It turned out, as he had anticipated, to be a difficult case, and when they did at last resort to induced labour, it proved fruitless. Meantime the young woman back home told the husband that his wife would have a perfectly natural delivery on a certain day and give birth to a son. And that, in short, was precisely what happened.

Having heard enough about all this to pique his interest, the doctor called on the young woman, who was his patient, though he could do nothing for her, and in the course of conversation discovered that she never felt lonely, least of all at night-time, for then a dead neighbour would drop in for a céilidh and they would have a pleasant chat. She told him that his mother (who was dead) had called on her recently and had not sat on the chair or stool as the others did, but on the bottom corner of the bed in a way that he recognised as peculiar to his mother. Now this young woman had certainly never seen his mother alive, for his home had been in a distant place. Yet the people here had got it into their heads—by an understandable mistake, which need not be explained—that he belonged to another place, so that there was a certain puzzlement in the young woman’s look when she repeated his mother’s story of the true birth-place. She described his mother quite accurately. A forecast, by his dead mother, regarding the girl’s recovery has yet to be ‘proved’.

There is a third class of story dealing entirely with some past event, generally of a desperate or gruesome nature. The haunted room is the type of this story, but such experiences as have been related to me by those who have undergone them have been characterised for the most part by an ugly terror. Little of the cloak-and-sword romantic phantom or of the wailing of the banshee. In fact it could almost be said that it is not so much what happens as of the state of mind induced by the happening. A brilliant young Dublin woman is in the Irish West, walking along an Irish road with her sister, the place new to them, their minds happy, when all at once they are overcome with terror. They hear chains clanking behind them. They try to run, but their joints weaken in loathsome horror. They begin squawling. The experience was altogether horrible. As she tells it to us in her Dublin sitting-room, she shudders.

They found afterwards the true history of the clanking chains. It was a real piece of the past, and others had had a similar experience at the same spot.

This kind of horror story has its fascination for those interested in the physical content. The horror can be so awful that it not only terrifies and overcomes the mind, leaving it abject and degraded, but becomes so omnipresent that the very senses apprehend it, as they would a pervasive poisonous smell. The reaction is one of profound and bitter shame, not only for oneself but for our common humanity.