MODERN GHOSTS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 592, 22 August 1873, Page 2

MODERN GHOSTS.

Ghosts seem to have transferred their favors from the suburbs and police courts of London to a still more credulous country than our own. In America they are becoming a daily nuisance, and the columns of leading journals are continually devoted to chronicling their movements. The latest accounts speak of six notorious cases, all contemporary, and in full force up to date. One of the ghosts of a little boy with golden hair, and dressed iu brown, who is always looking through the window of a school at Ncwburyport, kept by a certain Miss Perkins, and frightening her and her pupils out of such wits as they may happen to have among them. A second is the case of Miss Clementine Jones, of Lanslngburg, who is vistimised by the yelling of unaccountable voices, the sound of footsteps, and iu general by a “shadow of mystery,’* whatever that may mean. A third ghost is a young lady who haunts the driver of tho engine Von Moltke, on the Syracuse and Binghampton Railway. “A mysterious voice proclaiming the presence of tho spectre,” is heard all the way to Marathon- not, we we must assume, tho Marathon of classic memory. The driver alone secs her, but the guard once heard these awful words, “ Now Billy, I’ve got you, and will throw you iuto the water.” After this, both guard and driver naturally refused to run Von Moltke any more, and their places were supplied by other men. Ghost number four is a human head which visits a house in Virginia, with glaring eyes, a throat cut from ear to car, and uttering cries for “(blood ” Tho owuer of the house [is said to have offered to sell it, ghost and all, for half its value* But the fifth is the most wonderful of all—it is tho ghost of a railway engine, running at Newark on tbs 10th of every month, with unusual punctuality, at 12 o’clock p.m. Six hundred people actually gathered together on tha last occasion, and though they saw notning, heard a most mistakeable whistle at the proper hour. Lastly, Mr. Charles Dickens is dictating to a compositor the continuation of “ Edwin Drood.’, All thess cases rest on the “ best authority.” Wonderful things happen in America, and perhaps not the least wonderful thing is] tho Great Republic’s self glorification mi it* being free from the worn out superstitions of our credulous old world.