The haunted Isla de Pedrosa was a place of isolation. First for sailors with exotic diseases, then as a children’s sanatorium for those suffering from strange afflictions. In the later years it has been thought to be haunted by those isolated on the island that took those unwanted by the rest of society.
Off the coast of Cantabria, the Isla Pedrosa sits as a dark spot on the blue ocean. The island has become known as Isla Embrujada, or the haunted islands because of the strange things that are said to have taken place there.
Read more: Check out all of our ghost stories from Spain
Isolated places were in old times used as a precaution to illnesses since the time of the Black Death and often deserted islands close to the ports were used to hinder any diseases from oncoming ships. These places are called lazarettos, taken from the Bible story about the man that rose from the dead. The most famous Lazaretto is perhaps the haunted Poveglia Island in Venice.
Lazaretto: Isla de Pedrosa was for a long time used as a lazaretto for ships that came from exotic places to quarantine and prevent bringing any illness into port.
In the 19th century, Isla de Pedrosa took on a new role as a place to house sailors and other individuals suffering from exotic diseases from 1834 to help battle the diseases like yellow fever from America for instance as well as smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera and leprosy. The isolation of the island made it an ideal location for quarantine, protecting the mainland from potential outbreaks. It is said that during this time, many tragic events occurred on the island, leaving behind a haunting presence that still lingers today.
In the first decade of the 20th century it was converted from a lazaretto into a maritime children’s sanatorium. It could house over 200 children from almost half of Spain by 1910. First and foremost it was in an effort to combat tuberculosis. It wasn’t the only illness though and it operated until 1989.
The Haunting Legends of Isla de Pedrosa
One of the most chilling aspects of Isla de Pedrosa’s history is the abundance of haunting legends that surround the island. Many locals and visitors alike have reported eerie encounters and unexplained phenomena, contributing to its reputation as a haunted place.
Among the abandoned buildings on Isla de Pedrosa, there is one that stands out as particularly haunted – the abandoned theater. This theater was once frequented by the sick individuals who were quarantined on the island, and it is said that their spirits still linger within its decaying walls.
The Haunted Theatre: One of the places that are said to be more haunted than other, is the theatre found on Isla de Pedrosa that are now not in use and just left abandoned.
Visitors to the theater have reported hearing disembodied voices and footsteps, as well as seeing apparitions moving across the stage. Some have even claimed to witness performances happening in the theater, despite its state of abandonment. The ghostly presence in the theater adds to the island’s eerie atmosphere, leaving visitors with an unforgettable experience.
The Bird Girls on Isla de Pedrosa
Another haunting legend of Isla de Pedrosa involves the so-called Bird Girls. These two sisters were said to have lived on the island during the time it served as a quarantine facility sometimes in the 1960s. They were born with a rare disease called progeria that made them somehow look like birds.
This appearance led superstitious people to speculate that their conditions were caused by the devil himself.
The Strange Illnesses: After being used as a base for quarantine, they started to isolate children with strange diseases, like the Bird Girls. Here is a picture of Alfonso XIII visiting Isla de Pedrosa in 1914.
According to the legend, the Bird Girls were isolated from society and hidden away on the island and they tragically died very young, perhaps because of their affliction. Visitors to Isla de Pedrosa have reported seeing the ghostly figures of these sisters roaming the shores, their deformed bodies reminiscent of bird-like creatures. The presence of the Bird Girls adds a layer of mystery and intrigue to the island’s haunted reputation.
People Experiencing Paranormal Activity
There are plenty of people that claim to have experienced something paranormal on this island. A paranormal seeker named Anita Lauda claims to have seen spirits of children coming towards them accompanied by a nurse after an Ouija board session.
Today’s Isla de Pedrosa
In present times, Isla de Pedrosa is mostly abandoned, with only a few buildings still in use. Some of these buildings now house juvenile prisoners and serve as a reintegration center. The island’s dark past and haunted reputation make it an eerie and unsettling place for those who reside there.
Despite its haunting atmosphere, Isla de Pedrosa continues to attract visitors curious about its mysterious history. People from all over the world come to explore the abandoned buildings and soak in the eerie ambiance that surrounds the island. Isla de Pedrosa serves as a reminder of the past and a testament to the power of legends and folklore.
Said to be only a temporary bridge, the Jakni Bandh Bridge in Goa claimed the life of a bus loaded with young children. According to local lore, you can still hear their dying screams echoing off the road at night.
Between the villages of Navelim and Drampur lies Jakni Bandh Bridge shrouded in darkness—a bridge built as a temporary measure. How temporary though is uncertain as it has been the only bridge there for decades.
Known as Jakni Bandh, this seemingly innocuous structure conceals a chilling secret, one that continues to haunt the hearts and minds of those who dare to tread its path.
Although the narrow path has gone through modernization, it is still remembered for its pasts and how it costs countless lives throughout the years. The most well known story and victims being the school bus filled with children that never returned home.
The Horrible Accident on the Bridge
Jakni Bandh, initially intended as a simple connector between two communities, has become synonymous with tragedy and terror. Its traumatic past is rooted in a fateful accident in 1979 that forever altered the fabric of reality in its vicinity.
It was on a seemingly ordinary day that a mini-bus bus, teeming with children, met its untimely demise at the hands of fate, or as some blame it, the driver’s fault. What really happened that day we will never know, as none of them lived to tell.
The driver lost control of the bus in any case, toppling over the bridge’s edge, the bus plummeted into the abyss below, claiming the lives of all aboard in a horrifying instant. The locals rushed to the scene to try to help, but it was too late.
The Haunted Jakni Bandh Bridge
Since that fateful day, Jakni Bandh has become a hotbed of paranormal activity, with reports of inexplicable phenomena flooding in from all corners that are said to happen after sunset.
Passersby speak of hearing the anguished cries and blood-curdling screams of children through the night air, their voices a haunting reminder of the tragedy that befell them. But when people try to track down where the wailing of the children comes from, there is no one there.
The people reporting of paranormal activity also claim to have seen apparition of what looks like children running around in the area, long after bedtime. This cumulates especially to night time or certain nights of the year, although it is hard to find out what days the locals claim this is.
The Other Ghosts Haunting the Jakni Bandh Bridge
In addition to the sound and sighing of ghostly children running around, the place around the Jakni Bandh Bridge is also said to be haunted by a woman as well.
The Jakni Bandh Bridge: As the bridge was in 2014. //Source: Joegoauk Goa/Flickr
In the heart of Goa’s lush countryside, Jakni Bandh stands as a silent sentinel, its secrets buried deep within the recesses of memory and where school children still sometimes choose minibus drivers over bigger ones because of their convenience.
And although the road has gone through developments since then, and that it is after all said to be just a temporary thing, the Jakni Bandh Bridge still remains a dangerous place to venture, especially after dark if we are to believe the legends.
“For the Blood is the Life” by F. Marion Crawford, published in 1905, is a haunting and atmospheric vampire tale set on the coast of Italy. The story unfolds through the eyes of two friends who discover an ancient, abandoned treasure hidden in a lonely field marked by a sinister mound. They soon encounter the spectral figure of a beautiful woman who rises from her grave to drain the life from a local shepherd. As the friends delve deeper into the mystery, they uncover a tragic love story intertwined with the curse of vampirism.
For the Blood is the Life by F. Marion Crawford
We had dined at sunset on the broad roof of the old tower, because it was cooler there during the great heat of summer. Besides, the little kitchen was built at one corner of the great square platform, which made it more convenient than if the dishes had to be carried down the steep stone steps broken in places and everywhere worn with age. The tower was one of those built all down the west coast of Calabria by the Emperor Charles V early in the sixteenth century, to keep off the Barbary pirates, when the unbelievers were allied with Francis I against the Emperor and the Church. They have gone to ruin, a few still stand intact, and mine is one of the largest. How it came into my possession ten years ago, and why I spend a part of each year in it, are matters which do not concern this tale. The tower stands in one of the loneliest spots in Southern Italy, at the extremity of a curving, rocky promontory, which forms a small but safe natural harbour at the southern extremity of the Gulf of Policastro, and just north of Cape Scalea, the birthplace of Judas Iscariot, according to the old local legend. The tower stands alone on this hooked spur of the rock, and there is not a house to be seen within three miles of it. When I go there I take a couple of sailors, one of whom is a fair cook, and when I am away it is in charge of a gnome-like little being who was once a miner and who attached himself to me long ago.
My friend, who sometimes visits me in my summer solitude, is an artist by profession, a Scandinavian by birth, and a cosmopolitan by force of circumstances.
We had dined at sunset; the sunset glow had reddened and faded again, and the evening purple steeped the vast chain of the mountains that embrace the deep gulf to eastward and rear themselves higher and higher towards the south. It was hot, and we sat at the landward corner of the platform, waiting for the night breeze to come down from the lower hills. The colour sank out of the air, there was a little interval of deep-grey twilight, and a lamp sent a yellow streak from the open door of the kitchen, where the men were getting their supper.
Then the moon rose suddenly above the crest of the promontory, flooding the platform and lighting up every little spur of rock and knoll of grass below us, down to the edge of the motionless water. My friend lighted his pipe and sat looking at a spot on the hillside. I knew that he was looking at it, and for a long time past I had wondered whether he would ever see anything there that would fix his attention. I knew that spot well. It was clear that he was interested at last, though it was a long time before he spoke. Like most painters, he trusts to his own eyesight, as a lion trusts his strength and a stag his speed, and he is always disturbed when he cannot reconcile what he sees with what he believes that he ought to see.
“It’s strange,” he said. “Do you see that little mound just on this side of the boulder?”
“Yes,” I said, and I guessed what was coming.
“It looks like a grave,” observed Holger.
“Very true. It does look like a grave.”
“Yes,” continued my friend, his eyes still fixed on the spot. “But the strange thing is that I see the body lying on the top of it. Of course,” continued Holger, turning his head on one side as artists do, “it must be an effect of light. In the first place, it is not a grave at all. Secondly, if it were, the body would be inside and not outside. Therefor, it’s an effect of the moonlight. Don’t you see it?”
“Perfectly; I always see it on moonlight nights.”
“It doesn’t seem it interest you much,” said Holger.
“On the contrary, it does interest me, though I am used to it. You’re not so far wrong, either. The mound is really a grave.”
“Nonsense!” cried Holger incredulously. “I suppose you’ll tell me that what I see lying on it is really a corpse!”
“No,” I answered, “it’s not. I know, because I have taken the trouble to go down and see.”
“Then what is it?” asked Holger.
“It’s nothing.”
“You mean that it’s an effect of light, I suppose?”
“Perhaps it is. But the inexplicable part of the matter is that it makes no difference whether the moon is rising or setting, or waxing or waning. If there’s any moonlight at all, from east or west or overhead, so long as it shines on the grave you can see the outline of the body on top.”
Holger stirred up his pipe with the point of his knife, and then used his finger for a stopper. When the tobacco burned well, he rose from his chair.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ll go down and take a look at it.”
