The Ghost of the Haunted Hardenbrook House on Shore Road

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Halloween is nearly upon us.  As has been the tradition for years, on each of the five business days until Halloween beginning today, Historic Pelham will present another new Pelham ghost story based upon years of research.  Next year, this author will publish a third book on Pelham history centered on the many, many ghost stories centered in Pelham.  It tentatively is entitled "A Haunted History of Pelham, New York" and combines ghost stories and lore passed down in Pelham for generations with the historical context and backdrop from which many such stories originate.  Today's story begins the week before Halloween with "The Ghost of the Haunted Hardenbrook House on Shore Road" and includes what may be the only known image, or one of the only known images, of a Pelham ghoul.

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Marvin R. Clark of New York City was a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic.  He did not believe in superstitions.  He did not believe in ghosts, goblins, ghouls, or spirits.  Indeed, he devoted his life to proving that such things are poppycock.

Clark was the thirteenth member of the original thirteen members of the famous "Thirteen Club" of New York City.  The Club existed to flout such things, nay, to disprove them.  Its members met in room 13 of the Knickerbocker Cottage on Sixth Avenue and 28th Street in Manhattan at 8:13 p.m. each Friday the 13th.  Club members broke mirrors, opened umbrellas inside, passed beneath ladders, kept black cats, and forbade the tossing of salt over the shoulder.  The Club even placed advertisements in The New York Herald offering a reward to anyone who could identify a truly haunted house in New York City in which members of the club might dine.  They never found one.  

Yet, there Clark stood in the garden of a Pelham home at midnight on a cool September evening in 1886 staring into the derisive countenance of a Pelham ghost that seemed to beckon him forward.  Frozen in place in abject terror, Clark could only listen as a housekeeper standing behind him let loose a blood-curdling scream.  

The story of Clark's amazing ghostly encounter that night later warranted nearly half a page of coverage in The World of New York City.  Indeed, the article included two images reflecting events of that night, one of which may be the only known image of a Pelham ghost based on an eyewitness account (see below).

The tale of that night of terror is one of the most fascinating Pelham ghost stories ever told.  Here is the saga of the ghost of the haunted Hardenbrook house on Shore Road.

On a moonless, breeze-less, and cool night in September, 1886, Marvin Clark visited his friend, John A. Hardenbrook, at the Hardenbrook home on Shore Road in the Town of Pelham.  Hardenbrook's beautiful cottage was on the Long Island Sound side of Shore Road.  The cottage sat on a slope that led to the water.  The entry and parlor of the home was at road level in the front of the home.  The rear of the cottage was a story lower than the parlor level.  

The lower level of the home included a cozy dining room that also served as a comfortable sitting room for after-dinner drinks, chats, and smoking.  Adjacent to that cozy room was a kitchen.  Both the dining room and the kitchen looked out over Long Island Sound.  Between the cottage and the Sound was a small garden planted with all the vegetables a housekeeper and cook might need including corn, cabbage, carrots, radishes, lettuce, pumpkins, and much more. 

Hardenbrook lived in the cottage with his housekeeper named "Mrs. Gordon."  Mrs. Gordon was a little gray-haired lady with a boundless sense of humor.  She was surprisingly active and kindhearted.  She adored John Hardenbrook and worked hard at her job to keep the cottage immaculate and to cook, and clean for him.

Like Marvin Clark, John Hardenbrook was a journalist.  He was a bright and intellectual journalist who had been nicknamed "Doctor" by his journalist peers.  That September he invited Marvin Clark to stay with him at his cottage for several days to get away from the hustle and bustle of New York City.

Every evening during Clark's visit, Mrs. Gordon prepared a sumptuous meal for Hardenbrook and his guest.  At the conclusion of every meal, after Mrs. Gordon had cleared the table, cleaned, and put away the dishes, the three would sit in the cozy dining room to sip beer while the men smoked their pipes and swapped stories.

Doc Hardenbrook knew his friend was a member of the Thirteen Club.  Hardenbrook, like his friend, was a jaded journalist and a skeptic who harbored no superstitions and did not believe in ghosts, ghouls, goblins, or spirits.

