After tea, when fading twilight had deepened the shadows in the house, we went up the stairway, past the landing with its window containing the armorial bearings of the family in stained glass, and, achieving the upper hall, crossed to a great bedchamber, the principal guest room, and paused just inside the door.

And now, because of what I am about to relate, I shall give the names of those who were present.  We were:  Dr. Murray P. Brush, A.B., Ph.D., acting Dean of Johns Hopkins University; Dr. John McF.  Bergland of Baltimore; my companion, Wallace Morgan, illustrator; and myself.

The light had, by this time, melted to a mere faint grayness sifting like mist through the many oblong panes of several large windows.  Nevertheless I could discern that it was a spacious room, and from the color of it and certain shadowy lines upon the walls, I judged that it was paneled to the ceiling in white-painted wood.  I am under the impression that it contained a fireplace, and that the great four-post bed, standing to the right of the doorway, was placed upon a low platform, a step or two above the floor—­though of this I am not quite certain, the bulk of the bed and the dim light having, perhaps, deceived me.  The rest of the furniture in the room was dark in color, and massed in heavy vague spots against the lighter background of the walls.

Directly before the door, at about the center of the wall against which it was backed, stood something which loomed tall and dark, and which I took to be either a gigantic clothespress or a closet built into the room.  Looking past the front of this obstruction, I saw one of the windows; the piece of furniture was therefore exhibited sidewise, in silhouette.

I do not think that I had definitely thought of ghost stories before, and I know that ghosts had not been spoken of, but as I looked into this room, and reflected on the long series of persons who had occupied it, and on where they were now, and on all the stories that the room must have heard, there entered my mind thoughts of the supernatural.

Having taken a step or two into the room, I was a little in advance of my three friends, and as these fancies came strongly to me, I spoke over my shoulder to one of them, who was at my right and a little behind me, saying, half playfully: 

“There ought to be ghosts in a room like this.”

Hardly had I spoken when without a sound, and swinging very slowly, the door of the large piece of furniture before me gently opened.  My first idea was that the thing must be a closet, built against the wall, with a door at the back opening on a passageway, or into the next room, and that the little girl whom we had met downstairs had opened it from the other side and was coming in.

I fully expected to see her enter.  But she did not enter, for, as I learned presently, she was in the nursery at the time.

After waiting for an instant to see who was coming, I began to realize that there was no one coming; that no one had opened the door; that, like an actor picking up a cue, the door had begun to swing immediately upon my saying the word “ghosts.”