He left me, crossed the roof, and disappeared down the dark steps. I did not move, but sat looking down until he came out of the tower below. I heard him humming an old Danish song as he crossed the open space in the bright moonlight, going straight to the mysterious mound. When he was ten paces from it, Holger stopped short, made two steps forward, and then three or four backward, and then stopped again. I know what that meant. He had reached the spot where the Thing ceased to be visible — where, as he would have said, the effect of light changed.
Then he went on till he reached the mound and stood upon it. I could see the Thing still, but it was no longer lying down; it was on its knees now, winding its white arms round Holger’s body and looking up into his face. A cool breeze stirred my hair at that moment, as the night wind began to come down from the hills, but it felt like a breath from another world.
The Thing seemed to be trying to climb to its feet helping itself up by Holger’s body while he stood upright, quite unconcious of it and apparently looking toward the tower, which is very picturesque when the moonlight falls upon it on that side.
“Come along!” I shouted. “Don’t stay there all night!”
It seemed to me that he moved reluctantly as he stepped from the mound, or else with difficulty. That was it. The Thing’s arms were still round his waist, but its feet could not leave the grave. As he came slowly forward it was drawn and lengthened like a wreath of mist, thin and white, till I saw distinctly that Holger shook himself, as a man does who feels a chill. At the same instant a little wail of pain came to me on the breeze — it might have been the cry of the small owl that lives amongst the rocks — and the misty presence floated swiftly back from Holger’s advancing figure and lay once more at its length upon the mound.
Again I felt the cool breeze in my hair, and this time an icy thrill of dread ran down my spine. I remembered very well that I had once gone down there alone in the moonlight; that presently, being near, I had seen nothing; that, like Holger, I had gone and had stood upon the mound; and I remembered how when I came back, sure that there was nothing there, I had felt the sudden conviction that there was something after all if I would only look back, a temptation I had resisted as unworthy of a man of sense, until, to get rid of it, I had shaken myself just as Holger did.
And now I knew that those white, misty arms had been round me, too; I knew it in a flash, and I shuddered as I remembered that I had heard the night owl then, too. But it had not been the night owl. It was the cry of the Thing.
I refilled my pipe and poured out a cup of strong southern wine; in less than a minute Holger was seated beside me again.
“Of course there’s nothing there,” he said, “but it’s creepy, all the same. Do you know, when I was coming back I was so sure that there was something behind me that I wanted to turn around and look? It was an effort not to.”
He laughed a little, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and poured himself out some wine. For a while neither of us spoke, and the moon rose higher and we both looked at the Thing that lay on the mound.
“You might make a story about that,” said Holger after a long time.
“There is one,” I answered. “If you’re not sleepy, I’ll tell it to you.”
“Go ahead,” said Holger, who likes stories.
Old Aderio was dying up there in the village beyond the hill. You remember him, I have no doubt. They say that he made his money by selling sham jewelry in South America, and escaped with his gains when he was found out.. Like all those fellows, if they bring anything back with them, he at once set to work to enlarge his house, and as there are no masons here, he sent all the way to Paola for two workmen. They were a rough-looking pair of scoundrels–a Neapolitan who had lost one eye and a Sicilian with an old scar half an inch deep across his left cheek. I often saw them, for on Sundays they used to come down here and fish off the rocks. When Alario caught the fever that killed him the masons were still at work. As he had agreed that part of their pay should be their board and lodging, he made them sleep in the house. His wife was dead, and he had an only son called Angelo, who was a much better sort than himself. Angelo was to marry the daughter of the richest man in the village, and, strange to say, though the marriage was arranged by their parents, the young people were said to be in love with eachother.
For that matter, the whole village was in love with Angelo, and among the rest a wild, good-looking creature called Cristina, who was more like a gipsy than any girl I ever saw about here. She had very red lips and very black eyes, she was built like a greyhound, and had the tongue of the devil. But Angelo did not care a straw for her. He was rather a simpleminded fellow, quite different from his old scoundrel of a father, and under what I should call normal circumstances I really believe that he would never have looked at any girl except the nice plump little creature, with a fat dowry, whom his father meant him to marry. But things turned up which were neither normal nor natural.
On the other hand, a very handsome young shepherd from the hills above Maratea was in love with Cristina, who seems to have been quite indifferent to him. Cristina had no regular means of subsistence, but she was a good girl and willing to do any work or go on errands to any distance for the sake of a loaf of bread or a mess of beans, and permission to sleep under cover. She was especially glad when she could get something to do about the house of Angelo’s father. There is no doctor in the village, and when the neighbours saw that old Alario was dying they sent Cristina to Scalea to fetch one. That was late in the afternoon, and if they had waited so long it was because the dying miser refused to allow any such extravagance while he was able to speak. But while Cristina was gone matters grew rapidly worse, the priest was brough tothe bedside, and when he had done what he could he gave it as his opinion to the bystanders that the old man was dead, and left the house.
You know these people. They have a physical horror of death. Until the priest spoke, the room had been full of people. The words were hardly out of his mouth before it was empty. It was night now. They hurried down the dark steps and out into the street.
Angelo, as I have said, was away, Cristina had not come back–the simple woman-servant who had nursed the sick man fled with the rest, and the body was left alone in the flickering light of the earthen oil lamp.
Five minutes later two men looked in cautiously and crept forward toward the bed. They were the one-eyed Neapolitan mason and his Sicilian companion. They knew what they wanted. In a moment they had dragged from under the bed a small but heavy iron-bound box, and long before anyone thought of coming back to the dead man they had left the house and the village under cover of darkness. It was easy enough, for Alario’s house is the last toward the gorge which leads down here, and the thieves merely went out by the back door, got over the stone wall, and had nothing to risk after that except that possibility of meeting some belated countryman, which was very small indeed, since few of the people use that path. They had a mattock and shovel, and they made their way without accident.
I am telling you this story as it must have happened, for, of course, there were no witnesses to this part of it. The men brought the box down by the gorge, intending to bury it on the beach in the wet sand, where it would have been much safer. But the paper would ahve rotted if they had been obliged to leave it there long,so they dug their hole down there, close to that boulder. Yes, just where the mound is now.
Cristina did not find the doctor in Scalea, for he had been sent for from a place up the valley, half-way to San Domenico. If she had found him we would have come on his mule by the upper road, which is smoother but much longer. But Cristina took the short cut by the rocks, which passes about fifty feet above the mound, and goes round that corner. The men were digging when she passed, and she heard them at work. It would not hav been like her to go by without finding out what the noise was, for she was never afraid of anything in her life, and, besides, the fishermen sometimes come ashore here at night to get a stone for an anchor or to gather sticks to make a little fire. The night was dark and Cristina probably came close to the two men before she could see what they were doing. She knew them, of course, and they knew her, and understood instantly that they were in her power. There was only one thing to be done for their safety, and they did it. They knocked her on the head, they dug the hole deep, and they buried her quickly with the iron-bound chest. They must have understood that their only chance of escaping suspicion lay in getting back to the village before their absence was noticed, for they returned immediately, and were found half and hour later gossiping quietly with the man who was making Alario’s coffin. He was a crony of theirs, and had been working at the repairs in the old man’s house. So far as I have been able to make out, the only persons who were supposed to know where Alario kept his treasure were Angelo and the one woman-servant I have mentioned. Angelo was away; it was the woman who discovered the theft.
It was easy enough to understand why no one else knew where the money was. The old man kept his door locked and the key in his pocket when he was out, and did not let the woman enter to clean the place unless he was there himself. The whole village knew that he had money somewhere, however, and the masons had probably discovered the whereabouts of the chest by climbing in at the window in his absence. If the old man had not been delirious until he lost conciousness he would have been in frightful agony of mind for his riches. The faithful woman-servant forgot their existence only for a few moments when she fled with the rest, overcome by the horror of death. Twenty minutes had not passed before she returned with the two hideous old hags who are always called in to prepare the dead for burial. Even then she had not at first the courage to go near the bed with them, but she made a pretence of dropping something, went down on her knees as if to find it, and looked under the bedstead. The walls of the room were newly whitewashed down to the floor and she saw at a glance that the chest was gone. It had been there in the afternoon, it had therefore been stolen in the short interval since she had left the room.
There are no carabineers stationed in the village; there is not so much as a municipal watchman, for there is no municipality. There never was such a place, I believe. Scalea is supposed to look after it in some mysterious way, and it takes a couple of hours to get anybody from there. As the old woman had lived in the village all her life, it did not even occur to her to apply to any civil authority for help. She simply set up a howl and ran through the village in the dark, screaming out that her dead master’s house had been robbed. Many of the people looked out, but at first no one seemed inclined to help her. Most of them, judging her by themselves, whispered to each other that she had probably stolen the money herself. The first man to move was the father of the girl whom Angelo was to marry; having collected his household, all of whom felt a personal interest in the wealth which was to have come into the family, he declared it to be his opinion that the chest had been stolen by the two journeymen masons who lodged in the house. He headed a search for them, which naturally began in Alario’s house and ended in the carpenter’s workshop, where the thieves were found discussing a measure of wine with the carpenter over the half-finished coffin, by the light of one earthen lamp filled with oil and tallow. The search-party at once accused the delinquents of the crime, and threatened to lock them up in the cellar till the carabineers could be fetched from Scalea. The two men looked at each other for one moment, and then without the slightest hesitation they put out the single light, seized the unfinished coffin between them, and using it as a sort of battering ram, dashed upon their assailants in the dark. In a few moments they were beyond pursuit.
That is the end of the first part of the story. The tresure had disappeared, and as no trace of it could be found the people supposed that the thieves had succeeded in carrying it off. The old man was buried, and when Angelo came back at last he had to borrow money to pay for the miserable funeral, and had some difficulty in doing so. He hardly needed to be told that in losing his inheritance he had lost his bride. In this part of the world marriages are made on strictly business principles, and if the promised cash is not forthcoming on the appointed day, the bride or the bridegroom whose parents have failed to produce it may as well take themselves off, for there will be no wedding. Poor Angelo knew that well enough. His father had been possessed of hardly any land, and now that the hard cash which he had brought from South America was gone, there was nothing left but debts for the building materials that were to have been used for enlarging and improving the old house. Angelo was beggared, and the nice plump little creature who was to have been his, turned up her nose at him in the most approved fashion. As for Cristina, it was several days before she was missed, for no one remembered that she had been sent to Scalea for the doctor, who had never come. She often disappeared in the same way for days together, when she could find a little work here and there at the distant farms among the hills. But when she did not come back at all, people began to wonder, and at last made up their minds that she had connived with the masons and had escaped with them.
I paused and emptied my glass.
“That sort of thing could not happen anywhere else,” observed Holger, filling his everlasting pipe again. “It is wonderful what a natural charm there is about murder and sudden death in a romantic country like this. Deeds that would be simply brutal and disgusting anywhere else become dramatic and mysterious because this is Italy, and we are living in a genuine tower of Charles V built against Barbary pirates.”
“There’s something in that,” I admitted. Holger is the most romantic man in the world inside of himself, but he always thinks it necessary to explain why he feels anything.
“I suppose the found the poor girl’s body with the box,” he said presently.
“As it seems to interest you,” I answered, “I’ll tell you the rest of the story.”
The mood had risen by this time; the outline of the Thing on the mound was clearer to our eyes than before.
