“In the course of his talk, Captain Tobias offered to take the house off my hands; and as this suited me perfectly, for I was about stalled with it, and the plan also suited the landlord, it was decided that no steps should be taken against him; and that the whole business should be hushed up.

“I asked the captain whether there was really anything queer about the house; whether he had ever seen anything.  He said yes, that he had twice seen a Woman going about the house.  We all looked at one another, when the captain said that.  He told us she never bothered him, and that he had only seen her twice, and on each occasion it had followed a narrow escape from the Revenue people.

“Captain Tobias was an observant man; he had seen how I had placed the mats against the doors; and after entering the rooms, and walking all about them, so as to leave the foot-marks of an old pair of wet woollen slippers everywhere, he had deliberately put the mats back as he found them.

“The maggot which had dropped from his disgusting leg of mutton had been an accident, and beyond even his horrible planning.  He was hugely delighted to learn how it had affected us.

“The moldy smell I had noticed was from the little closed stairway, when the captain opened the panel.  The door slamming was also another of his contributions.

“I come now to the end of the captain’s ghost play; and to the difficulty of trying to explain the other peculiar things.  In the first place, it was obvious there was something genuinely strange in the house; which made itself manifest as a Woman.  Many different people had seen this Woman, under differing circumstances, so it is impossible to put the thing down to fancy; at the same time it must seem extraordinary that I should have lived two years in the house, and seen nothing; whilst the policeman saw the Woman, before he had been there twenty minutes; the landlord, the detective, and the inspector all saw her.

“I can only surmise that fear was in every case the key, as I might say, which opened the senses to the presence of the Woman.  The policeman was a highly-strung man, and when he became frightened, was able to see the Woman.  The same reasoning applies all ’round. I saw nothing, until I became really frightened; then I saw, not the Woman; but a Child, running away from Something or Someone.  However, I will touch on that later.  In short, until a very strong degree of fear was present, no one was affected by the Force which made Itself evident, as a Woman.  My theory explains why some tenants were never aware of anything strange in the house, whilst others left immediately.  The more sensitive they were, the less would be the degree of fear necessary to make them aware of the Force present in the house.

“The peculiar shining of all the metal objects in the cellar, had been visible only to me.  The cause, naturally I do not know; neither do I know why I, alone, was able to see the shining.”