On a particularly black night, the threesome enjoyed after-dinner aperitifs and swapped stories in the brightly-lit cottage.  The kerosene lanterns were un-shaded.  Their tall wicks burned intensely, casting brilliant light throughout the room and out of the windows of the cottage into the inky night.  

As the clock crawled to midnight, Doc Hardenbrook and Mrs. Gordon prepared to retire for the evening.  As they busied themselves, Marvin Clark leaned back in his chair to read a little of the "Book of Martyrs" by John Foxe.  

Clark became thoroughly engrossed in his book.  A death-like stillness pervaded the cottage broken only by the sound of Doc Hardenbrook and Mrs. Gordon opening the door from the kitchen to the garden to step outside to count chickens and check on the old sow in a nearby pen.  Not a breeze stirred.  

Remaining absorbed in his book, Clark soon heard a gasp and glanced toward the door.  He saw Hardenbrook holding the door slightly ajar as Mrs. Gordon stretched to watch over his shoulder through the crack of the open door.  Both had ghastly, horrific looks on their ashen faces with wild-eyed stares directed at something immediately outside.  

Paralyzed with fear, Mrs. Gordon whispered hoarsely "It's a real, live ghost"  She urged Doc Hardenbrook to "lock the doors!"  

"Nonsense!" replied Hardenbrook.  Yet, Hardenbrook never averted his gaze.  He remained wild-eyed, with his stare transfixed on something just beyond the door.  

Marvin Clark could see that Mrs. Gordon was shaking with fright.  She said with alarm "See, Doctor, it is moving this way!  Oh, what will become of us all!  I say, Doctor, don't stay there!  I cannot bear to look at it!  Come in and shut the door!"

Ever the skeptic, Clark smiled.  He assumed the pair was playing a prank precisely because he was ever the skeptic and a member of the Thirteen Club.  He remained seated until. . . .

Mrs. Gordon gave a horrified shriek and turned toward Marvin Clark with a "ghastly white face."  Clark later wrote that the scream "almost curdled the blood in my veins."  He realized at that moment that whatever the pair saw outside the door had truly terrified them.  He stood and "crept cautiously" toward the door.  Doctor Hardenbrook was holding tightly to the edge of the slightly ajar door.  His knuckles were white and bloodless from gripping the door so fearfully.  The housekeeper continued to peek over his shoulder timidly through the crack of the door at something in the garden.

As Clark approached the door, he realized that the pair were shivering with terror.  He then understood that it was no prank.  The pair could see something, as he later wrote, "a long way out of the ordinary, nay, beyond the extraordinary."  

When Clark reached the door, Doc Hardenbrook whispered "Look there!" and made barely enough room for Clark to step around him onto the doorstep to look.  What Clark saw sent shivers down his spine.  He later described his feelings at that moment:

"I gasped when my eyes fell upon the object which had riveted their attention for so long a time while I had sat in the dining-room, under the impression that they were trying to play a joke upon me and frighten a Thirteener.  The smile that was upon my face faded away instantly, and was superseded by a look of real alarm. . . . I was suffused with an indescribable fear which was the very extreme of terror. . . . It is the feeling of despair, which surrounds one like a cloud, with the knowledge of a quickly impending and unavoidable doom, and yet more than this.  It is the knowledge that this is something supernatural not of the earth, but intangible, and therefore irresistible.  It is the overpowering sensation that the bravest of the brave must go down before it as helplessly as the most cowardly of all cowards.  It is the realization that strong and weak alike must succumb to its ghostly influence, as to the avalanche, . . . the hurricane, the mountain torrent and the tidal wave, against which human power of resistance is as a straw."