The village very soon settled down to its small dull life. No one missed old Alario, who had been away so much on his voyages to South America that he had never been a familiar figure in his native place. Angelo lived in the half-finished house, and because he had no money to pay the old woman-servant, she would not stay with him, but once in a long time she would come and wash a shirt for him for old acquaintance’ sake. Besides the house, he had inherited a small patch of ground at some distance from the village; he tried to cultivate it, but he had no heart in the work, for he knew he could neer pay the taxes on it and on the house, which would certainly be confiscated by the Government, or seized for the debt of the building material, which the man who had supplied it refused to take back.
Angelo was very unhappy. So long as his father had been alive and rich, every girl in the village had been in love with him; but that was all changed now. It had been pleasant to be admired and courted, and invited to drink wine by fathers who had girls to marry. It was hard to be stared at coldly, and sometimes laughed at because he had been robbed of his inheritance. He cooked his miserable meals for himself, and from being sad became melancholy and morose.
At twilight, when the day’s work was done, instead of hanging about in the open space before the church with young fellows of his own age, he took to wandering in lonely places on the outskirts of the village till it was quite dark. Then he slunk home and went to bed to save the expense of a light. But in those lonely twilight hours he began to have strange waking dreams. He was not always alone, for often when he sat on the stump of a tree, where the narrow path turns down the gorge, he was sure that a woman came up noiselessly over the rough stones, as if her feet were bare; and she stood under a clump of chestnut trees only half a dozen yards down the path, and beckoned to him without speaking. Though she was in the shadow he knew that her lips were red, and that when they parted a little and smiled at him she showed two small sharp teeth. He knew this at first rather than saw it, and he knew that it was Cristina, and that she was dead. Yet he was not afraid; he only wondered whether it was a dream, for he thought that if he had been awake he should have been frightened.
Besides, the dead woman had red lips, and that could only happen in a dream. Whenever he went near the gorget after sunset she was already there waiting for him, or else she very soon appeared, and he began to be sure of her blood-red mouth, but now each feature grew distinct, and the pale face looked at him with deep and hungry eyes.
It was the eyes that grew dim. Little by little he came to know that someday the dream would not end when he turned away to go home, but would lead him down the gorge out of which the vision rose. She was nearer now when she beckoned to him. Her cheeks were not livid like those of the dead, but pale with starvation, with the furious and unappeased physical hunger of her eyes that devoured him. They feasted on his soul and cast a spell over him, and at last they were close to his own and held him. He could not tell whether her breath was as hot as fire, or as cold as ice; he could not tell whether her red lips burned his or froze them, or whether her five fingers on his wrists seared scorching scars or bit his flesh like frost; he could not tell whether he was awake or asleep, whether she was alive or dead, but he knew that she loved him, she alone of all creatures, earthly or unearthly, and her spell had power over him.
When the moon rose high that night the shadow of that Thing was not alone down there upon the mound.
Angelo awoke in the cool dawn, drenched with dew and chilled through flesh, and blood, and bone. He opened his eyes to the faint grey light, and saw the stars were still shining overhead. He was very weak, and his heart was beating so slowly that he was almost like a man fainting. Slowly he turned his head on the mound, as on a pillow, but the other face was not there. Fear seized him suddenly, a fear unspeakable and unknown; he sprang to his feet and fled up the gorge, and he never looked behind him until he reached the door of the house on the outskirts of the village. Drearily he went to his work that day, and wearily the hours dragged themselves after the sun, till at last it touched the sea and sank, and the great sharp hills above Maratea turned purple against the dove-coloured eastern sky.
Angelo shouldered his heavy hoe and left the field. He felt less tired now than in the morning when he had begun to work, but he promised himself that he would go home without lingering by the gorge, and eat the best supper he could get himself, and sleep all night in his bed like a Christian man. Not again would he be tempted down the narrow way by a shadow with red lips and icy breath; not again would he dream that dream of terror and delight. He was near the village now; it was half an hour since the sun had set, and the cracked church bell sent little discordant echoes across the rocks and ravines to tell all good people that the day was done. Angelo stood still a moment where the path forked, where it led toward the village on the left, and down to the gorge on the right, where a clump of chestnut trees overhung the narrow way. He stood still a minute, lifting his battered hat from his head and gazing at the fast-fading sea westward, and his lips moved as he silently repeated the familiar evening prayer. His lips moved, but the words that followed them in his brain lost their meaning and turned into others, and ended in a name that he spoke aloud — Cristina! With the name, the tension of his will relaxed suddenly, reality went out and the dream took him again, and bore him on swiftly and surely like a man walking in his sleep, down, down, by the steep path in the gathering darkness. And as she glided beside him, Cristina whispered strange, sweet things in his ear, which somehow, if he had been awake, he knew that he could not quite have understood; but now they were the most wonderful words he had ever heard in his life. And she kissed him also, but not upon his mouth. He felt her sharp kisses upon his white throat, and he knew that her lips were red. So the wild dream sped on through twilight and darkness and moonrise, and all the glory of the summer’s night. But in the chilly dawn he lay as one half dead upon the mound down there, recalling and not recalling, drained of his blood, yet strangely longing to give those red lips more. Then came the fear, the awful nameless panic, the mortal horror that guards the confines of the world we see not, neither know of as we know of other things, but which we feel when its icy chill freezes our bones and stirs our hair with the touch of a ghostly hand. Once more Angelo sprang from the mound and fled up the gorge in the breaking day, but his step was less sure this time, and he panted for breath as he ran; and when he came to the bright spring of water that rises half way up the hillside, he dropped upon his knees and hands and plunged his whole face in and drank as he had never drunk before — for it was the thirst of the wounded man who has lain bleeding all night upon the battle-field.
She had him fast now, and he could not escape her, but would come to her every evening at dusk until she had drained him of his last drop of blood. It was in vain that when the day was done he tried to take another turning and to go home by a path that did not lead near the gorge. It was in vain that he made promises to himself each morning at dawn when he climbed the lonely way up from the shore to the village. It was all in vain, for when the sun sank burning into the sea, and the coolness of the evening stole out as from a hiding-place to delight the weary world, his feet turned toward the old way, and she was waiting for him in the shadow under the chestnut trees; and then all happened as before, and she fell to kissing his white throat even as she flitted lightly down the way, winding one arm about him. And as his blood failed, she grew more hungry and more thirsty every day, and every day when he awoke in the early dawn it was harder to rouse himself to the effort of climbing the steep path to the village; and when he went to his work his feet dragged painfully, and there was hardly strength in his arms to wield the heavy hoe. He scarcely spoke to anyone now, but the people said he was “consuming himself” for love of the girl he was to have married when he lost his inheritance; and they laughed heartily at the thought, for this is not a very romantic country. At this time Antonio, the man who stays here to look after the tower, returned from a visit to his people, who live near Salerno. He had been away all the time since before Alario’s death and knew nothing of what had happened. He has told me that he came back late in the afternoon and shut himself up in the tower to eat and sleep, for he was very tired. It was past midnight when he awoke, and when he looked out toward the mound, and he saw something, and he did not sleep again that night. When he went out again in the morning it was broad daylight, and there was nothing to be seen on the mound but loose stones and driven sand. Yet he did not go very near it; he went straight up the path to the village and directly to the house of the old priest.
“I have seen an evil thing this night,” he said; “I have seen how the dead drink the blood of the living. And the blood is the life.”
“Tell me what you have seen,” said the priest in reply.
Antonio told him everything he had seen.
“You must bring your book and your holy water to-night,” he added. “I will be here before sunset to go down with you, and if it pleases your reverence to sup with me while we wait, I will make ready.”
“I will come,” the priest answered, “for I have read in old books of these strange beings which are neither quick nor dead, and which lie ever fresh in their graves, stealing out in the dusk to taste life and blood.”
Antonio cannot read, but he was glad to see that the priest understood the business; for, of course, the books must have been instructed him as to the best means of quieting the half-living Thing for ever.
So Antonio went away to his work, which consists largely in sitting on the shady side of the tower, when he is not perched upon a rock with a fishing-line catching nothing. But on that day he went twice to look at the mound in the bright sunlight, and he searched round and round it for some hole through which the being might get in and out; but he found none. When the sun began to sink and the air was cooler in the shadows, he went up to fetch the old priest, carrying a little wicker basket with him; and in this they placed a bottle of holy water, and the basin, and sprinkler, and the stole which the priest would need; and they came down and waited in the door of the tower till it should be dark. But while the light still lingered very grey and faint, they saw something moving, just there, two figures, a man’s that walked, and a woman’s that flitted beside him, and while her head lay on his shoulder she kissed his throat. The priest has told me that, too, and that his teeth chattered and he grasped Antonio’s arm. The vision passed and disappeared into the shadow. Then Antonio got the leathern flask of strong liquor, which he kept for great occasions, and poured such a draught as made the old man feel almost young again; and gave the priest his stole to put on and the holy water to carry, and they went out together toward the spot where the work was to be done. Antonio says that in spite of the rum his own knees shook together, and the priest stumbled over his Latin. For when they were yet a few yards from the mound the flickering light of the lantern fell upon Angelo’s white face, unconscious as if in sleep, and on his upturned throat, over which a very thin red line of blood trickled down into his collar; and the flickering light of the lantern played upon another face that looked up from the feast, upon two deep, dead eyes that saw in spite of death — upon parted lips, redder than life itself — upon two gleaming teeth on which glistened a rosy drop. Then the priest, good old man, shut his eyes tight and showered holy water before him, and his cracked voice rose almost to a scream; and then Antonio, who is no coward after all, raised his pick n one hand and the lantern in the other, as he sprang forward, not knowing what the end should be; and then he swears that he heard a woman’s cry, and the Thing was gone, and Angelo lay alone on the mound unconscious, with the red line on his throat and the beads of deathly sweat on his cold forehead. They lifted him, half-dead as he was, and laid him on the ground close by; then Antonio went to work, and the priest helped him, thought he was old and could not do much; and they dug deep, and at last Antonio, standing in the grave, stooped down with his lantern to see what he might see.
His hair used to be dark brown, with grizzled streaks about the temples; in less than a month from that day he was as grey as a badger. He was a miner when he was young, and most of these fellows have seen ugly sights now and then, when accidents have happened, but he had never seen what he saw that night — that Thing which is neither alive nor dead, that Thing that will abide neither above ground nor in the grave. Antonio had brought something with him which the priest had not noticed — a sharp stake shaped from a piece of tough old driftwood. He had it with him now, and he had his heavy pick, and he had taken the lantern down into the grave. I don’t think any power on earth could make him speak of what happened then, and the old priest was too frightened to look in. He says he heard Antonio breathing like a wild beast, and moving as if he were fighting with something almost as strong as himself; and he heard an evil sound also, with blows, as of something violently driven through flesh and bone; and then, the most awful sound of all — a woman’s shriek, the unearthly scream of a woman neither dead nor alive, but buried deep for many days. And he, the poor old priest, could only rock himself as he knelt there in the sand, crying aloud his prayers and exorcisms to drown these dreadful sounds. Then suddenly a small iron-bound chest was thrown up and rolled over against the old man’s knee, and in a moment more Antonio was beside him, his face as white as tallow in the flickering light of the lantern, shoveling the sand and pebbles into the grave with furious haste, and looking over the edge till the pit was half full; and the priest said that there was much fresh blood on Antonio’s hands and on his clothes.
