He drew the door open with a fling, and stared in:  but the closet was empty, except for the clothes hanging from the pegs on the wall, and the dressing-table and looking-glass facing the windows.  He shut it sharply, and locked it, and felt for a minute, he says, ’as if he were like to lose his wits;’ then, ringing at the bell, he brought the servants, and with much ado they recovered Mrs. Prosser from a sort of ‘trance,’ in which, he says, from her looks, she seemed to have suffered ’the pains of death:’  and Aunt Rebecca adds, ’from what she told me of her visions, with her own lips, he might have added, “and of hell also."’

But the occurrence which seems to have determined the crisis was the strange sickness of their eldest child, a little boy aged between two and three years.  He lay awake, seemingly in paroxysms of terror, and the doctors who were called in, set down the symptoms to incipient water on the brain.  Mrs. Prosser used to sit up with the nurse by the nursery fire, much troubled in mind about the condition of her child.

His bed was placed sideways along the wall, with its head against the door of a press or cupboard, which, however, did not shut quite close.  There was a little valance, about a foot deep, round the top of the child’s bed, and this descended within some ten or twelve inches of the pillow on which it lay.

They observed that the little creature was quieter whenever they took it up and held it on their laps.  They had just replaced him, as he seemed to have grown quite sleepy and tranquil, but he was not five minutes in his bed when he began to scream in one of his frenzies of terror; at the same moment the nurse, for the first time, detected, and Mrs. Prosser equally plainly saw, following the direction of her eyes, the real cause of the child’s sufferings.

Protruding through the aperture of the press, and shrouded in the shade of the valance, they plainly saw the white fat hand, palm downwards, presented towards the head of the child.  The mother uttered a scream, and snatched the child from its little bed, and she and the nurse ran down to the lady’s sleeping-room, where Mr. Prosser was in bed, shutting the door as they entered; and they had hardly done so, when a gentle tap came to it from the outside.

There is a great deal more, but this will suffice.  The singularity of the narrative seems to me to be this, that it describes the ghost of a hand, and no more.  The person to whom that hand belonged never once appeared:  nor was it a hand separated from a body, but only a hand so manifested and introduced that its owner was always, by some crafty accident, hidden from view.