“Liquor, for one,” he replied. “You was plumb absquottleated at Asher’s place. And you was hitting that punch bowl mighty hard again last night. Hell, Poe, there’ve been times I stowed away so much whisky I was seeing two-headed grizzly bears doing the fandango, and pink-striped rattlesnakes climbing over the walls.”

I took a moment to consider this apparently plausible explanation before answering thusly: “I confess that, in spite of my determination to lead a life of rigorously abstemious habits, I may well have succumbed, in each of the two instances you speak of, to the temptations of the moment. Nevertheless, while my resulting mental condition may fairly be described as one of intoxication, it fell far short of the sort of extreme inebriation that would have produced such intense and lifelike hallucinations.

“Moreover,” I continued, “on the evening I confronted the sinister female spectre in the gloomy precints of Alexander Montague’s dwelling, I had indulged in no drink stronger than water. No, Colonel Crockett,” I concluded with an emphatic shake of my head. “Mere intemperance alone cannot possibly account for the ghastly feminine horror I have now witnessed no less than three separate times.”

“Maybe liquor ain’t the whole story,” Crockett conceded “But you mix it together with that pesky queer imagination of yours, and I’ll be blowed if that don’t serve as all the explaining you need. Hell, just look at these-here pestiferous books you spend your whole blessed life reading.” Here, he turned his gaze upon the myriad volumes lining my bookshelves and laboriously began to enunciate their tides: “The True History of Satan Worship; Devils, Demons, and Witches; The Art of Dying; Burial Practices in Ancient Europe; Torments and Tortures of the Spanish Inquisition—”

Abandoning his efforts with an exaggerated sigh, Crockett shook his head—fixed me with a sharp, sardonic look—and wryly declared: “My souls, Poe. If my days was spent readin’ such-like ornery truck, I’d be seeing double, too!”

Recalling the several recent occasions when I had been the recipient of strange, nocturnal visitations (such as the radiant apparition that materialized in my chamber on the very night of Crockett’s advent in my life), I was forced to conclude that there might be a modicum of truth to the frontiersman’s observation. “It is undeniably the case,” said I, “that I am constitutionally nervous to an unusual degree, and thus prone, under conditions of extreme anxiety and duress, to visions of a wild and phantasmagoric nature. In short, your hypothesis is not entirely without an element of validity.

“Still,” I continued, “even if I have been mistaken in the precise facial appearance of the dark and unsettling female presence I have thrice encountered, there is no doubt whatsoever that the figure itself was literally and palpably there on each of these occasions.”

“Poe,” Crockett responded, “I just cain’t credit that such savagerous killings could’ve been done by a she-male”