods, clothing, provisions, the horses in the
stable, the cows in the field, the negroes in the quarters—all as it
stood; nothing was missing—except a man, a woman, three girls, a boy and
a babe! It was not altogether surprising that a plantation where seven
human beings could be simultaneously effaced and nobody the wiser should
be under some suspicion.

One night in June, 1859, two citizens of Frankfort, Col. J. C. McArdle, a
lawyer, and Judge Myron Veigh, of the State Militia, were driving from
Booneville to Manchester. Their business was so important that they
decided to push on, despite the darkness and the mutterings of an
approaching storm, which eventually broke upon them just as they arrived
opposite the “Spook House.” The lightning was so incessant that they
easily found their way through the gateway and into a shed, where they
hitched and unharnessed their team. They then went to the house, through
the rain, and knocked at all the doors without getting any response.
Attributing this to the continuous uproar of the thunder they pushed at
one of the doors, which yielded. They entered without further ceremony
and closed the door. That instant they were in darkness and silence.
Not a gleam of the lightning’s unceasing blaze penetrated the windows or
crevices; not a whisper of the awful tumult without reached them there.
It was as if they had suddenly been stricken blind and deaf, and McArdle
afterward said that for a moment he believed himself to have been killed
by a stroke of lightning as he crossed the threshold. The rest of this
adventure can as well be related in his own words, from the Frankfort
_Advocate_ of August 6, 1876:

“When I had somewhat recovered from the dazing effect of the transition
from uproar to silence, my first impulse was to reopen the door which I
had closed, and from the knob of which I was not conscious of having
removed my hand; I felt it distinctly, still in the clasp of my fingers.
My notion was to ascertain by stepping again into the storm whether I had
been deprived of sight and hearing. I turned the doorknob and pulled
open the door. It led into another room!

“This apartment was suffused with a faint greenish light, the source of
which I could not determine, making everything distinctly visible, though
nothing was sharply defined. Everything, I say, but in truth the only
objects within the blank stone walls of that room were human corpses. In
number they were perhaps eight or ten—it may well be understood that I
did not truly count them. They were of different ages, or rather sizes,
from infancy up, and of both sexes. All were prostrate on the floor,
excepting one, apparently a young woman, who sat up, her back supported
by an angle of the wall. A babe was clasped in the arms of another and
older woman. A half-grown lad lay face downward across the legs of a
full-bearded man. One or two were nearly naked, and the hand of a young
girl held the fragment of a gown which she had torn open at the breast.
The bodies were in various stages of decay, all greatly shrunken in face
and figure. Some were but little more than skeletons.

“While I stood stupefied with horror by this ghastly spectacle and still
holding open the door, by some unaccountable perversity my attention was
diverted from the shocking scene and concerned itself with trifles and
details. Perhaps my mind, with an instinct of self-preservation, sought
relief in matters which would relax its dangerous tension. Among other
things, I observed that the door that I was holding open was of heavy
iron plates, riveted. Equidistant from one another and from the top and
bottom, three strong bolts protruded from the beveled edge. I turned the
knob and they were retracted flush with the edge; released it, and they
shot out. It was a spring lock. On the inside there was no knob, nor
any kind of projection—a smooth surface of iron.

“While noting these things with an interest and attention which it now
astonishes me to recall I felt myself thrust aside, and Judge Veigh, whom
in the intensity and vicissitudes of my feelings I had altogether
forgotten, pushed by me into the room. ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘do
not go in there! Let us get out of this dreadful place!’

“He gave no heed to my entreaties, but (as fearless a gentleman as lived
in all the South) walked quickly to the center of the room, knelt beside
one of the bodies for a closer examination and tenderly raised its
blackened and shriveled head in his hands. A strong disagreeable odor
came through the doorway, completely overpowering me. My senses reeled;
I felt myself falling, and in clutching at the edge of the door for
support pushed it shut with a sharp click!

“I remember no more: six weeks later I recovered my reason in a hotel at
Manchester, whither I had been taken by strangers the next day. For all
these weeks I had suffered from a nervous fever, attended with constant
delirium. I had been found lying in the road several miles away from the
house; but how I had escaped from it to get there I never knew. On
recovery, or as soon as my physicians permitted me to talk, I inquired
the fate of Judge Veigh, whom (to quiet me, as I now know) they
represented as well and at home.

“No one believed a word of my story, and who can wonder? And who can
imagine my grief when, arriving at my home in Frankfort two months later,
I learned that Judge Veigh had never been heard of since that night? I
then regretted bitterly the pride which since the first few days after
the recovery of my reason had forbidden me to repeat my discredited story
and insist upon its truth.

“With all that afterward occurred—the examination of the house; the
failure to find any room corresponding to that which I have described;
the attempt to have me adjudged insane, and my triumph over my
accusers—the readers of the _Advocate_ are familiar. After all these
years I am still confident that excavations which I have neither the
legal right to undertake nor the wealth to make would disclose the secret
of the disappearance of my unhappy friend, and possibly of the former
occupants and owners of the deserted and now destroyed house. I do not
despair of yet bringing about such a search, and it is a source of deep
grief to me that it has been delayed by the undeserved hostility and
unwise incredulity of the family and friends of the late Judge Veigh.”

Colonel McArdle died in Frankfort on the thirteenth day of December, in
the year 1879.

THE OTHER LODGERS

“IN order to take that train,” said Colonel Levering, sitting in the
Waldorf-Astoria hotel, “you will have to remain nearly all night in
Atlanta. That is a fine city, but I advise you not to put up at the
Breathitt House, one of the principal hotels. It is an old wooden
building in urgent need of repairs. There are breaches in the walls that
you could throw a cat through. The bedrooms have no locks on the doors,
no furniture but a single chair in each, and a bedstead without
bedding—just a mattress. Even these meager accommodations you cannot be
sure that you will have in monopoly; you must take your chance of being
stowed in with a lot of others. Sir, it is a most abominable hotel.

“The night that I passed in it was an uncomfortable night. I got in late
and was shown to my room on the ground floor by an apologetic night-clerk
with a tallow candle, which he considerately left with me. I was worn
out by two days and a night of hard railway travel and had not entirely
recovered from a gunshot wound in the head, received in an altercation.
Rather than look for better quarters I lay down on the mattress without
removing my clothing and fell asleep.

“Along toward morning I awoke. The moon had risen and was shining in at
the uncurtained window, illuminating the room with a soft, bluish light
which seemed, somehow, a bit spooky, though I dare say it had no uncommon
quality; all moonlight is that way if you will observe it. Imagine my
surprise and indignation when I saw the floor occupied by at least a
dozen other lodgers! I sat up, earnestly damning the management of that
unthinkable hotel, and was about to spring from the bed to go and make
trouble for the night-clerk—him of the apologetic manner and the tallow
candle—when something in the situation affected me with a strange
indisposition to move. I suppose I was what a story-writer might call
‘frozen with terror.’ For those men were obviously all dead!

“They lay on their backs, disposed orderly along three sides of the room,
their feet to the walls—against the other wall, farthest from the door,
stood my bed and the chair. All the faces were covered, but under their
white cloths the features of the two bodies that lay in the square patch
of moonlight near the window showed in sharp profile as to nose and chin.

“I thought this a bad dream and tried to cry out, as one does in a
nightmare, but could make no sound. At last, with a desperate effort I
threw my feet to the floor and passing between the two rows of clouted
faces and the two bodies that lay nearest the door, I escaped from the
infernal place and ran to the office. The night-clerk was there, behind
the desk, sitting in the dim light of another tallow candle—just sitting
and staring. He did not rise: my abrupt entrance produced no effect upon
him, though I must have looked a veritable corpse myself. It occurred to
me then that I had not before really observed the fellow. He was a
little chap, with a colorless face and the whitest, blankest eyes I ever
saw. He had no more expression than the back of my hand. His clothing
was a dirty gray.

