The Ghost of Guir House

And now I am going to tell you a strange thing. It is this: I have

shadowed your life from the hour of your birth. I have watched your

career, and where able have guided and helped you, knowing that you

were one whom I could love. I have helped to make you what you are,

and therefore my right of possession is doubly founded, even though

my love be too great to lead you astray. Gradually I led you up to

the hour when all was ripe, and then mentally impressed you with

the letter which you thought you received, and which I knew would

affect you through your strongest characteristics--love of

adventure, and--curiosity--as well as from the fact that you were

susceptible to mental influence. You came, and I was happy--more

happy than you will ever know--until my unsated Karma thwarted my

plan, and showed that while seeking my own peace, I might possibly

endanger yours. That ended all. I could go no further. But even

now, as before, I shall come to you in spirit, during the still

hours of night; for my love is more intense and strangely different

from that which waking men are wont to feel. It is that which

sometimes comes in dreams. Do you not know what I mean?

You will feel bewildered on reading this, and at a loss to

understand many things, but remember that your inward or spiritual

sight has been opened through the power of hypnotism, and you must

not judge things as in your normal state.

When you reached our little station of Guir, you were expecting to

find me there, and expectation is the proper frame of mind in which

to produce a strong impression; and therefore, although you did not

know what I was like, Ah Ben and I together easily made you see me

as I was, together with the cart and horse; and although you

actually got into the stage which was waiting, you thought you were

in the cart with me. The incident of the broken spring was merely

suggested as a fitting means to bring you back physically from the

coach to the cart, where for the first time, in the moonlight, you

saw me in semi-material form, visible as a shadow to some men, but

wholly so to you. Had I appeared thus at the station, I should have

alarmed all who saw me, and so I came to you only. The two worlds

are so closely intermingled that men often live in one while their

bodies are in another, and to those who are susceptible, the

immaterial can be made more real than the other. I know these

things, because, while at home in neither, I have been in both.