I had come to the end of my story. Holger finished his wine and leaned back in his chair.
“So Angelo got his own again.” he said. “Did he marry the prim and plump young person to whom he had been betrothed?”
“No; he had been badly frightened. He went to South America, and has not been heard of since.”
“And that poor thing’s body is there still, I suppose,” said Holger. “Is it quite dead yet, I wonder?”
I wonder, too. But whether it be dead or alive, I should hardly care to see it, even in broad daylight. Antonio is as grey as a badger, and he has never been quite the same man since that night.
What really happened around the Pollingsried Chapel, and its supposed plague cemetery? Is there really a curse around the area? As far as the ringing of the bells can be heard?
Searching for its name, the utburd ghost from Norwegian folklore haunts the forests, waters and houses its parents left them to die. For the most part, they remained in folk tales, but sometimes, the stories about the dead children got real life consequences.
Perhaps one of the most well known figures from Irish mythology is the Banshee, the omen of death, wailing as death comes to a house. But where does she come from? And what does she want from the dead?
Before meeting a vampire in Transylvania, a short story places Jonathan Harket facing the undead outside of Munich. Could it have a connection to the village that according to legend, vanished suddenly in the middle ages.
One of the dark entities on the emerald island, there is the Death Coach who comes to collect the souls of the dead. Pulled by headless horses, the Cóiste Bodhar stops at nothing before its mission is complete, and misfortune happens upon those getting in its way.
In 1687, the ghost of a murdered child started to testify against its mother in northern Norway and people took it seriously. Today, the Utburd of Skåvoll or the Nille-case is remembered as the ghost story that condemned a woman to her death.
Have a look at some of the most haunted places in Dublin, from the mysteries of the Hellfire Club, churches where you can supposedly summon the devil and the dead lingering in the dusty libraries and colleges.
After strange knocking and poltergeist activity made the people at Erstad Farm believe it was haunted. And when they asked the ghost what it wanted, it unraveled the lives of more than one person forever.
Was there an iberian vampire before the European vampire panic in Eastern Europe? Who was really Conde Estruch, the vampire of Catalonia, and what happened to the witches of Llers Castle the count was said to use as his lair.
Join a haunted pub crawl through Dublin’s ancient streets for ghosts and a pint of Guinness. From plotting revolutionaries to somber writers, these pubs and bars are said to be a place where some of the patrons have been lingering for a long time.
In 1852, the alleged psychic Erika Larsdatter Bogen, arrived at Børholmen, a small island in western Norway. She claimed that she had found the ghost and corpse of the dead child, and she named the mother who allegedly buried it. But what was the truth?
The Black sand and even darker history made Dumas Beach get a haunted reputation. People claim to have heard ghostly voices amid the waves crashing in as well as shadowy figures leaving no footprints in the sand.
Facing the Arabian Sea, Dumas Beach, known as one of the most haunted destinations in India, has captured the imagination of countless thrill-seekers and paranormal enthusiasts around 20 km from Surat in Gujarat.
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From eerie whisperings to unexplained footsteps, the popular beach has been the site of numerous unexplained occurrences that have left visitors both fascinated and terrified after visiting. But what exactly is the history behind its haunted rumors?
A Place for Hindu Burials
According to local legends, Dumas Beach was once a burial ground for Hindus, which was later taken over by the British to build a beach resort. This is according to folklore though and we don’t really know if there actually was a burial ground here, although it’s nor unlikely.
The most common practice in Hindu burial tradition is cremation, as Hindus believe that it helps release the soul from the cycle of reincarnation. The deceased is typically wrapped in white cloth and brought to the cremation ground on a simple wooden stretcher. Before cremation, family members often perform rituals such as offering prayers, placing flowers, and lighting incense. The eldest son or another male relative usually lights the funeral pyre, symbolizing the release of the soul.
After cremation, the ashes are collected and either scattered in a sacred river, such as the Ganges, or preserved in an urn for immersion during specific religious ceremonies. Different regions and communities may have variations in these rituals, but the underlying principles of honoring the deceased and facilitating their spiritual journey remain consistent.
The Legend of Dumas Beach
It is believed that the souls of the people buried or cremated here still roam the beach, making it one of the most haunted places in India. It is said that the black sand on the beach comes from the ashes of all the people that got burned.
The locals also believe that the beach is cursed, and anyone who goes there after dark is sure to encounter some paranormal activity. It is said that tourists that didn’t know about it, and locals that didn’t care went missing, some even turned up dead.
Apart from the burial ground, there is also a cremation ground nearby, which adds to the eerie atmosphere of the place. The sound of the waves crashing against the shore and the rustling of the trees in the wind create an eerie ambiance that is perfect for ghostly encounters.
Haunted Experiences at Dumas Beach
Visitors to Dumas Beach have reported a variety of spooky experiences, including unexplained whisperings, footsteps, and even apparitions that turn up in the corner of their eyes as well as in their photographs. Even dogs are said to behave strangely when they come here
Dumas Beach: Sunset at Dumas Beach with its black sand that people think may be haunted. //Source: Wiki
Many people have reported feeling a strange presence around them, as if they are being watched by someone or something. Some have even claimed to see the ghostly figures of men and women walking along the beach at night or moving white figures and orbs.
Mostly it is tales of weird sounds from the beach that gets people scared. Apparently it sounds like someone laughing or crying as it is difficult to make out.
The Haunted Black Beach
Dumas Beach may be one of the most haunted destinations in India, but it is also a beautiful and fascinating place to visit. Whether you are a paranormal enthusiast or just looking for an adventure, Dumas Beach is sure to leave a lasting impression on you. So pack your bags, grab your camera, and get ready to experience the supernatural for yourself at Dumas Beach. But remember, always take safety precautions and respect the spirits that haunt this mysterious location.
It is said that a mother carrying her child is haunting the NH-79 close to Dudu in Rajasthan. People tell about seeing the ghosts of them, still trying to escape their fate.
Rajasthan’s highways are known for their picturesque landscapes and historical significance, but one stretch of road near Dudu Village on NH-79 has gained notoriety for much darker reasons.
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This section of the Ajmer-Udaipur highway, often referred to as the “road that asks for blood,” is considered one of the most haunted places in the region. The spine-chilling tales emerging from Dudu Village and its surroundings have left many travelers wary of this seemingly cursed highway.
A Dark History of Child Marriages
The haunting reputation of NH-79 near Dudu Village, or rather a district, is rooted in a tragic story from the past. In a time when child marriages were rampant in India, a horrifying incident occurred that would forever mark this area with a sense of dread. That is what the stories say, “from when it was common”, as if it is a thing of the past. Sadly, although there are many laws to protect against it today, these things still happen.
In the Dudu and Kishangarh blocks in Rajasthan, approximately every year, more than 150 child marriage cases can be found. 27% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday and 7% are married before the age of 15.
The Mother and the Child Trying to Escape
Children as young as babies are all victims of child marriages in the world, and this is one of the stories about it.
A five-day-old infant girl was to be married off to a three-year-old boy. The infant’s mother, vehemently opposed to this inhumane tradition, decided to flee in a desperate bid to save her daughter from her sealed fate.
In her frantic escape, the mother ran towards the highway seeking help. Tragically, her attempt to secure freedom ended in disaster when both she and her baby were struck and killed by a vehicle. Their untimely and brutal deaths are said to be the origin of the ghostly legends that now haunt NH-79.
The Ghost Guiding them Away from Dudu
The eerie tales of NH-79 came to life for three friends who were driving down the Ajmer-Udaipur highway one dark night. As they neared Dudu Village, they encountered an apparition that would leave them deeply unsettled. The ghost of a woman, carrying a baby in her arms, appeared and inexplicably entered their car, taking a seat in the back.
The spectral figure then began to guide them out of the village, her presence undeniable and terrifying. The friends, initially dismissing the experience as a nightmare, quickly realized the gravity of the situation as the haunting encounter continued for over fifteen minutes.
The chilling ordeal left a lasting impression, a tale they would recount with a shiver for years to come. But then again, the ghost came to help them out of the place. Perhaps in some ways they helped her too?
The Highway Numberings
Many sources claim that the story is set on the NH-79 Highway. This is not possible though as Dudu is a district in Rajasthan, and the highway is entirely in Tamil Nadu, a completely different state.
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It is also said to be the Ajmer-Udaipur route, which is a part of NH-58 and you have to take the NH-48 to get to Dudu on the way to Jaipur. Although the old numbering looks like it was NH-79 that went from Ghat Bilod to Ajmer before it changed in 2010.
In that case, the ghost story had to happen before 2010 although the stories online seems to have appeared some years later, at least in English.
At the Central Ridge in Delhi, you’ll find Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal, a haunted old hunting lodge said to be haunted. But who of the many people that have been connected to this Mahal is still lingering?
In the bustling neighborhood of Karol Bagh in Delhi lies a monument that carries with it a legend away from the busy market. Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal (भूली भटियारी का महल), a ruined fort palace in the dense forest with a haunting past.
The Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal has mostly been left on its own devices inside of the thick forest, falling into disrepair over time. Although some restorations have been done to it, it seems like it will never be able to shake its haunted past off it.
History and Legend of Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal
Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal, also known as Bhuli Bhatiyara Palace, was built during the Tughlaq dynasty in the 14th century by Emperor Firoz Shah Tughlaq. It is said this fort was built as a hunting lodge, most likely in 1354.
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After the Tughlaq dynasty The Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal was abandoned and became the place for a Sufi saint named Bu Ali Bakhtiyari. The name of the building is said to be a distorted version of the Sufi’s name, or even one of the female caretakers called Bu-Ali Bhatti. It is also said she was a tribal woman from Rajasthan that got lost and ended up here.
The Forgotten Castle: Today The Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal is overgrown and mostly forgotten about by the world outside. No one is allowed near it after nightfall as it is said that is when the ghosts comes out to haunt the place. //Source: Mohammedqqasim/Wikimedia
The Queen Haunting the Grounds
Perhaps it is the woman called Bu Ali Bakhtiyari or the hermit Sufi that are today haunting the grounds. Perhaps it is something to the legend about the ancient queen haunting the place according to one of the legends that has grown from the place.
One of the enduring legends told about The Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Maha is about a queen that lived in the hunting lodge and died there around 600 years ago. She apparently liked the palace so much she made it her residence.
The Ghost of the Queen: According to legend, there is a queen haunting the ruins of the Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal and the surrounding forest at night. Who could she be, and is there any truths to the legends?
Another version of the legend tells a more sinister story. Once the king saw the queen in love with someone else and imprisoned the queen in the forest and palace where she ended her days. Some local residents say that the queen had committed suicide in this fort out of a desire to take revenge from the king and if you happen to meet her in the forest,you might become another victim for the queens revenge as well.
No name has been given to this particular legend though, and we have no proof that a queen set foot in this place at all.
According to this enduring haunted story though it is said that after her death, she has been seen haunting the place at night. But perhaps she isn’t alone in haunting the Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal?
