Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

160

MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

ble presence, the agitation of window shades by hands
unseen, and thunderous sounds in the cockloft, as if
someone overhead was rolling lignum vita tenpin ball.
or round Edam cheeses along the flooring. Less frequent,
but numbering up to dozens of times as the weeks went
by, was the apparition, at the outside of the window toward the front entry or at one of the doors when open, of
the figure of a tow-headed, blue-eyed boy of about ten,
dressed in brown, pale of face and sad of expression; eyes
open and pathetically beautiful; hands always crossed
before his waist and slightly extended with the palms
outward-hands thin and white, fingers wasted as if by
long sickness. The school child ghost never spoke. He
would stand quietly whenever he appeared, with head
bent forward and palms held out like a real schoolboy
deprecating punishment. When Miss Perkins attempted
to grasp the intruder to ascertain what manner of thing
it was, the figure either vanished like a dissolving view
or fled up the steps to the cockloft. More than once the
teacher courageously pursued it thither; the vanishing
occurred at the top of the steps. When the trap-door was
padlocked and the outside front door bolted from within
it made no difference; the child ghost nevertheless was
seen by all at the entry window.
This was the story told by Lucy Perkins, the teacher,
and corroborated by the nearly unanimous testimony of
her sixty or seventy little boy co-witnesses. Curious visitors to the school during the early days of the manifestations declared that they, too, saw and heard these things;
it soon became necessary for the school committee to forbid the admission of outsiders. The committee, including
two clergymen, were inclined at first to pooh-pooh the

whole affair and to attribute the ghost and the noises
either to unknown tricksters or to hysterical exaggerations
on the part of the teacher and to suggested beliefs in the
minds of her pupils and visitors.