“’You will probably wonder why I am here—­I shall tell you, I was murdered—­by my own father....  I was a young widow living in this house which belonged to my father I became unchaste and to save his own name he poisoned me when I was enceinte—­another week and I should have become a mother; but he poisoned me and my innocent child died too—­it would have been such a beautiful baby—­and you would probably want to kiss it’

and horror of horrors, she took out the child from her womb and showed it to me.  She began to move in my direction with the child in her arms saying—­’You will like to kiss it.’

“I don’t know whether I shouted—­but I fainted.

“When I recovered consciousness it was broad day-light, and I was lying on the floor, with the revolver by my side.  I picked it up and slowly walked out of the house with as much dignity as I could command.  At the door I met one of my friends to whom I told a lie that I had seen nothing.—­It is the first time that I have told you what I saw at the place.

“The Ghostly woman spoke the language of the part of the country in which the Ghostly house is situate.”

The friend who told me this story is a responsible Government official and will not make a wrong statement.  What has been written above has been confirmed by others—­who had passed nights in that Ghostly house; but they had generally shouted for help and fainted at the sight of the ghost, and so they had not heard her story from her lips as reproduced here.

The house still exists, but it is now a dilapidated old affair, and the roof and the doors and windows are so bad that people don’t care to go and pass a night there.

There is also a haunted house in Assam.  In this house a certain gentleman committed suicide by cutting his own throat with a razor.

You often see him sitting on a cot in the verandah heaving deep sighs.

Mention of this house has been made in a book called “Tales from the Tiger Land” published in England.  The Author says he has passed a night in the house in question and testifies to the accuracy of all the rumours that are current.

* * * * *

Talking about haunted houses reminds me of a haunted tank.  I was visiting a friend of mine in the interior of Bengal during our annual summer holidays when I was yet a student.  This friend of mine was the son of a rich man and in the village had a large ancestral house where his people usually resided.  It was the first week of June when I reached my friend’s house.  I was informed that among other things of interest, which were, however, very few in that particular part of the country, there was a large Pukka tank belonging to my friend’s people which was haunted.

What kind of Ghost lived in the tank or near it nobody could say, but what everybody knew was this, that on Jaistha Shukla Ekadashi (that is on the eleventh day after the new moon in the month of Jaistha) that occurs about the middle of June, the Ghost comes to bathe in the tank at about midnight.