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

MEDDLINGS WITH THE OCCULT

163

slow-going hours. It was a companion which spoke to us
in normal language and reassured us with its hearty
voice at every succeeding second. You may imagine the
looks of bewilderment that were exchanged. For a few
moments there was not one of the party who would not
have taken oath to the Newburyport ghost.
Then it occurred to somebody to put the teacher's fat
dictionary upon the teacher's chair and climb up and
examine the interior of the responsive clock. The key
was there. The applied key showed that the eight-day
works had run down. When the janitor came after daybreak, at the end of a night yielding nothing further that
is worth mention, he assured us that he had wound the
clock only forty-eight hours before; but that this was a
mistake the testimony of the key had evinced. I am recounting things as they were. Without much stretching
of conscience any one of us could have told a story-and
it is human nature to help out the marvellous-that would
have added to the ghostly prestige of the schoolhouse. In
subsequent experiences I learned how often the artistic
suppression of an essential if commonplace fact is responsible for much public amazement. In this case I
found sufficient cause for wonder in the coincidence which
had made the clock run down at the exact moment of our
solemn invocation.
There must be people still living in Newburyport who
remember the excitement of 1872 and 1873 and know
better than myself the manner in which the affair terminated. Forty-five years later, when passing through the
city in an automobile with my friend Judge Bartlett, it
was difficult to find anybody who could direct us to the
scene of the incident, or who even had heard of it; an

illustration of the ephemeral fame of the best authenticated New England ghosts. Finally, a local historian
indicated the whereabouts, and it is by his information
that I have been able to locate the haunted schoolhouse.