Outside in the garden Clark saw a luminous, shimmering shape floating above the ground.  He later described it as an "awful shape, as plainly defined as ever was mortal man, all gleaming with white, its form perfect and outlined in silvery waves of light, standing out clear and distinct against the ebony darkness of the night for a background."  According to Clark, the luminous shape plainly was that of a man from head to foot.  Though there was no breeze and not a leaf stirred, Clark later maintained that from neck to floating feet, a shimmery robe-like light seemed to undulate as if it were blowing in a soft breeze that could not be felt in the black night.  As Clark described it, it seemed to undulate with "graceful oscillations."  In addition, the creature's arms rose and fell with a peculiar motion as if to beckon Clark to approach if he dared.  Clark shivered involuntarily as he looked at the face of the creature.  As he later wrote, its face was "smiling upon me derisively, as if to say, tauntingly, that I dared not" approach.  Even Clark realized that to doubt what he saw before him was to doubt not only the evidence of his own senses, but also that of his two friends who likewise stood mute and paralyzed beside him.  

Clark later wrote:  "I am not exaggerating -- not one hair's breadth.  There was the image, just as I have described it, and its long, white robe, almost reaching the ground where it stood, softly moving to and fro, while the arms waved and the ghastly head nodded and bowed at me solemnly."  Yet, with "more than human effort," Clark took a step forward and stopped.  

The terrible spirit neither advanced, nor retreated.  Clark advanced another step.  The shimmering ghost stood its ground, shimmering and undulating in the still night.  Clark could stand it no longer.  He rushed forward to touch and grab the awful creature.

Mrs. Gordon uttered a soul-piercing scream that rang out shrill and clear in the still darkness.  Doc Hardenbrook sprang forward and attempted to grab Marvin Clark by the arm to stop him.  Clark grasped at the creature's outstretched arms.  He felt utterly nothing.  It was as if the apparition was made of light -- no substance; no mass; no heft; only shimmering, dancing light.

Marvin Clark was a dedicated skeptic and a loyal Thirteener.  He simply never could accept what he saw that night in the Hardenbrook House on Shore Road in Bartow-on-the-Sound.  Indeed, for years he maintained that all that he and the others had seen was dancing light from an un-shaded kerosene lantern shining through a cottage window and playing through waving stalks of corn in the garden.  He claimed that when he later examined the rows of corn outside the cottage window there were two odd stalks that "stood out distinctly from the others" and were peculiarly shaped just right to filter the light so as to cast an image of "the tall figure of a man" into the night.  He claimed that "our fevered imaginations pictured the rest."

Of course, loyal Thirteener Marvin Clark never explained how the corn stalks could sway on a wind-less night.  He could not clarify how what he had seen was the luminous image of a man with its "form so perfect" as he admitted in writing.  Nor could he explain what strange sort of screen or substance the lantern light had projected onto to create so perfect an image of a floating man.  Perhaps most significantly, he never tried to explain the look of derision on the apparition's face as it seemed to beckon him to approach.  

Though his explanation of what he had witnessed that night may have satisfied smug members of the Thirteen Club, Clark's explanations and rationalizations fell on the deaf ears of at least two others:  Doc John Hardenbrook and Mrs. Gordon.  Those two never stepped into the garden of the Hardenbrook house in the dead of night again.  Both knew what they had seen that awful night:  the ghost of the haunted Hardenbrook house on Shore Road.

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Below is the text of the news article from The World on which today's Historic Pelham ghost story is based.  The text is followed by a citation and link to its source.  Also included below are two images that appeared with the article, including one that purported to show the spirit the group encountered that night.

"ALL SURE THEY SAW A GHOST.
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By Marvin R. Clark, thirteenth of the original thirteen of the famous Thirteen Club.

It may be considered remarkable that I, who have been one of the chief pillars of the Thirteen Club, for seven consecutive years its Archivist, loudest in my denunciations of the old, injurious superstitions, I, who have defied every known one of them and particularly scoffed at ghost stories, should, with grave deliberation, in all seriousness, tell the millions who have often heard of this now famous Thirteen Club, that I have actually seen a ghost!  Yet such is the fact.  What the consequences may be to me when it comes to the eyes and ears of my fellow-members of that anti-superstitious concern I will not stop to consider, but will leave the reader to surmise.

