Needless to say the Colonel carried out my injunctions to the letter.  Far from continuing his work of excavation he lost no time in restoring the bones he had kept to their original resting-place; after which, as I predicted, the hauntings ceased.

This case, to me, is very satisfactory, as it testifies to what was unquestionably an actual phantasm of the dead—­of a dead horse—­albeit that horse was prehistoric; and such horses are all the more likely to be earth-bound on account of their wild, untamed natures.

Here is another account of a phantom horse taken from Mr. Stead’s Real Ghost Stories.  It is written by an Afrikander who, in a letter to Mr. Stead, says: 

“I am not a believer in ghosts, nor never was; but seeing you wanted a census of them, I can’t help giving you a remarkable experience of mine.  It was some three summers back, and I was out with a party of Boer hunters.  We had crossed the Northern boundary of the Transvaal, and were camped on the ridges of the Sembombo.  I had been out from sunrise, and was returning about dusk with the skin of a fine black ostrich thrown across the saddle in front of me, in the best of spirits at my good luck.  Making straight for the camp, I had hardly entered a thick bush when I thought that I heard somebody behind me.  Looking behind, I saw a man mounted on a white horse.  You can imagine my surprise, for my horse was the only one in camp, and we were the only party in the country.  Without considering I quickened my pace into a canter, and on doing so my follower appeared to do the same.  At this I lost all confidence, and made a run for it, with my follower in hot pursuit, as it appeared to my imagination; and I did race for it (the skin went flying in about two minutes, and my rifle would have done the same had it not been strapped over my shoulders).  This I kept up until I rode into camp right among the pals cooking the evening meal.  The Boers about the camp were quick in their enquiries as to my distressed condition, and regaining confidence, I was putting them off as best I could, when the old boss (an old Boer of some sixty-eight or seventy years), looking up from the fire, said: 

“‘The white horse!  The Englishman has seen the white horse.’

“This I denied, but to no purpose.  And that night round the camp fire I took the trouble to make enquiries as to the antecedents of the white horse.  And the old Boer, after he had commanded silence, began.  He said: 

“’The English are not brave, but foolish.  We beat them at Majuba, some twenty-five seasons back.  There was an Englishman here like you; he had brought a horse with him, against our advice, to be killed with the fly, the same as yours will be in a day or two.  And he, like you, would go where he was told not to go; and one day he went into a bush (that very bush you rode through to-night), and he shot seven elephants, and the next day he went in to fetch the ivory, and about night his horse came into camp riderless, and was dead from the fly before the sun went down.  The Englishman is in that bush now; anyway, he never came back.  And now anybody who ventures into that bush is chased by the white horse.  I wouldn’t go into that bush for all the ivory in the land.  The English are not brave, but foolish; we beat them at Majuba.’