Julian, to whom it belonged by purchase, left no immediate heirs,
and his relatives squabbled between themselves over the property,
till one by one the disputing parties died off, and now there is
no one enterprising enough to resuscitate the lawsuit."

Rising to take my leave of the genial old man, it occurred to me
as extremely probable that he might have been led to form some
opinion worth hearing with regard to the nature of the strange
appearances at Steepside, and I ventured accordingly to make
the inquiry.

"If my views on the subject have any value or interest for you,"
said he, "you are very welcome to know them. As a priest of the
Catholic Church, I cannot accept the popular notions about ghostly
visitations. Such experiences as yours in that ill-fated mansion
are explicable to me only on the following hypothesis. There is
a Power greater than the powers of evil; a Will to which even demons
must submit. It is not inconsistent with Christian doctrine to
suppose that, in cases of such terrible crimes as that we have been
discussing, the evil spirits who prompted these crimes may, for a
period more or less lengthy, be forced to haunt the scene of their
machinations, and re-enact there, in phantom show, the horrors they
once caused in reality. Naturally--or perhaps," said he, breaking
off with a little smile, "I ought rather to say super-naturally--
these demons, in order to manifest themselves, would be forced to
resume some shape that would identify them with the crime they had
suggested; and, in such a case, what more likely than that they
should adopt the spectral forms of their human victims--murdered
and murderer, or otherwise--according to the nature of the wickedness
perpetrated? This is but an amateur opinion, monsieur; I offer