Every author of note has had his ghost, and I claim one as my inalienable right.  Charles Dickens had several, Shakespeare had a church full, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, G. P. R. James, Wilkie Collins, Charles Lamb, Capt. Marryatt, Washington Irving and a thousand more authors, both great and small, did not consider their work well done until they had introduced to the world at least one ghost, whose fame ran in an equal ration with the fame of the author.  In view of this fact, and considering that I am an author, I hope to be rubbed down less severely by the hard brick, now become so proverbial, in the hands of an irascible Thirteen Club, and would beg that the knowledge of my being the thirteenth thirteener of the original thirteen will not lead them to place any confidence in the superstition that I may be the Judas of that great anti-superstitious club of the world.

During the year 1884, I, as the representative, and with the sanction of the Thirteen Club, advertised in the New York Herald for a haunted house, they seeming, at that time, according to the newspapers, to be in season and the crop large, offering a reward for such residence of spooks, and agreeing to lay out any number of ghosts that might put in an appearance, and the more the merrier.  It may surprise the reader to learn that there was not even one response to that advertisement, although it was repeated several times, in the vain hope that something in the shape of what we most desired might put in an appearance.  As an anti-superstitious club, and one devoted to heart and soul to the laying of all manner of superstitions, including that of shades from the land of supernatural creations, we had pined and waxed impatient for a ghost.  Contrary to our fond hopes, none had visited us at our festive board, and experience had shown that, as far as the city of New York was concerned, there was not a genuine haunted house in it, and so far as the club was concerned, there wasn't a ghost in it.  It was after this effort that I began to look around on my own account for a veritable, unadulterated ghost.  After four long, weary years of waiting my industry was rewarded in a most unexpected manner and at a time and place when and where I could not have been forewarned of its coming.

I had a friend once of the name of Hardenbrook.  I say 'once' because it is past finding out how long you will have a friend unless you borrow his money and forget to return it, or run away with his daughter, sweetheart or mother-in-law, or do some other pleasant thing like that, so that he will keep you in mind and stick to you with commendable fidelity.  He was a fellow-journalist, and being brother Bohemians I may consider the friendship still on, I suppose.

Our great Washington Irving, in his 'Knickerbocker's History of New York,' speaks pathetically of the families of Tenbroeck and Tinbroeck.  Anglicizing them into Tenbreeches and Tinbreeches, claiming that their names originated in the fact that one of the heads of each of these families wore ten breeches and the other tin breeches, at that time, on account of the coldness of the atmosphere.  With equal pathos the great author mentions the existence of the ancient family of Hardenbroecks, or Hardbreeches, so called because they were particularly hard netherlings.  I mention this in order to account for a belief which has always existed in my mind that the 'Doctor,' as he is familiarly known among journalists, came of that grand old Holland Dutch stock of Hardbreeches, and on account of which statement he may honestly say that he owes me one, and also thank me for tracing  his pedigree as far as the famous Dutch, who are accused of being wide-awake enough, at one opportune moment to commit themselves to all time by taking Holland.

Dr. Hardenbreeches looked like a Hollander then, and still being in the land of the living and the place of his birth, he looks still more like a Hollander at this writing.  He was tall, gaunt, thin as a wafer, in appearance grand as Don Quixote, whom he resembled in many respects otherwise than his looks, and he wore a remarkable cloak in all his travels which the scraggy Don would have given a kingdom for, it he had possessed one, and Hardbreeches's travels were from Dan to Beersheba.  I do not know how it came about, but I always imagined that the Doctor wore that cloak in a spirit of weak imitation of the famous white coat of the reverend Horace Greeley, and this proverbial cloak clung pathetically to the old man's stooping shoulders until it became exhausted, which occurred after many years of good and faithful service.  When he emerged from it, like the butterfly from the chrysalis, he lost his identity until we became both accustomed and reconciled to the transformation he created in a new overcoat.  But the man was there, all the same, with a heart in his old breast and a growl upon his smiling lips for everybody.  The latter as a sop to Cerberus.