Over the years, there have been several reports of ghostly encounters and haunting stories associated with Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal. Visitors have reported feeling a sense of unease as soon as they enter the palace.
Many have claimed to have heard strange noises, footsteps, and whispers coming from the corridors. Some visitors have even reported feeling a cold breeze or a sudden drop in temperature, despite the hot and humid weather outside.
It is said that no one of the guards wants to stay at the the Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal or in the surrounding woods after dark and many are said to have quit after only a matter of days. There is supposedly a note written at the entrance warning people to come after dark. The Delhi Police is also said to patrol the area frequently and try to deter people from entering.
The Mystery of the White Wall
There is also a strange story about some people that claimed that they saw a huge white wall in the woods next to the building. This must have been many years ago since they didn’t use a digital camera. They took a picture of it with an analog though, but when they developed the picture, there was no wall there.
When they went back to the place they claimed to have seen the wall, they found no trace of it, and what it could have been.
The Mystery of Bhuli Bhatiyari Ka Mahal
Where the legends of it being haunted comes from is difficult to pinpoint. Some claim that there have always been stories about it. According to one of the guards that have been there for 34 years, people started talking about it being haunted first after people started posting about it on the internet.
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As to why we can only speculate. Perhaps to attract tourists, perhaps to make an overgrown ruin a little bit more interesting? Or perhaps there is something lurking between the trees or just behind the gate of the old Mahal?
One of the huge Portuguese families branched out into the colonies and The Braganza House is the testament to it, now thought to be haunted. Could it have something to do with the family curse that once plagued The Braganza Family?
The Braganza House stands as a magnificent yet eerie relic of the past in Chandor Village in Goa, India. This grand mansion close to the church square in Chandor, built over 350 to 500 years ago, is a testament to the opulence and grandeur of Portuguese colonial architecture with its Italian marble antique chandelier from Europe and carved rodewood furniture.
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Behind its ornate facades, private library and family portraits lies a history steeped in tragedy, mystery, and according to some coming out of the manor house, paranormal activity, making it one of the most haunted places in Goa.
Braganza House: One of the two parts of the house, the Menezes Braganza House exterior. It used to belong to one of the most powerful Portuguese families, and is a silent witness to the Portuguese rule in Goa. // Source: Wikimedia
A Glimpse into History
The Braganza House, a sprawling mansion divided into two wings with the family divided into two different branches, was constructed by the affluent Braganza family, who were prominent Portuguese nobles, built centuries ago when Goa was under Portuguese rule.
The mansion’s East Wing is owned by the descendants of the Pereira-Braganza family, while the West Wing belongs to the Menezes-Braganza family. The house is renowned for its stunning collection of antiques, vintage furniture, and artifacts that reflect the family’s wealth and status during the Portuguese era.
The mansion’s history is intertwined with tales of power, betrayal, and sorrow. Among the most notable events is the tragic story of a young woman from the Braganza family who is said to have committed suicide in one of the mansion’s opulent rooms.
There are not many details about who she was and as of why. Some local gossip claims that she was the daughter of the master of the house and fell in love with a servant, a relationship her father didn’t accept. He then killed her lover when they tried to elope and she took her own life right after.
Her untimely death has become the cornerstone of the haunted reputation that envelops the Braganza House. Her spirit is said to linger in the room where she died, a place now shrouded in an unsettling aura.
The Ghostly Woman of the Braganza House
Today the Archaeological Survey of India has opened the house to visitors as a museum. Visitors and locals alike have reported numerous eerie encounters and unexplained phenomena within the Braganza House. Most often, a descendant are said to lead the tours through the house.
Many who have ventured into the room recount feeling an inexplicable sense of sadness and despair. Some have reported seeing the ghostly figure of a woman dressed in traditional Portuguese attire, her face pale and mournful, drifting through the corridors of the mansion.
The flickering of candles, sudden drops in temperature, and the sound of soft sobbing are just a few of the paranormal activities attributed to her restless spirit.
To be noted, although there are few details and very few resources stating who the woman was, for what reason, or even which room are now haunted, it is worth noting the name, Braganza. If it weren’t for the family owning the house, one could almost write off the history as just rumors, but according to myth, the Braganza Family has said to be cursed for centuries.
The Curse of the Braganza Family
King John IV of Portugal: The first Braganza to reign and be cursed.
Adding to the house’s haunted legacy is the alleged curse that is said to plague the House of Braganza. The Braganza family, once a symbol of nobility and power and the rulers of Portugal as well as their colonies for centuries, is believed to be cursed due to a series of unfortunate events that have befallen its members over the centuries.
The curse is said to have originated during the reign of John IV of Portugal in the 17th century. Allegedly he kicked a Franciscan friar who was begging for alms. Because of this offense, the friar cast a curse over his family, saying that no first-born male in his family would live to sit on the throne.
This act doomed the family’s lineage to a cycle of misfortune and sorrow and since then, without three exceptions all first-born boys in the family died before taking the crown.
House of Braganza in Goa
So could this curse have something to do with the haunted rumors that seems to linger as a whisper outside of the main conversation. Although, the curse and its female ghostly counterpart seems unlikely.
King John VI seemed adamant about ending the curse, and annually visited Franciscan monasteries in both Portugal and Brazil. But it is said that it first ended with the reign of Braganzas ending at the start of the 1900s.
While the Braganza House stands as a beautiful relic of a bygone era, it also serves as a haunting reminder of the tragedies and mysteries that continue to captivate and terrify those who dare to enter its shadowy confines.
After a horrible plane crash at Los Rodeos Airport on Tenerife in the 70s, over 500 lives were lost in the deadly collision between two planes on the runway. It is believed that the lost souls from that day are still haunting the airport, showing up before takeoffs.
When we think of haunted places, airports are not usually the first locations that come to mind. However, Los Rodeos Airport has gained a notorious reputation as one of the most haunted airports in the world after a tragic accident in the 70s.
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With its unsettling atmosphere and chilling tales of supernatural occurrences, The Tenerife North–Ciudad de La Laguna Airport, as it is known as today, has become a magnet for paranormal enthusiasts and thrill-seekers alike.
The Tragic History of Los Rodeos Airport
To understand the haunted reputation of Los Rodeos Airport, we must delve into its tragic history. One event, in particular, stands out as the catalyst for the ghostly encounters that plague the terminal to this day – the Tenerife airport disaster of 1977.
On that fateful day, March 27th a bomb was set off by the Canary Islands Independence Movement at Gran Canaria Airport not far from Tenerife. This caused too many flights to be diverted to Los Rodeos. It was also a thick fog that clouded the vision of an already very chaotic situation. KLM Flight 4805 initiated its takeoff run while Pan Am Flight 1736 was still on the runway. The two airplanes collided on the runway, resulting in the deadliest aviation accidents in history.
The Tragic Accident: The Tenerife Airport accident was the most deadliest in history and left only a few survivors, and according to the stories, many ghosts.
The collision claimed the lives of at least 583 people, leaving behind a trail of sorrow and despair. Only 61 people survived that day as they were seated in the front section of the aircraft. It is said that the spirits of those who perished in the disaster still linger within the airport, unable to find peace.
Legends and Myths Surrounding the Haunted Terminal
The reports of ghostly encounters at Los Rodeos Airport are not limited to legends and myths. Many individuals, including airport staff, passengers, and paranormal investigators, have claimed to experience unexplained phenomena within the terminal’s walls. These encounters range from hearing disembodied voices and footsteps to witnessing apparitions and inexplicable temperature drops.
MemorialGhosts: The myths of seeing strange silhouettes and people that aren’t really there spread on the airport. People think that it must be from the victims from the Tenerife Airport Catastrophe.
Over the years, numerous legends and myths have emerged surrounding the haunted terminal of Los Rodeos Airport. One of the most chilling tales is that of a young girl who went missing within the airport’s premises. Despite extensive searches, her body was never found. Since then, there have been multiple reports of a ghostly figure resembling a young girl roaming the corridors of the terminal, her presence sending shivers down the spines of those who encounter her.
Another legend revolves around the military barracks at Garita Sur, located near the airport. It is believed that soldiers stationed there have witnessed ghostly apparitions of a young girl wandering alone and unexplained phenomena.
Confused Pilots Seeing things on the Runway
Several pilots that have taken the flights to and from this airport have claimed that more than one of the souls from the crash is still haunting the airport. One pilot said that a lot of the spirits would appear and according to him, he claimed that he had delayed at least two takeoffs because he thought he saw figures on the runway, waving their hands as if warning of something dangerous ahead.
Pilot’s Tell: In the early morning hours or in the late darkness, several pilots tells about seeing things that aren’t really there on the runway on this airport.
Los Rodeos Airport’s haunted history continues to captivate the imagination of those who dare to explore its eerie corridors. The tragic events of the past have left an indelible mark on the terminal, manifesting in ghostly encounters that defy rational explanation. Whether you are a believer in the supernatural or a skeptic, a visit to Los Rodeos Airport is sure to leave an impression that will linger long after you depart.
A pirate ship once got lost in the mangroves and swamps of the Everglades in Florida. They were cursed by the crew they made to walk the plank and are now The Ghost Ship of the Everglades are doomed to sail the murky waters forever.
Everglades National Park, with its mysterious labyrinth of bald cypress trees, shadowy hammock forests, and winding rivers, takes on an eerie ambiance after the sun dips below the horizon.
Centuries ago, pirates plagued the seas from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean. They attacked merchant ships to steal the goods and it could be a very lucrative business. The pirates also sometimes ended up on the Florida coastline as well.
Read More: Check out all of our ghost stories from USA
In 1901 one of these stories were printed in the national newspaper, the New York Daily People and the Chicago Tribune, about a 300 year old curse about a pirate ghost ship cursed to sail the narrow rivers in the Everglades forever.
The Ghost Ship of the Everglades: It is said that a pirate ship was cursed to sail the narrow Everglades for eternity after they made the crew of an entire ship walk the plank.
The Ghost Pirate Ship
The story goes that a merchant vessel was sailing through the waters near Cape Florida in the 1700s, just beyond the bounds of Miami. Pirate lore in Florida are initially from the Florida Key area after Spanish vessels came and many pirates took hold around St. Augustine. But did they ever sail to the swampy waters of the Everglades?
The Ghost Ship of the Everglades: The story of the cursed pirate ships made the news in 1901. Read the full story here.
According to this story, seizing the opportunity for a lucrative plunder, the pirate ship set forth in pursuit. However, the resourceful crew aboard the merchant ship, well-acquainted with the treacherous waters, hatched a plan to elude their pursuers by navigating through the intricate channels of the Everglades.
The pirate ship finally caught up with the merchant ship in the end though and looted the goods of the merchant ship. The pirate captain was furious about how long it took to chase them, that he made the whole crew walk the plank and made the skipper’s wife watch before she herself had to walk the plank and end up in the boggy water.
The wife prayed to God to curse the pirates, and he did and pushed them deep into the Everglades, making them haunt the Everglades for all eternity, a place they would never escape from.
The tidal wave brought the pirates stuck in the swamp, making them die of starvation and fever one by one.
