Tito Schipa, Opera Star, Chats of Ghostly Friends

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 312, 24 March 1928, Page 24

Tito Schipa, Opera Star, Chats of Ghostly Friends

■ O begin with, I am not a credulous believer in the supernatural, nor am I to be included in the long list of opera singers governed by super-

stition, as are many people of the stage. Nevertheless, certain happenings in my life have remained difficult to explain, verging on that which baffles mortal understanding (relates Tito Schfpa, the grand opera star, in an interview ih an English paper). One of these puzzling incidents came to me in boyhood. Being the first of its kind, the strong impression left burned into my memory. At that time I was ill in bed. Resting quietly, niy mother had left me alone in the twilight while she went to get her supper.

As the shadows deepened in my room I lay there watching them. Presently, as darkness grew, a figure seemed to form itself from the substance of those shadows, growing gradually into the half-defined form of a woman, wearing a veil in Spanish, style and carrying a fan. Young, beautiful, she floated slowly rather than moved along my bedside, smiling but not looking at me. Presently she vanished, or rather, melted, as a mist does. The day after my mother got word from Parma, Italy, my birthland, that her sister-in-law, long an invalid, had passed on. Several months later I took up a photograph album lying on the table. Suddenly, among the pictures, I recognised one, exclaiming to my mother, “This is the lady I saw beside my bed that night when you said no one was there”! I had never seen my dead aunt, whose photograph it proved to be, nor had I ever seen a likeness of her. That likeness had been made in Spain at the time of her marriage; she was young, beautiful, wore a mantilla and carried a fan exactly as I had seen her in the apparition which floated at my bedside ou the day she died. One night, at an Inn at Vencelli, Italy, tossing restlessly for hours I at last fell asleep, though it seemed to me only briefly, when I was awakened by a whirring noise as of some big bird circling just above my head. Thinking probably a bat had flown in through the open window, I got up, lit a candle and made search. No bat was there.

Sleeping from then on, I was again aroused in the half dawn by repetition of the whirring noise just above my head. Only partially awake, I struggled against sleep until startled by spoken words. Sounding husky, and uttering the words singly, as if with strong effort, the voice said: “Look—on—left—wall.”

Dragging up a tall table across the floor, I climbed up on it, taking down the picture, which proved to be the martyrdom of St. Sebastian gloomy and cruel, showing the bleeding wounds and piercing arrows. I placed the face of the picture against the wall. Before I climbed back to hang it up, and in the daylight which had meanwhile grown stronger, the gleam of a white paper caught my eyes. It was neatly folded and stuck at the back of the picture between a wooden stretcher and the canvas. Pulling the paper out, I took it to a window to investigate. It was the lost will, leaving the inn to the writer’s eldest son, and concerning which there had been a great deal of trouble.

Frankly speaking, a cold sweat covered me. The will dropped from my hands. The voice speaking must have been that of the dead.

The next strange adventure came In my singing life while still in Italy. I went to a little resort in the mountains. At the foot of the mountain up which I had to drive to reach my destination was a little inn called Santa Croce. On that latest trip, as usual I stopped there for lunch. Always the grey-haired inkeeper had served me. “Where is he?” I asked. “Dead.” was the laconic answer. “His daughter, Ottavia, is cooking for me.” Later, Ottavia, gloom personified, appeared. She spoke reluctantly oi her father, adding listlessly: “Money he must have made. Always he took it to bank in the to-wn. When I went to inquire after his death there was only

a little left. Worse yet, he had borrowed, borrowed. So the place was sold for debt. I have nowhere elseTo go, so I stay on here and cook.” I felt sorry for Ottavia, but promptly forgot her. until a month later she was recalled to mind.

“I have never suffered such a shock,” an Englishwoman was saying as I entered the living room of my summer stopping place. Her listener asked: “And you saw nothing?”

"Absolutely nothing,”' declared the Englishwoman, “but I heard it. If there is such a thing as a ghost, one was in the room with me last night.” “Here?” I asked.

“No, at Santa Croce. I was too tired to go further and stopped there all night on my way up here. About two o’clock in the morning it was, I think, I awoke with the feeling that there was some one else in the room. I listened; all was still. Just as I was falling asleep, I heard tipping footsteps. Then came the swish of something dragged along the floor and two deep, gasping sighs. At last I got my voice and screamed.

“In a moment people were knocking at the door. I shook so that at first I could not draw the bolt. When the door swung open and they came with candles, there lying on the floor

on the far side of the room, was my dress, which I had laid on a chair at the bedside.

“To prove it was a ghost that strange girl, Ottavia, who went back with me into the room next morning to get my things dragged aside a big chest and showed me bloodstains on the floor.

Whispering, “They say this is the spot where the man was murdered long ago ”

This story settled things for me. I determined to investigate by sleeping all night, in that room at the inn. It took diplomacy to do it. The proprietor only agreed to my plan after I had paid him in advance for the chest covering bloodstains revealed by Ottavia. Of course. I said no word about an investigation. It was a long wait alone in utter darkness in the room that night. At about two o'clock I heard a cautious cracking sound on the far side of the place. Presently soft footfalls came slowly across the floor nearer and nearer. Next I heard my clothes dragged from a chair at the bedside, where I had placed them, and trailed away. A shuddering sigh followed. I knew that to be my moment. Levelling the powerfnl flashlight I carried, I shot it. Framed in blackness about an open sliding panel low in the wall was the face of the girl Ottavia looking in. She screamed. In that instant her little black dog shot through the opened panel and it banged shut.

This was the solution of the ghost. Her confession presently confirmed it. Ottavia had concocted the vile plot and trained her little black dog to play his part, thinking that by ruining the inn as a haunted place she could buy it back for a song.