You will wonder how Doc Hardenbrook is in it, and I will inform you.  Hardenbrook owned a small place on the water side of Bartow-on-the-Sound, a small town in Westchester County, N. Y., now within the boundaries of what is known as Pelham Park, with a comfortable two-story and basement cottage on it, where he lived in peace and quietness with his housekeeper, Mrs. Gordon, a pleasant, little, gray-haired lady of immeasurable spirits and activity.  I was frequently a guest at this cottage during the summer and fall of the year 1886 and it was here that my ghost appeared one cool evening in the month of September.

The house being built upon a decline, the parlor floor was on a level with the road in front of the house, while the rear of the cottage was a story lower.  The dining room which was also the sitting-room, and the kitchen were in the basement, and both looked out upon a vegetable garden where was planted all kinds of garden truck.  Every evening after dinner when I was there, we remained in the dining room in preference to occupying the less congenial parlor, and smoked our pipes and drank our beer -- Dutch fashion to be sure and told yarns such as are rare and all the more enjoyable for that.  We did not spare each other on ghost stories and the most improbable we pressed most to believe.  After the ordinary run of this class of fiction was exhausted we set to work at manufacturing something beyond reason in order to grand discount those which had gone before.

One evening we had been engaged the Doctor and I in a powerful effort to frighten the pleasant housekeeper with some awful revelations, and, I may claim, with some degree of success.  After hours of labor, reaching up to the topmost figures on the clock's dial the Doctor and the lady went about preparing for retirement to the restful land of Nod, while I remained seated at the dining-table, engrossed in the mysteries of Fos's [sic; should be "Foxe's"] 'Book of Martyrs,' which no family is complete without.  They had gone into the kitchen together, and, as I supposed, out into the garden to count the chickens and the old sow.  A death-like stillness pervaded the premises and I was absorbed in the book until a whispered conversation fell upon my ear and awakened my suspicions.  I looked up and saw them standing at the outer door of the kitchen, leading into the garden, with the wonder in my mind as to what caused them to remain there so long, pinned, as it were, to the spot.  After straining my ears for a sound I heard a whisper of the Doctor, saying:

'Don't tell him for the world!'

Then came the reply from the housekeeper:

'Bless you, no.  It would scare him out of a year's growth.  But did you ever see anything like it, Doctor?  It's a real, live ghost and no mistake!  See it wave its arms and shake its head!  Doctor, let's go in and lock the doors!'

'Nonsense!' replied Hardenbrook, still in a frightened whisper, 'You can't get away from it that way.  Wait and see what it'll do next.'

'Come in, I say!' whispered Mrs. Gordon, with strong emphasis and shivering with alarm.  'See, Doctor, it is moving this way!  Oh, what will become of us all!'

'Nonsense!' answered he of the Dutch descent.  'It doesn't move an inch.  But what can it be, do you suppose?'

'Don't' exclaimed Mrs. Gordon.  'I say, doctor, don't stay there!  I cannot bear to look at it!  Come in and shut the door!'

I had listened to these whispers with a broad smile upon my face, and in the firm belief that they were playing upon me, with a hope that they would succeed in frightening me.  Consequently I sat still, and smiled a significant smile with a wink in the corner of my eye, saying to myself that they were barking up the wrong tree and that I was not the kind of coon to come down anyway.  But when the lady gave a horrified shriek, which almost curdled the blood in my veins -- for she was not more than fifteen feet from where I was sitting, and I saw her shiver and turn towards me a ghastly white face -- I arose and crept, cautiously, to where they were standing, at the open door, the doctor holding tightly to its edge and the housekeeper peeking timidly through the crack at something in the garden.

There was no moon that night, and all was black darkness, save for the faint light of a few stars, which seemed to make the darkness more impenetrable.  The water of the Sound lapped the shore with a melancholy sob and all else was silent, even to painfulness, at that midnight hour.  They stood there, perfectly mute, when I reached them and did not volunteer a word of explanation to my wondering look of inquiry.  Mrs. Gordon looked all that she felt of fear, and Hardenbrook's face was blanched as I never saw it before or since, and the door shook in his grasp.

