“The ghostly solution of the problem did not yet enter my mind.  However, I told the story at breakfast next morning.  My father, who had himself suffered from the lady’s visit so long before, never said a word, and it passed as some folly of mine.  So slight was the impression it made on me at the time that, though I slept many a night after in the room, I never thought of watching or looking out for anything.

“Years later I was again a guest at the Hall.  The Marquis of Ely and his family, with a large retinue of servants, filled the house to overflowing.  As I passed the housekeeper’s room I heard the valet say:  ’What!  I to sleep in the tapestry chamber?  Never!  I will leave my lord’s service before I sleep there!’ At once my former experience in that room flashed upon my mind.  I had never thought of it during the interval, and was still utterly ignorant of Anne Tottenham:  so when the housekeeper was gone I spoke to the valet and said, ’Tell me why you will not sleep in the tapestry room, as I have a particular reason for asking.’  He said, ’Is it possible that you do not know that Miss Tottenham passes through that room every night, and, dressed in a stiff flowered silk dress, enters the closet in the corner?’ I replied that I had never heard a word of her till now, but that I had, a few years before, twice seen a figure exactly like what he had described, and passed my arm through her body.  ‘Yes,’ said he, ’that was Miss Tottenham, and, as is well known, she was confined—­mad—­in that room, and died there, and, they say, was buried in that closet.’

“Time wore on and another generation arose, another owner possessed the property—­the grandson of my friend.  In the year 185—­, he being then a child came with his mother, the Marchioness of Ely, and his tutor, the Rev. Charles Dale, to the Hall for the bathing season.  Mr. Dale was no imaginative person—­a solid, steady, highly educated English clergyman, who had never even heard the name of Miss Tottenham.  The tapestry room was his bed-chamber.  One day in the late autumn of that year I received a letter from the uncle of the Marquis, saying, ’Do tell me what it was you saw long ago in the tapestry chamber, for something strange must have happened to the Rev. Charles Dale, as he came to breakfast quite mystified.  Something very strange must have occurred, but he will not tell us, seems quite nervous, and, in short, is determined to give up his tutorship and return to England.  Every year something mysterious has happened to any person who slept in that room, but they always kept it close.  Mr. D——­, a Wexford gentleman, slept there a short while ago.  He had a splendid dressing-case, fitted with gold and silver articles, which he left carefully locked on his table at night; in the morning he found the whole of its contents scattered about the room.’

“Upon hearing this I determined to write to the Rev. Charles Dale, then Incumbent of a parish near Dover, telling him what had occurred to myself in the room, and that the evidence of supernatural appearances there were so strong and continued for several generations, that I was anxious to put them together, and I would consider it a great favour if he would tell me if anything had happened to him in the room, and of what nature.  He then for the first time mentioned the matter, and from his letter now before me I make the following extracts: