Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download

MAGUS

84 unquestionable. The usual morning salute in meeting a friend is now invariably accompanied by the query “Is all quiet at Allen’s?” And not alone in Cookstown but in all the district for miles round the doings of the ghost are canvassed and criticised with the greatest interest. It has been shrewdly suggested that a Belfast detective might soon purge the premises of the spirit, but Mr Allen scouts the possibility of such aid as not only useless but absurd. Perhaps he is right; but in all human probability I think he is wrong. This being the market day the great topic was, of course, actively discussed and theories beyond number asserted each as the true and particular explanation of this whole business. Meanwhile the ghost is not yet laid, but more of him anon. Belfast Newsletter, 19 November 1874, The Cookstown Ghos.t To say that we have a ghost amongst us is, I think, not strictly correct as nothing, not even any of the shadowy forms flitting along through dark corridors and disappearing in a solid wall, or sinking suddenly into the ground, which is the stereotyped programme of all respectable ghosts, nor any other approved “appearance” through the medium of which such unwelcome visitors are supposed to show themselves to mortals, has yet been seen by anybody; but we are aware that an unseen agency is at work in our midst which defies all our efforts to unravel. We cannot even get a glimpse of a retiring figure in white, no blood- freezing noises; not even the rustle of an unseen garment; in fact nothing that is said to indicate or designate the presence of a spirit from the world of the “departed dead”. Some think it is not a ghost at all but a conglomeration of atoms which became unmanageable in the hands of Dr Tyndall during some experiment in Belfast; but this of the matter is considered doubtful. Clergymen, doctors, [illegible] churchwardens and businessmen of all grades and degrees of ability have tried their hand at lifting the veil but all with the same result, leaving the matter as mysterious as they found it. The general impression just now seems to be that the manifestations as we have them, are the work of some satanic agency, evoked by some person or persons unknown; that the agent has now the whip-hand of his employer and things are to go on as present ad infinitum or till a more practised hand reduced him to obedience. That this notion is gaining ground is not to be wondered at, inasmuch as, of the hundreds of mysterious things which have happened, not the [illegible] remote clue has been found to connect a single one of them with any human

Pages Overview