“‘Damn you!’ I said; ‘what do you mean?’

“Just the same, I was shaking like a leaf in the wind and did not
recognize my own voice.

“The night-clerk rose, bowed (apologetically) and—well, he was no longer
there, and at that moment I felt a hand laid upon my shoulder from
behind. Just fancy that if you can! Unspeakably frightened, I turned
and saw a portly, kind-faced gentleman, who asked:

“‘What is the matter, my friend?’

“I was not long in telling him, but before I made an end of it he went
pale himself. ‘See here,’ he said, ‘are you telling the truth?’

“I had now got myself in hand and terror had given place to indignation.
‘If you dare to doubt it,’ I said, ‘I’ll hammer the life out of you!’

“‘No,’ he replied, ‘don’t do that; just sit down till I tell you. This
is not a hotel. It used to be; afterward it was a hospital. Now it is
unoccupied, awaiting a tenant. The room that you mention was the
dead-room—there were always plenty of dead. The fellow that you call the
night-clerk used to be that, but later he booked the patients as they
were brought in. I don’t understand his being here. He has been dead a
few weeks.’

“‘And who are you?’ I blurted out.

“‘Oh, I look after the premises. I happened to be passing just now, and
seeing a light in here came in to investigate. Let us have a look into
that room,’ he added, lifting the sputtering candle from the desk.

“‘I’ll see you at the devil first!’ said I, bolting out of the door into
the street.

“Sir, that Breathitt House, in Atlanta, is a beastly place! Don’t you
stop there.”

“God forbid! Your account of it certainly does not suggest comfort. By
the way, Colonel, when did all that occur?”

“In September, 1864—shortly after the siege.”

THE THING AT NOLAN

TO the south of where the road between Leesville and Hardy, in the State
of Missouri, crosses the east fork of May Creek stands an abandoned
house. Nobody has lived in it since the summer of 1879, and it is fast
going to pieces. For some three years before the date mentioned above,
it was occupied by the family of Charles May, from one of whose ancestors
the creek near which it stands took its name.

Mr. May’s family consisted of a wife, an adult son and two young girls.
The son’s name was John—the names of the daughters are unknown to the
writer of this sketch.

John May was of a morose and surly disposition, not easily moved to
anger, but having an uncommon gift of sullen, implacable hate. His
father was quite otherwise; of a sunny, jovial disposition, but with a
quick temper like a sudden flame kindled in a wisp of straw, which
consumes it in a flash and is no more. He cherished no resentments, and
his anger gone, was quick to make overtures for reconciliation. He had a
brother living near by who was unlike him in respect of all this, and it
was a current witticism in the neighborhood that John had inherited his
disposition from his uncle.

One day a misunderstanding arose between father and son, harsh words
ensued, and the father struck the son full in the face with his fist.
John quietly wiped away the blood that followed the blow, fixed his eyes
upon the already penitent offender and said with cold composure, “You
will die for that.”

The words were overheard by two brothers named Jackson, who were
approaching the men at the moment; but seeing them engaged in a quarrel
they retired, apparently unobserved. Charles May afterward related the
unfortunate occurrence to his wife and explained that he had apologized
to the son for the hasty blow, but without avail; the young man not only
rejected his overtures, but refused to withdraw his terrible threat.
Nevertheless, there was no open rupture of relations: John continued
living with the family, and things went on very much as before.

One Sunday morning in June, 1879, about two weeks after what has been
related, May senior left the house immediately after breakfast, taking a
spade. He said he was going to make an excavation at a certain spring in
a wood about a mile away, so that the cattle could obtain water. John
remained in the house for some hours, variously occupied in shaving
himself, writing letters and reading a newspaper. His manner was very
nearly what it usually was; perhaps he was a trifle more sullen and
surly.

