HAUNTED HOUSE. 167 



ing calamity : in the United States of North America, 

 in the middle of the Nineteenth Century \ Hallucina- 

 tions of some poor-minded ignorant people, some per- 

 sons will say in justification of the community at large. 

 Alas ! it was not so, being obliged to live there five years 

 I had occasion to be convinced myself that the credulity 

 was not confined in a few poor country people unedu- 

 cated, but spread in all classes of society. 



We had been living in that ghost's refuge for eigh- 

 teen or twenty months, I cannot exactly tell. We had 

 two persons living with us, a servant girl, and a man 

 working with me. My wife was almost every day in the 

 week in Albany from 8 A. M. to 4 p. M. About that 

 time we lost our second child, the first having died in 

 Astoria, a few months later we had a daughter, the 

 oldest one of seven boys and girls, six living with me or 

 near me now, 1892 we had to get a nurse, a large, 

 stout, immense woman, whom from the appearance 

 one could have supposed she could nurse up half a 

 dozen, still the child did not thrive well. She slept in 

 the same room with my wife on a cot bed at the foot 

 of my wife's bed. One morning early I went in the 

 room to see how they were all, mother, child and 

 nurse, when in a great excitement a flurry said 

 that she would not sleep in that house another night, 

 for any thing in the world, that the greatest part of 