The Ghost Ship of the Everglades of Cursed Pirates
The Ghost Ship of the Everglades has been haunting Florida’s south coast since the days of pirating marauders. The ship’s phantom crew is cursed to sail the seas for all eternity, after giving chase to a merchant ship and getting lost in the twisting channels of the Everglades’ swamp lands.
According to the story in 1901, the Natives that stayed in the wetland as well as hunters spending much time navigating the same rivers, came back, telling stories about having seen the The Ghost Ship of the Everglades with its rotting masts and hill. The crew are now all skeletons, still trying to find their way out of the Everglades.
Was it ever a pirate ship sailing the fresh water sea of the Everglades? Although we don’t have much documentation, we have a long tradition of tales instead. And perhaps, the dim lights of the skeleton crew working ever since the golden age of piracy speaks for itself as it glides through the river of mangroves and alligators.
“Good Lady Ducayne” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, published in 1896, is a vampire tale that explores the themes of aging, exploitation, and the quest for eternal youth. The story follows the young and impoverished Bella Rolleston, who becomes the companion to the elderly and enigmatic Lady Ducayne. As Bella becomes increasingly entangled in Lady Ducayne’s web, she discovers the horrifying truth behind her employer’s unnaturally prolonged life—Lady Ducayne survives by feeding on the blood of the young. Braddon’s narrative skillfully blends elements of Gothic horror with social commentary, shedding light on the darker aspects of Victorian society while also delving into the timeless allure and dangers of immortality.
Chapter I
Bella Rolleston had made up her mind that her only chance of earning her bread and helping her mother to an occasional crust was by going out into the great unknown world as companion to a lady. She was willing to go to any lady rich enough to pay her a salary and so eccentric as to wish for a hired companion. Five shillings told off reluctantly from one of those sovereigns which were so rare with the mother and daughter, and which melted away so quickly, five solid shillings, had been handed to a smartly-dressed lady in an office in Harbeck Street, W., in the hope that this very Superior Person would find a situation and a salary for Miss Rolleston.
The Superior Person glanced at the two half-crowns as they lay on the table where Bella’s hand had placed them, to make sure they were neither of them forms, before she wrote a description of Bella’s qualifications and requirements in a formidable-looking ledger.
‘Age?’ she asked curtly.
‘Eighteen, last July.’
‘Any accomplishments?’
‘No; I am not at all accomplished. If I were I should want to be a governess–a companion seems the lowest stage.’
‘We have some highly accomplished ladies on our books as companions, or chaperon companions.’
‘Oh, I know!’ babbled Bella, loquacious in her youthful candour. ‘But that is quite a different thing. Mother hasn’t been able to afford a piano since I was twelve years old, so I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to play. And I have had to help mother with her needlework, so there hasn’t been much time to study.’
‘Please don’t waste time upon explaining what you can’t do, but kindly tell me anything you can do,’ said the Superior Person, crushingly, with her pen poised between delicate fingers waiting to write. ‘Can you read aloud for two or three hours at a stretch? Are you active and handy, an early riser, a good walker, sweet tempered, and obliging?’
‘I can say yes to all those questions except about the sweetness. I think I have a pretty good temper, and I should be anxious to oblige anybody who paid for my services. I should want them to feel that I was really earning my salary.’
‘The kind of ladies who come to me would not care for a talkative companion,’ said the Person, severely, having finished writing in her book. ‘My connection lies chiefly among the aristocracy, and in that class considerable deference is expected.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Bella; ‘but it’s quite different when I’m talking to you. I want to tell you all about myself once and for ever.’
‘I am glad it is to be only once!’ said the Person, with the edges of her lips.
The Person was of uncertain age, tightly laced in a black silk gown. She had a powdery complexion and a handsome clump of somebody else’s hair on the top of her head. It may be that Bella’s girlish freshness and vivacity had an irritating effect upon nerves weakened by an eight hours day in that over-heated second floor in Harbeck Street. To Bella the official apartment, with its Brussels carpet, velvet curtains and velvet chairs, and French clock, ticking loud on the marble chimney-piece, suggested the luxury of a palace, as compared with another second floor in Walworth where Mrs Rolleston and her daughter had managed to exist for the last six years.
‘Do you think you have anything on your books that would suit me?’ faltered Bella, after a pause.
‘Oh, dear, no; I have nothing in view at present,’ answered the Person, who had swept Bella’s half-crowns into a drawer, absentmindedly, with the tips of her fingers. ‘You see, you are so very unformed–so much too young to be companion to a lady of position. It is a pity you have not enough education for a nursery governess; that would be more in your line.’
‘And do you think it will be very long before you can get me a situation?’ asked Bella, doubtfully.
‘I really cannot say. Have you any particular reason for being so impatient–not a love affair, I hope?’
‘A love affair!’ cried Bella, with flaming cheeks. ‘What utter nonsense. I want a situation because mother is poor, and I hate being a burden to her. I want a salary that I can share with her.’
‘There won’t be much margin for sharing in the salary you are likely to get at your age–and with your–very–unformed manners,’ said the Person, who found Bella’s peony cheeks, bright eyes, and unbridled vivacity more and more oppressive.
‘Perhaps if you’d be kind enough to give me back the fee I could take it to an agency where the connection isn’t quite so aristocratic,’ said Bella, who–as she told her mother in her recital of the interview–was determined not to be sat upon.
‘You will find no agency that can do more for you than mine,’ replied the Person, whose harpy fingers never relinquished coin. ‘You will have to wait for your opportunity. Yours is an exceptional case: but I will bear you in mind, and if anything suitable offers I will write to you. I cannot say more than that.’
The half-contemptuous bend of the stately head, weighted with borrowed hair, indicated the end of the interview. Bella went back to Walworth–tramped sturdily every inch of the way in the September afternoon–and ‘took off’ the Superior Person for the amusement of her mother and the landlady, who lingered in the shabby litle sitting–room after bringing in the tea-tray, to applaud Miss Rolleston’s ‘taking off’.
‘Dear, dear, what a mimic she is!’ said the landlady. ‘You ought to have let her go on the stage, mum. She might have made her fortune as a hactress.’
Chapter II
Bella waited and hoped, and listened for the postman’s knocks which brought such store of letters for the parlours and the first floor, and so few for that humble second floor, where mother and daughter sat sewing with hand and with wheel and treadle, for the greater part of the day.
Mrs Rolleston was a lady by birth and education; but it had been her bad fortune to marry a scoundrel; for the last half–dozen years she had been that worst of widows, a wife whose husband had deserted her. Happily, she was courageous, industrious, and a clever needle-woman; and she had been able just to earn a living for herself and her only child, by making mantles and cloaks for a West-end house. It was not a luxurious living. Cheap lodgings in a shabby street off the Walworth Road, scanty dinners, homely food, well-worn raiment, had been the portion of mother and daughter; but they loved each other so dearly, and Nature had made them both so light-hearted, that they had contrived somehow to be happy..But now this idea of going out into the world as companion to some fine lady had rooted itself into Bella’s mind, and although she idolized her mother, and although the parting of mother and daughter must needs tear two loving hearts into shreds, the girl longed for enterprise and change and excitement, as the pages of old longed to be knights, and to start for the Holy Land to break a lance with the infidel.
She grew tired of racing downstairs every time the postman knocked, only to be told ‘nothing for you, miss,’ by the smudgy-faced drudge who picked up the letters from the passage floor.
‘Nothing for you, miss,’ grinned the lodging-house drudge, till at last Bella took heart of grace and walked up to Harbeck Street, and asked the Superior Person how it was that no situation had been found for her.
‘You are too young,’ said the Person, ‘and you want a salary.’
‘Of course I do,’ answered Bella; ‘don’t other people want salaries?’
‘Young ladies of your age generally want a comfortable home.
‘I don’t,’ snapped Bella; ‘I want to help mother.’
‘You can call again this day week,’ said the Person; ‘or, if I hear of anything in the meantime, I will write to you.
No letter came from the Person, and in exactly a week Bella put on her neatest hat, the one that had been seldomest caught in the rain, and trudged off to Harbeck Street.
It was a dull October afternoon, and there was a greyness in the air which might turn to fog before night. The Walworth Road shops gleamed brightly through that grey atmosphere, and though to a young lady reared in Mayfair or Belgravia such shop-windows would have been unworthy of a glance, they were a snare and temptation for Bella. There were so many things that she longed for, and would never be able to buy.
Harbeck Street is apt to be empty at this dead season of the year, a long, long street, an endless perspective of eminently respectable houses. The Person’s office was at the further end, and Bella looked down that long, grey vista almost despairingly, more tired than usual with the trudge from Walworth. As she looked, a carriage passed her, an old-fashioned, yellow chariot, on cee springs, drawn by a pair of high grey horses, with the stateliest of coachmen driving them, and a tall footman sitting by his side.
‘It looks like the fairy god-mother’s coach,’ thought Bella. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if it began by being a pumpkin.’
It was a surprise when she reached the Person’s door to find the yellow chariot standing before it, and the tall footman waiting near the doorstep. She was almost afraid to go in and meet the owner of that splendid carriage. She had caught only a glimpse of its occupant as the chariot rolled by, a plumed bonnet, a patch of ermine.
The Person’s smart page ushered her upstairs and knocked at the official door. ‘Miss Rolleston,’ he announced, apologetically, while Bella waited outside.
‘Show her in,’ said the Person, quickly; and then Bella heard her murmuring something in a low voice to her client.
Bella went in fresh, blooming, a living image of youth and hope, and before she looked at the Person her gaze was riveted by the owner of the chariot.
Never had she seen anyone as old as the old lady sitting by the Person’s fire: a little old figure, wrapped from chin to feet in an ermine mantle; a withered, old face under a plumed bonnet–a face so wasted by age that it seemed only a pair of eyes and a peaked chin. The nose was peaked, too, but between the sharply pointed chin and the great, shining eyes, the small, aquiline nose was hardly visible..’This is Miss Rolleston, Lady Ducayne.’
Claw-like fingers, flashing with jewels, lifted a double eyeglass to Lady Ducayne’s shining black eyes, and through the glasses Bella saw those unnaturally bright eyes magnified to a gigantic size, and glaring at her awfully.
‘Miss Torpinter has told me all about you,’ said the old voice that belonged to the eyes. ‘Have you good health? Are you strong and active, able to eat well, sleep well, walk well, able to enjoy all that there is good in life?’
‘I have never known what it is to be ill, or idle,’ answered Bella.
‘Then I think you will do for me.’
‘Of course, in the event of references being perfectly satisfactory,’ put in the Person.
‘I don’t want references. The young woman looks frank and innocent. I’ll take her on trust.’
‘So like you, dear Lady Ducayne,’ murmured Miss Torpinter.
‘I want a strong young woman whose health will give me no trouble.’
‘You have been so unfortunate in that respect,’ cooed the Person, whose voice and manner were subdued to a melting sweetness by the old woman’s presence.
‘Yes, I’ve been rather unlucky,’ grunted Lady Ducayne.
‘But I am sure Miss Rolleston will not disappoint you, though certainly after your unpleasant experience with Miss Tomson, who looked the picture of health–and Miss Blandy, who said she had never seen a doctor since she was vaccinated–‘
‘Lies, no doubt,’ muttered Lady Ducayne, and then turning to Bella, she asked, curtly, ‘You don’t mind spending the winter in Italy, I suppose?’
