Greenbrier independent. [volume] (Lewisburg, Va. [W. Va.]) 1859-1980, 1897-04-29

and lived in that house in ceaseless
misery, until one day her husbands
cruelty attained its consummation
and whilst she was brushing her hail
he attacked her from behind, plung.
ing dagger through her heart
The murderer escaped and is still al
large. OF course you will say moth.
ing to lead to the Identification OF
the house. Haunted houses are diff
ficult to let-not that L believe in
ghosts myself"
One spiritual phenomenon de.
serves singular observation, and that
is the wonder known as mysterious
music-not the whistling of the
wind through reeds, but most melo-
dious, not accounted for by echo of
strains of real music which distance
has strangely etherealized, but weird
beyond the scope of present expla-
nation. Music due to no ordinary
source, strangely inspiring, almost
hallowed. is heard lowering above a
little churchyard on the south bank
OF the Tweed. Between the river
and the church there runs the public
highway, and between this road and
the church there are dense trees on
rising ground, through which at
times the strange sounds greet the
traveller. Such chords within a
house must seem yet more miracu-
lous.
There is a house called Pottery
House in the Hunslet district of
Leeds. In an upper bedroom there,
not many years ago, man lay ill,
sadly stricken with rheumatic fever,
and, as it seemed, at the very point
of death. One night when his sis.
ter and her husband had left him for
time, they heard a succession
of most musical and enchantingly
melodious sounds in his room. They
wentto him. The sufferer had listened
to the preternatural sounds entranced
and from that hour grew we'll. This
is not the only instance of spirit
music, and in each recurring case
the sounds thus visitant from other
spheres have harmony which
seems supernal as if the angels
played. In these investigations tes-
timony is fortified by common cor
roboratiOn, and still more when
wild or domestic animals join hu-
man beings as witnesses.
One day many persons seated in
room in house in Canada heard the
master of the place ride swiftly up;
heard, too, the dogs in the court
yard run to meet and welcome him
as they always did-heard him lead
his horse to the stables, then enter
the house, ascend the stairs, and, hav-
ing entered the library, close the door.
TO this room, as his arrival was
quite unexpected, the others f1ocked
Immediately. No one could be
seen. The master of the house was
Il hundred miles away. This was a
phantasm of the living rather than
the dead.
Our next room embraces haunted
kitchen in the village of Armitage
in Staffordshire. Here we have the
corroboration of persons in different
apartments of the house. A lady
was in the kitchen, when the door
opened, and her father, who had
been dead for many years, walked
across the room, his brow clouded,
his hands clasped behind him an at
titude which in life had always
marked extreme anxiety. He ira
yersed the kitchen and assembled the
stairs beyond, his younger daughter
in another room hearing his foot
steps distinctly. Many visions purely
Elusive fade swiftly from the mind,
but to the last day of her life she
who saw this appalling apparition
believed it to be the earth-bOrne
spirit of her father. AT that time the
youngest daughter was on the eve of
her marriage, and the explanation of
the phantasm was that her father, in
the realms which are severed from
US by distance we cannot measure,
thought so anXiously about his child
that his earthly visual form was
thus presented-as in life our fixed
and anxious thought may, in this
same manner, be borne upon the
sense of distant friends, and even
speak with them.
1t is not quite pleasant to be left
alone in the study of a certain we'll
known vicarage. In this luxuriously
furnished room spirits came and
turned the pages Of books upon the
desk. They knelt at the stool of
prayer, moving their lips in suppli-
cation, and tugged and at times
toyed with the cassock of the priest,
whose wrist once, as he wrote his
sermon, was clutched by an evil
spirit and held with such cruel te.
nacity that at last the pen dropped
from the writer's helpless hand,
which was almost paralyzed with
pain. A sensation, however, far from
unpleasant awaits those who visit a
church in Paddinton, and hear the
earnest incumbent from his pulpit
proclaim that soon we shall realize
the benign influences of the spirits
which hover overhead and never
leave US. This good man has told
his congregation that ere many years
have passed we shall communicate
with the spirits of the dead as freely
as we now do with those who still
breathe the breath Of earthly life
Not less interesting-if SO cold a
term can qualify our thought on such
a theme-than ghosts of men are
the spirits of birds, of whose ap-
pearance l may here append a strik-
ing instance, not strictly associated
with any particular room, yet seen
so often in chamber at Brighton
that faces the sea as to stand in init
mate connection with it.
A lady who occupied this room
when she has looked towards the
wide sea and wider blue of the
heavens, has not once or twice but
frequently had misfortunes heralded
by the sign of white dove hover.
ing in the sky, whose silver wings
we're lit by radiance brjphfer than