'What is it?' I asked, realizing that something unearthly was presenting itself to their visitors.

There is something in this expression of fear which cannot be described.  These two were permeated with it to overflowing, and communicated the overflow to me, as I stood there and realized that they were shivering with terror at the sight of what, to them, was something supernatural.  They were man and woman past the meridian of life, and had seen much of it.  Younger people would have fainted at the sight and been justified in so doing on account of the extraordinary cause.  Evidently it was no hoax which they were endeavoring to practice upon me, but something a long way out of the ordinary, nay, beyond the extraordinary.

I cannot say that the old doctor's hair stood upon end, but it must have done so while I gazed at him and heard him, in a harsh whisper, say

'Look there!'

Even the whisper had a tremble in it as he nodded faintly around the edge of the open door, while holding tightly to it, as if to support his trembling limbs.  As he spoke he made room for me to pass out just one step of the board platform, and I turned my gaze in the direction to which he nodded.

I gasped when my eyes fell upon the object which had riveted their attention for so long a time while I had sat in the dining-room, under the impression that they were trying to play a joke upon me and frighten a Thirteener.  The smile that was upon my face faded away instantly, and was superseded by a look of real alarm, I am sure.

'Good gracious!' I exclaimed, 'It's a ghost!'

It is only by those who have had such an experience that my feelings can be appreciated, for the English language does not contain words adequate to the description.  I was suffused with an indescribable fear which was the very extreme of terror.  Even wild beasts tremble at such sights, and remain fixed to the spot.  There is a humble and religious awe that permeates the worshiper when he stands upon holy ground, and it sometimes overcomes him, but the feeling was not of that character.  There is a feeling of worship of the Almighty in the view of his grandest works, but it cannot be compared to that.  There is a painful feeling when in the presence of death, but my feelings were not of that character.  There may be that which overcomes the mind and terrorizes one when in the very gasp of the lightning's flash and the thunder's roll, but it was not that which I felt.  There is an unutterable feeling of loneliness and desertion that overwhelms one from whom loved ones, friends, and sympathetic acquaintances have dropped, one by one, and left him standing alone, without a helping hand to save him from the flood of affliction which sweeps down upon him, but it was not this that I felt.  It is the feeling of despair, which surrounds one like a cloud, with the knowledge of a quickly impending and unavoidable doom, and yet more than this.  It is the knowledge that this is something supernatural not of the earth, but intangible, and therefore irresistible.  It is the overpowering sensation that the bravest of the brave must go down before it as helplessly as the most cowardly of all cowards.  It is the realization that strong and weak alike must succumb to its ghostly influence, as to the avalanche, the simoon [sic], the hurricane, the mountain torrent and the tidal wave, against which human power of resistance is as a straw.

'Hush!' whispered the doctor, his voice ending in a hiss that made me start and shiver.

For what seemed to be a long time I remained silent, absolutely unable to remove my gaze from the ghost.  There, in the rear of the house, stood the awful shape, as plainly defined as ever was mortal man, all gleaming with white, its form perfect and outlined in silvery waves of light, standing out clear and distinct against the ebony darkness of the night for a background.  From head to foot it was a man, and from neck to feet it was clothed in a pure white, flowing robe, which undulated in the soft breeze -- so gentle that it did not stir a leaf -- with graceful oscillations, while its arms rose and fell with a peculiar motion, and seemed to beckon me to approach, the face smiling upon me derisively, as if to say, tauntingly, that I dared not.

I had never experienced such a sensation, and never since that evening have I felt anything like it, thanks to my good fortune.  Of course, I did not then approach the thing.  Nothing so foolhardy was in my mind.  I stood there tremblingly transfixed to the spot like my companions, without power of action, waiting, if for anything, to see it approach us, when I knew I must turn, if I could summon up the courage to do so, and fly in terror, whither I could not have cared as long as it might be out of sight of that undulating enormity, which with open eyes I then saw but had always before scoffed at and invariably ridiculed others for supposing that such visitors could have an existence upon this too solid earth after they had met with the same experience which was then overwhelming me. 

