secretary's investigations I have been able to check certain information
obtained in the hypnotic trance by a 'sensitive' who helps me in such
cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have been a woman
of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by
hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England and
only came to light by the merest chance. She came to her end in the year
1798, for it was not this particular house she lived in, but a much
larger one that then stood upon the site it now occupies, and was then,
of course, not in London, but in the country. She was a person of
intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will, and of consummate
audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the resources of the
lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to explain the virulence
of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on after
death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life."

"You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct--"
gasped the author.

"I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful
personality may still persist after death in the line of their original
momentum," replied the doctor; "and that strong thoughts and purposes
can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their
originators have passed away.

"If you knew anything of magic," he pursued, "you would know that
thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and
pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed
from the region of our human life is another region where float the
waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the
dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of