_dare_ not leap out of bed and make a rush for the door lest we should
encounter we know not what. In an agony of fear, we feel it moving
towards us; it approaches closer, and yet closer, to the bed, and--for
what may or may not then happen we must refer our readers to the pages of
this book.

But the sceptical reader will say: "This is all very well, but--there are
_no_ haunted houses. All these alleged strange happenings are due to a
vivid imagination, or else to rats and mice." (The question of deliberate
and conscious fraud may be rejected in almost every instance.) This
simple solution has been put forward so often that it should infallibly
have solved the problem long ago. But will such a reader explain how it
is that the noise made by rats and mice can resemble slow, heavy
footsteps, or else take the form of a human being seen by several
persons; or how our imagination can cause doors to open and shut, or else
create a conglomeration of noises which, physically, would be beyond the
power of ordinary individuals to reproduce? Whatever may be the ultimate
explanation, we feel that there is a great deal in the words quoted by
Professor Barrett: "In spite of all reasonable scepticism, it is
difficult to avoid accepting, at least provisionally, the conclusion that
there are, in a certain sense, haunted houses, _i.e._ that there are
houses in which similar quasi-human apparitions have occurred at
different times to different inhabitants, under circumstances which
exclude the hypothesis of suggestion or expectation."

We must now turn to the subject of this chapter. Mrs. G. Kelly, a lady
well known in musical circles in Dublin, sends as her own personal
experience the following tale of a most quiet haunting, in which the
spectral charwoman (!) does not seem to have entirely laid aside all her
mundane habits.