In Italy! The very word was magical. Bella’s fair young face flushed crimson.
‘It has been the dream of my life to see Italy,’ she gasped.
From Walworth to Italy! How far, how impossible such a journey had seemed to that romantic dreamer.
‘Well, your dream will be realized. Get yourself ready to leave Charing Cross by the train deluxe this day week at eleven. Be sure you are at the station a quarter before the hour. My people will look after you and your luggage.’
Lady Ducayne rose from her chair, assisted by her crutch-stick, and Miss Torpinter escorted her to the door.
‘And with regard to salary?’ questioned the Person on the way.
‘Salary, oh, the same as usual–and if the young woman wants a quarter’s pay in advance you can write to me for a cheque,’ Lady Ducayne answered, carelessly.
Miss Torpinter went all the way downstairs with her client, and waited to see her seated in the yellow chariot. When she came upstairs again she was slightly out of breath, and she had resumed that superior manner which Bella had found so crushing.
‘You may think yourself uncommonly lucky, Miss Rolleston,’ she said. ‘I have dozens of young ladies on my books whom I might have recommended for this situation–but I remembered having told you to call this afternoon–and I thought I would give you a chance.
Old Lady Ducayne is one of the best people on my books. She gives her companion a hundred a year, and pays all travelling expenses. You will live in the lap of luxury.’
‘A hundred a year! How too lovely! Shall I have to dress very grandly? Does Lady Ducayne keep much company?’
‘At her age! No, she lives in seclusion–in her own apartments–her French maid, her footman, her medical attendant, her courier.’
‘Why did those other companions leave her?’ asked Bella..’Their health broke down!’
‘Poor things, and so they had to leave?’
‘Yes, they had to leave. I suppose you would like a quarter’s salary in advance?’
‘Oh, yes, please. I shall have things to buy.’
‘Very well, I will write for Lady Ducayne’s cheque, and I will send you the balance–after deducting my commission for the year.’
‘To be sure, I had forgotten the commission.’
‘You don’t suppose I keep this office for pleasure.’
‘Of course not,’ murmured Bella, remembering the five shillings entrance fee; but nobody could expect a hundred a year and a winter in Italy for five shillings.
Chapter III
‘From Miss Rolleston, at Cap Ferrino, to Mrs Rolleston, in Beresford Street, Walworth.
‘How I wish you could see this place, dearest; the blue sky, the olive woods, the orange and lemon orchards between the cliffs and the sea–sheltering in the hollow of the great hills–and with summer waves dancing up to the narrow ridge of pebbles and weeds which is the Italian idea of a beach! Oh, how I wish you could see it all, mother dear, and bask in this sunshine, that makes it so difficult to believe the date at the head of this paper. November! The air is like an English June-the sun is so hot that I can’t walk a few yards without an umbrella. And to think of you at Walworth while I am here! I could cry at the thought that perhaps you will never see this lovely coast, this wonderful sea, these summer flowers that bloom in winter. There is a hedge of pink geraniums under my window, mother–a thick, rank hedge, as if the flowers grew wild—and there are Dijon roses climbing over arches and palisades all along the terrace-a rose garden full of bloom in November! Just picture it all! You could never imagine the luxury of this hotel.
It is nearly new, and has been built and decorated regardless of expense. Our rooms are upholstered in pale blue satin, which shows up Lady Ducayne’s parchment complexion; but as she sits all day in a corner of the balcony basking in the sun, except when she is in her carriage, and all the evening in her armchair close to the fire, and never sees anyone but her own people, her complexion matters very little.
‘She has the handsomest suite of rooms in the hotel. My bedroom is inside hers, the sweetest room–all blue satin and white lace–white enamelled furniture, looking-glasses on every wall, till I know my pert little profile as I never knew it before. The room was really meant for Lady Ducayne’s dressing-room, but she ordered one of the blue satin couches to be arranged as a bed for me-the prettiest little bed, which I can wheel near the window on sunny mornings, as it is on castors and easily moved about. I feel as if Lady Ducayne were a funny old grandmother, who had suddenly appeared in my life, very, very rich, and very, very kind.
‘She is not at all exacting. I read aloud to her a good deal, and she dozes and nods while I read.
Sometimes I hear her moaning in her sleep–as if she had troublesome dreams. When she is tired of my reading she orders Francine, her maid, to read a French novel to her, and I hear her chuckle and groan now and then, as if she were more interested in those books than in Dickens or Scott. My French is not good enough to follow Francine, who reads very quickly. I have a great deal of liberty, for Lady Ducayne often tells me to run away and amuse myself; I roam about the hills for hours. Everything is so lovely. I lose myself in olive woods, always climbing up and up towards the pine woods above–and above the pines there are the snow mountains that just show their white peaks above the dark hills. Oh, you poor dear, how can I ever make you understand what this place is like–you, whose poor, tired eyes have only the opposite side of Beresford Street? Sometimes I go no farther than the terrace in front of the hotel, which is a favourite lounging-place with everybody. The gardens lie below, and the tennis courts where I sometimes play with a very nice girl, the only person in the hotel with whom I have made friends. She is a year older than I, and has come to Cap Ferrino with her brother, a doctor–or a medical student, who is going to be a doctor. He passed his M.B. exam at Edinburgh just before they left home, Lotta told me. He came to Italy entirely on his sister’s account. She had a troublesome chest attack last summer and was ordered to winter abroad. They are orphans, quite alone in the world, and so fond of each other. It is very nice for me to have such a friend as Lotta. She is so thoroughly respectable. I can’t help using that word, for some of the girls in this hotel go on in a way that I know you would shudder at. Lotta was brought up by an aunt, deep down in the country, and knows hardly anything about life. Her brother won’t allow her to read a novel, French or English, that he has not read and approved.
‘”He treats me like a child,” she told me, “but I don’t mind, for it’s nice to know somebody loves me, and cares about what I do, and even about my thoughts.”‘
‘Perhaps this is what makes some girls so eager to marry–the want of someone strong and brave and honest and true to care for them and order them about. I want no one, mother darling, for I have you, and you are all the world to me. No husband could ever come between us two. If I ever were to marry he would have only the second place in my heart. But I don’t suppose I ever shall marry, or even know what it is like to have an offer of marriage. No young man can afford to marry a penniless girl nowadays. Life is too expensive.’
‘Mr Stafford, Lotta’s brother, is very clever, and very kind. He thinks it is rather hard for me to have to live with such an old woman as Lady Ducayne, but then he does not know how poor we are-you and I–and what a wonderful life this seems to me in this lovely place. I feel a selfish wretch for enjoying all my luxuries, while you, who want them so much more than I, have none of them–hardly know what they are like–do you, dearest?–for my scamp of a father began to go to the dogs soon after you were married, and since then life has been all trouble and care and struggle for you.’
This letter was written when Bella had been less than a month at Cap Ferrino, before the novelty had worn off the landscape, and before the pleasure of luxurious surroundings had begun to cloy. She wrote to her mother every week, such long letters as girls who have lived in closest companionship with a mother alone can write; letters that are like a diary of heart and mind. She wrote gaily always; but when the new year began Mrs Rolleston thought she detected a note of melancholy under all those lively details about the place and the people.
‘My poor girl is getting homesick,’ she thought. ‘Her heart is in Beresford Street.’
It might be that she missed her new friend and companion, Lotta Stafford, who had gone with her brother for a little tour to Genoa and Spezzia, and as far as Pisa. They were to return before February; but in the meantime Bella might naturally feel very solitary among all those strangers, whose manners and doings she described so well.
The mother’s instinct had been true. Bella was not so happy as she had been in that first flush of wonder and delight which followed the change from Walworth to the Riviera. Somehow, she knew not how, lassitude had crept upon her. She no longer loved to climb the hills, no longer flourished her orange stick in sheer gladness of heart as her light feet skipped over the rough ground and the coarse grass on the mountain side. The odour of rosemary and thyme, the fresh breath of the sea, no longer filled her with rapture. She thought of Beresford Street and her mother’s face with a sick longing. They were so far–so far away! And then she thought of Lady Ducayne, sitting by the heaped-up olive logs in the over-heated salon–thought of that wizened-nut–cracker profile, and those gleaming eyes, with an invincible horror.
Visitors at the hotel had told her that the air of Cap Ferrino was relaxing–better suited to age than to youth, to sickness than to health. No doubt it was so. She was not so well as she had been at Walworth; but she told herself that she was suffering only from the pain of separation from the dear companion of her girlhood, the mother who had been nurse, sister, friend, flatterer, all things in this world to her. She had shed many tears over that parting, had spent many a melancholy hour on the marble terrace with yearning eyes looking westward, and with her heart’s desire a thousand miles away.
She was sitting in her favourite spot, an angle at the eastern end of the terrace, a quiet little nook sheltered by orange trees, when she heard a couple of Riviera habitués talking in the garden below. They were sitting on a bench against the terrace wall.
She had no idea of listening to their talk, till the sound of Lady Ducayne’s name attracted her, and then she listened without any thought of wrong-doing. They were talking no secrets–just casually discussing an hotel acquaintance.
They were two elderly people whom Bella only knew by sight. An English clergyman who had wintered abroad for half his lifetime; a stout, comfortable, well-to-do spinster, whose chronic bronchitis obliged her to migrate annually.
‘I have met her about Italy for the last ten years,’ said the lady; ‘but have never found out her real age.
‘I put her down at a hundred–not a year less,’ replied the parson. ‘Her reminiscences all go back to the Regency. She was evidently then in her zenith; and I have heard her say things that showed she was in Parisian society when the First Empire was at its best–before Josephine was divorced.’
‘She doesn’t talk much now.’
‘No; there’s not much life left in her. She is wise in keeping herself secluded. I only wonder that wicked old quack, her Italian doctor, didn’t finish her off years ago.’
‘I should think it must be the other way, and that he keeps her alive.’
‘My dear Miss Manders, do you think foreign quackery ever kept anybody alive?’
‘Well, there she is–and she never goes anywhere without him. He certainly has an unpleasant countenance.’
‘Unpleasant,’ echoed the parson, ‘I don’t believe the foul fiend himself can beat him in ugliness. I pity that poor young woman who has to live between old Lady Ducayne and Dr Parravicini.’
‘But the old lady is very good to her companions.’
‘No doubt. She is very free with her cash; the servants call her good Lady Ducayne. She is a withered old female Croesus, and knows she’ll never be able to get through her money, and doesn’t relish the idea of other people enjoying it when she’s in her coffin. People who live to be as old as she is become slavishly attached to life. I daresay she’s generous to those poor girls—but she can’t make them happy. They die in her service.’
‘Don’t say they, Mr Carton; I know that one poor girl died at Mentone last spring.’
‘Yes, and another poor girl died in Rome three years ago. I was there at the time. Good Lady Ducayne left her there in an English family. The girl had every comfort. The old woman was very liberal to her–but she died. I tell you, Miss Manders, it is not good for any young woman to live with two such horrors as Lady Ducayne and Parravicini..They talked of other things–but Bella hardly heard them. She sat motionless, and a cold wind seemed to come down upon her from the mountains and to creep up to her from the sea, till she shivered as she sat there in the sunshine, in the shelter of the orange trees in the midst of all that beauty and brightness.
