Hetty, Patty and Keziah lay.  Emily heard the noises later than some of her sisters, perhaps a week after the original groans.  She was locking up the house about ten o’clock when a sound came like the smashing and splintering of a huge piece of coal on the kitchen floor.  She and Sukey went through the rooms on the ground floor, but found the dog asleep, the cat at the other end of the house, and everything in order.  From her bedroom Emily heard a noise of breaking the empty bottles under the stairs, but was going to bed, when Hetty, who had been sitting on the lowest step of the garret stairs beside the nursery door, waiting for her father, was chased into the nursery by a sound as of a man passing her in a loose trailing gown.  Sukey and Nancy were alarmed by loud knocks on the outside of the dining-room door and overhead.  All this time Mr. Wesley heard nothing, and was not even told that anything unusual was heard.  Mrs. Wesley at first held her peace lest he should think it “according to the vulgar opinion, a warning against his own death, which, indeed, we all apprehended”.  Mr. Wesley only smiled when he was informed; but, by taking care to see all the girls safe in bed, sufficiently showed his opinion that the young ladies and their lovers were the ghost.  Mrs. Wesley then fell back on the theory of rats, and employed a man to blow a horn as a remedy against these vermin.  But this measure only aroused the emulation of the sprite, whom Emily began to call “Jeffrey”.

Not till 21st December did Mr. Wesley hear anything, then came thumpings on his bedroom wall.  Unable to discover the cause, he procured a stout mastiff, which soon became demoralised by his experiences.  On the morning of the 24th, about seven o’clock, Emily led Mrs. Wesley into the nursery, where she heard knocks on and under the bedstead; these sounds replied when she knocked.  Something “like a badger, with no head,” says Emily; Mrs. Wesley only says, “like a badger,” ran from under the bed.  On the night of the 25th there was an appalling vacarme.  Mr. and Mrs. Wesley went on a tour of inspection, but only found the mastiff whining in terror.  “We still heard it rattle and thunder in every room above or behind us, locked as well as open, except my study, where as yet it never came.”  On the night of the 26th Mr. Wesley seems to have heard of a phenomenon already familiar to Emily—­“something like the quick winding up of a jack, at the corner of the room by my bed head”.  This was always followed by knocks, “hollow and loud, such as none of us could ever imitate”.  Mr. Wesley went into the nursery, Hetty, Kezzy and Patty were asleep.  The knocks were loud, beneath and in the room, so Mr. Wesley went below to the kitchen, struck with his stick against the rafters, and was answered “as often and as loud as I knocked”.  The peculiar knock which was his own, 1-23456-7, was not successfully echoed at that time.  Mr. Wesley then returned to the nursery, which was as tapageuse as ever.  The children, three, were trembling in their sleep.  Mr. Wesley invited the agency to an interview in his study, was answered by one knock outside, “all the rest were within,” and then came silence.  Investigations outside produced no result, but the latch of the door would rise and fall, and the door itself was pushed violently back against investigators.