Quickly, as through the mind of a drowning mortal, rushed memories of all I had ever said in derision about just such supernatural visitors, and I became frightened at the thought that perhaps this wrath had come to mete out to me a terrible punishment for my mockeries and skepticism, so often vaunted at the festive board of the boldly defiant Thirteen Club.

I felt the clammy sweat oozing from every pore of my body.  I attempted to utter a long, loud and defiant laugh in aid of my forlorn condition and in evidence of an unfelt bravado.  But my courage had trickled out from my fingertips and, like the others, I was paralyzed with a fear such as I never had felt before, saving in a painful nightmare.  And this was a reality, while there stood the embodiment of the supernatural, waving its arms in the midnight darkness and beckoning me to its embrace of death.

I am not exaggerating -- not one hair's breadth.  There was the image, just as I have described it, and its long, white robe, almost reaching the ground where it stood, softly moving to and fro, while the arms waved and the ghastly head nodded and bowed at me solemnly, yet gracefully, as if to say that to doubt its existence was to doubt the evidence of, not only my own senses, but those of my two friends who stood mute and paralyzed beside me.

At last, with more than human effort, I moved a step forward and halted.  But seeing that the ghost neither advanced nor retreated, I again stepped forward, and then rushed towards it with a frantic desire to solve the mystery, while Mrs. Gordon uttered a scream that rang out shrill and clear through the night, and the doctor sprang after and seized me by the arm.  At the same instant, and when within a few feet of it, we looked up at the thing, and, as we grasped its outstretched arms, we burst out into a loud laugh, which was all the louder for the relief it brought to our overwrought feelings.

Shall I tell what my ghost was, or shall I leave the reader to surmise the real facts?  I prefer to clear up the mystery, and show that it was what many a ghost has been that has gone before it.

In the sitting-room, upon the dining table, was a kerosene lamp which gave out an unusually bright light.  There was no shade upon this lamp, and there was no shade down at the window opening out upon the garden.  Immediately in front of the garden, a few feet from the steps, were several rows of corn, and as the stalks waved in the air the bright light fell upon them.  Two of these stalks, which stood out distinctly from the others, were so peculiarly shaped that the light delineated in them the tall figure of a man, and our fevered imaginations pictured the rest.  I solemnly aver to you that we were as completely deceived by the vision that, had we retreated in affright, without solving the mystery, not one of us would have hesitated to swear that we had witnessed the supernatural, and that it stood plainly, and without the shadow of a doubt before us that night."

Source:  ALL SURE THEY SAW A GHOST, The World [NY, NY], Oct. 8, 1893, Vol. XXXIV, No. 11,737, p. 19, cols. 1-3.  

"WE DID NOT SCARE EACH OTHER ON GHOST STORIES."

Image shows, left to right, Housekeeper Mrs. Gordon, Dr.

Hardenbrook of Bartow-on-the-Sound, and Marvin R.

Clark of the Thirteen Club, in the Dining Area of the Hardenbrook

Home.  Source:  ALL SURE THEY SAW A GHOST, The World [NY, NY], 

Oct. 8, 1893, Vol. XXXIV, No. 11,737, p. 19, cols. 1-3.  NOTE:  Click

on Image to Enlarge.

"THE DOCTOR SEIZED ME BY THE ARM."

Image shows, left to right, Housekeeper Mrs. Gordon, Dr.

Hardenbrook of Bartow-on-the-Sound, and Marvin R.

Clark of the Thirteen Club, in the Garden Area of the Hardenbrook

Home.  This may be the only eyewitness-based image depicting
a Pelham ghost.  Source:  ALL SURE THEY SAW A GHOST, The World 
[NY, NY], Oct. 8, 1893, Vol. XXXIV, No. 11,737, p. 19, cols. 1-3.  NOTE:  
Click on Image to Enlarge.

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