At two o’clock he left the house. At five, he returned. For some reason
not connected with any interest in his movements, and which is not now
recalled, the time of his departure and that of his return were noted by
his mother and sisters, as was attested at his trial for murder. It was
observed that his clothing was wet in spots, as if (so the prosecution
afterward pointed out) he had been removing blood-stains from it. His
manner was strange, his look wild. He complained of illness, and going
to his room took to his bed.

May senior did not return. Later that evening the nearest neighbors were
aroused, and during that night and the following day a search was
prosecuted through the wood where the spring was. It resulted in little
but the discovery of both men’s footprints in the clay about the spring.
John May in the meantime had grown rapidly worse with what the local
physician called brain fever, and in his delirium raved of murder, but
did not say whom he conceived to have been murdered, nor whom he imagined
to have done the deed. But his threat was recalled by the brothers
Jackson and he was arrested on suspicion and a deputy sheriff put in
charge of him at his home. Public opinion ran strongly against him and
but for his illness he would probably have been hanged by a mob. As it
was, a meeting of the neighbors was held on Tuesday and a committee
appointed to watch the case and take such action at any time as
circumstances might seem to warrant.

On Wednesday all was changed. From the town of Nolan, eight miles away,
came a story which put a quite different light on the matter. Nolan
consisted of a school house, a blacksmith’s shop, a “store” and a
half-dozen dwellings. The store was kept by one Henry Odell, a cousin of
the elder May. On the afternoon of the Sunday of May’s disappearance Mr.
Odell and four of his neighbors, men of credibility, were sitting in the
store smoking and talking. It was a warm day; and both the front and the
back door were open. At about three o’clock Charles May, who was well
known to three of them, entered at the front door and passed out at the
rear. He was without hat or coat. He did not look at them, nor return
their greeting, a circumstance which did not surprise, for he was
evidently seriously hurt. Above the left eyebrow was a wound—a deep gash
from which the blood flowed, covering the whole left side of the face and
neck and saturating his light-gray shirt. Oddly enough, the thought
uppermost in the minds of all was that he had been fighting and was going
to the brook directly at the back of the store, to wash himself.

Perhaps there was a feeling of delicacy—a backwoods etiquette which
restrained them from following him to offer assistance; the court
records, from which, mainly, this narrative is drawn, are silent as to
anything but the fact. They waited for him to return, but he did not
return.

Bordering the brook behind the store is a forest extending for six miles
back to the Medicine Lodge Hills. As soon as it became known in the
neighborhood of the missing man’s dwelling that he had been seen in Nolan
there was a marked alteration in public sentiment and feeling. The
vigilance committee went out of existence without the formality of a
resolution. Search along the wooded bottom lands of May Creek was
stopped and nearly the entire male population of the region took to
beating the bush about Nolan and in the Medicine Lodge Hills. But of the
missing man no trace was found.

One of the strangest circumstances of this strange case is the formal
indictment and trial of a man for murder of one whose body no human being
professed to have seen—one not known to be dead. We are all more or less
familiar with the vagaries and eccentricities of frontier law, but this
instance, it is thought, is unique. However that may be, it is of record
that on recovering from his illness John May was indicted for the murder
of his missing father. Counsel for the defense appears not to have
demurred and the case was tried on its merits. The prosecution was
spiritless and perfunctory; the defense easily established—with regard to
the deceased—an _alibi_. If during the time in which John May must have
killed Charles May, if he killed him at all, Charles May was miles away
from where John May must have been, it is plain that the deceased must
have come to his death at the hands of someone else.

John May was acquitted, immediately left the country, and has never been
heard of from that day. Shortly afterward his mother and sisters removed
to St. Louis. The farm having passed into the possession of a man who
owns the land adjoining, and has a dwelling of his own, the May house has
ever since been vacant, and has the somber reputation of being haunted.

One day after the May family had left the country, some boys, playing in
the woods along May Creek, found concealed under a mass of dead leaves,
but partly exposed by the rooting of hogs, a spade, nearly new and
bright, except for a spot on one edge, which was rusted and stained with
blood.