Yes, they were uncanny, certainly, the pair of them–she so like an aristocratic witch in her withered old age; he of no particular age, with a face that was more like a waxen mask than any human countenance Bella had ever seen. What did it matter? Old age is venerable, and worthy of all reverence; and Lady Ducayne had been very kind to her. Dr Parravicini was a harmless, inoffensive student, who seldom looked up from the book he was reading. He had his private sitting-room, where he made experiments in chemistry and natural science-perhaps in alchemy.
What could it matter to Bella? He had always been polite to her, in his far-off way. She could not be more happily placed than she was–in this palatial hotel, with this rich old lady.
No doubt she missed the young English girl who had been so friendly, and it might be that she missed the girl’s brother, for Mr Stafford had talked to her a good deal–had interested himself in the books she was reading, and her manner of amusing herself when she was not on duty.
You must come to our little salon when you are “off,” as the hospital nurses call it, and we can have some music. No doubt you play and sing?’ upon which Bella had to own with a blush of shame that she had forgotten how to play the piano ages ago.
Mother and I used to sing duets sometimes between the lights, without accompaniment,’ she said, and the tears came into her eyes as she thought of the humble room, the half-hour’s respite from work, the sewing-machine standing where a piano ought to have been, and her mother’s plaintive voice, so sweet, so true, so dear.
Sometimes she found herself wondering whether she would ever see that beloved mother again. Strange forebodings came into her mind. She was angry with herself for giving way to melancholy thoughts.
One day she questioned Lady Ducayne’s French maid about those two companions who had died within three years.
‘They were poor, feeble creatures,’ Francine told her. ‘They looked fresh and bright enough when they came to Miladi; but they ate too much and they were lazy. They died of luxury and idleness. Miladi was too kind to them. They had nothing to do; and so they took to fancying things; fancying the air didn’t suit them, that they couldn’t sleep.’
‘I sleep well enough, but I have had a strange dream several times since I have been in Italy.’
‘Ah, you had better not begin to think about dreams, or you will be like those other girls. They were dreamers–and they dreamt themselves into the cemetery.’
The dream troubled her a little, not because it was a ghastly or frightening dream, but on account of sensations which she had never felt before in sleep–a whirring of wheels that went round in her brain, a great noise like a whirlwind, but rhythmical like the ticking of a gigantic clock: and then in the midst of this uproar as of winds and waves she seemed to sink into a gulf of unconsciousness, out of sleep into far deeper sleep–total extinction. And then, after that blank interval, there had come the sound of voices, and then again the whirr of wheels, louder and louder–and again the blank–and then she knew no more till morning, when she awoke, feeling languid and oppressed.
She told Dr Parravicini of her dream one day, on the only occasion when she wanted his professional advice. She had suffered rather severely from the mosquitoes before Christmas—and had been almost frightened at finding a wound upon her arm which she could only attribute to the venomous sting of one of these torturers. Parravicini put on his glasses, and scrutinized the angry mark on the round, white arm, as Bella stood before him and Lady Ducayne with her sleeve rolled up above her elbow.
‘Yes, that’s rather more than a joke,’ he said, ‘he has caught you on the top of a vein. What a vampire! But there’s no harm done, signorina, nothing that a little dressing of mine won’t heal.
You must always show me any bite of this nature. It might be dangerous if neglected. These creatures feed on poison and disseminate it.’
‘And to think that such tiny creatures can bite like this,’ said Bella; ‘my arm looks as if it had been cut by a knife.’
‘If I were to show you a mosquito’s sting under my microscope you wouldn’t be surprised at that,’ replied Parravicini.
Bella had to put up with the mosquito bites, even when they came on the top of a vein, and produced that ugly wound. The wound recurred now and then at longish intervals, and Bella found Dr Parravicini’s dressing a speedy cure. If he were the quack his enemies called him, he had at least a light hand and a delicate touch in performing this small operation.
‘Bella Rolleston to Mrs Rolleston–April 14th.
‘Ever Dearest,–Behold the cheque for my second quarter’s salary–five and twenty pounds.
There is no one to pinch off a whole tenner for a year’s commission as there was last time, so it is all for you, mother, dear. I have plenty of pocket-money in hand from the cash I brought away with me, when you insisted on my keeping more than I wanted. It isn’t possible to spend money here–except on occasional tips to servants, or sous to beggars and children–unless one had lots to spend, for everything one would like to buy–tortoise-shell, coral, lace-is so ridiculously dear that only a millionaire ought to look at it. Italy is a dream of beauty: but for shopping, give me Newington Causeway.
‘You ask me so earnestly if I am quite well that I fear my letters must have been very dull lately. Yes, dear, I am well–but I am not quite so strong as I was when I used to trudge to the West-end to buy half a pound of tea–just for a constitutional walk–or to Dulwich to look at the pictures. Italy is relaxing; and I feel what the people here call “slack”. But I fancy I can see your dear face looking worried as you read this. Indeed, and indeed, I am not ill. I am only a little tired of this lovely scene–as I suppose one might get tired of looking at one of Turner’s pictures if it hung on a wall that was always opposite one. I think of you every hour in every day–think of you and our homely little room–our dear little shabby parlour, with the armchairs from the wreck of your old home, and Dick singing in his cage over the sewing-machine. Dear, shrill, maddening Dick, who, we flattered ourselves, was so passionately fond of us. Do tell me in your next that he is well.
‘My friend Lotta and her brother never came back after all. They went from Pisa to Rome.
Happy mortals! And they are to be on the Italian lakes in May; which lake was not decided when Lotta last wrote to me. She has been a charming correspondent, and has confided all her little flirtations to me. We are all to go to Bellaggio next week–by Genoa and Milan. Isn’t that lovely? Lady Ducayne travels by the easiest stages–except when she is bottled up in the train de luxe. We shall stop two days at Genoa and one at Milan. What a bore I shall be to you with my talk about Italy when I come home.
‘Love and love-and ever more love from your adoring, Bella.’
Chapter IV
Herbert Stafford and his sister had often talked of the pretty English girl with her fresh complexion, which made such a pleasant touch of rosy colour among all those sallow faces at the Grand Hotel. The young doctor thought of her with a compassionate tenderness–her utter loneliness in that great hotel where there were so many people, her bondage to that old, old woman, where everybody else was free to think of nothing but enjoying life. It was a hard fate; and the poor child was evidently devoted to her mother, and felt the pain of separation-only two of them, and very poor, and all the world to each other,’ he thought.
Lotta told him one morning that they were to meet again at Bellaggio. ‘The old thing and her court are to be there before we are,’ she said. ‘I shall be charmed to have Bella again. She is so bright and gay–in spite of an occasional touch of homesickness. I never took to a girl on a short acquaintance as I did to her.’
‘I like her best when she is homesick,’ said Herbert; ‘for then I am sure she has a heart.’
‘What have you to do with hearts, except for dissection? Don’t forget that Bella is an absolute pauper. She told me in confidence that her mother makes mantles for a West-end shop. You can hardly have a lower depth than that.’
‘I shouldn’t think any less of her if her mother made match-boxes.’
‘Not in the abstract–of course not. Match-boxes are honest labour. But you couldn’t marry a girl whose mother makes mantles.’
‘We haven’t come to the consideration of that question yet,’ answered Herbert, who liked to provoke his sister.
In two years’ hospital practice he had seen too much of the grim realities of life to retain any prejudices about rank. Cancer, phthisis, gangrene, leave a man with little respect for the outward differences which vary the husk of humanity. The kernel is always the same–fearfully and wonderfully made–a subject for pity and terror.
Mr Stafford and his sister arrived at Bellaggio in a fair May evening. The sun was going down as the steamer approached the pier; and all that glory of purple bloom which curtains every wall at this season of the year flushed and deepened in the glowing light. A group of ladies were standing on the pier watching the arrivals, and among them Herbert saw a pale face that startled him out of his wonted composure.
‘There she is,’ murmured Lotta, at his elbow, ‘but how dreadfully changed. She looks a wreck.’
They were shaking hands with her a few minutes later, and a flush had lighted up her poor pinched face in the pleasure of meeting.
‘I thought you might come this evening,’ she said. ‘We have been here a week.’
She did not add that she had been there every evening to watch the boat in, and a good many times during the day. The Grand Bretagne was close by, and it had been easy for her to creep to the pier when the boat bell rang. She felt a joy in meeting these people again; a sense of being with friends; a confidence which Lady Ducayne’s goodness had never inspired in her.
‘Oh, you poor darling, how awfully ill you must have been, exclaimed Lotta, as the two girls embraced.
Bella tried to answer, but her voice was choked with tears.
‘What has been the matter, dear? That horrid influenza, I suppose?’
‘No, no, I have not been ill–I have only felt a little weaker than I used to be. I don’t think the air of Cap Ferrino quite agreed with me.’
‘It must have disagreed with you abominably. I never saw such a change in anyone. Do let Herbert doctor you. He is fully qualified, you know. He prescribed for ever so many influenza patients at the Londres. They were glad to get advice from an English doctor in a friendly way.’
‘I am sure he must be very clever!’ faltered Bella, ‘but there is really nothing the matter. I am not ill, and if I were ill, Lady Ducayne’s physician–‘
‘That dreadful man with the yellow face? I would as soon one of the Borgias prescribed for me. I hope you haven’t been taking any of his medicines.’
‘No, dear, I have taken nothing. I have never complained of being ill.’
This was said while they were all three walking to the hotel. The Staffords’ rooms had been secured in advance, pretty ground-floor rooms, opening into the garden. Lady Ducayne’s statelier apartments were on the floor above.
‘I believe these rooms are just under ours,’ said Bella.
‘Then it will be all the easier for you to run down to us,’ replied Lotta, which was not really the case, as the grand staircase was in the centre of the hotel.
‘Oh, I shall find it easy enough,’ said Bella. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have too much of my society.
Lady Ducayne sleeps away half the day in this warm weather, so I have a good deal of idle time; and I get awfully moped thinking of mother and home.’
Her voice broke upon the last word. She could not have thought of that poor lodging which went by the name of home more tenderly had it been the most beautiful that art and wealth ever created. She moped and pined in this lovely garden, with the sunlit lake and the romantic hills spreading out their beauty before her. She was homesick and she had dreams: or, rather, an occasional recurrence of that one bad dream with all its strange sensations–it was more like a hallucination than dreaming–the whirring of wheels; the sinking into an abyss; the struggling back to consciousness. She had the dream shortly before she left Cap Ferrino, but not since she had come to Bellaggio, and she began to hope the air in this lake district suited her better, and that those strange sensations would never return.
Mr Stafford wrote a prescription and had it made up at the chemist’s near the hotel. It was a powerful tonic, and after two bottles, and a row or two on the lake, and some rambling over the hills and in the meadows where the spring flowers made earth seem paradise, Bella’s spirits and looks improved as if by magic.
‘It is a wonderful tonic,’ she said, but perhaps in her heart of hearts she knew that the doctor’s kind voice and the friendly hand that helped her in and out of the boat, and the watchful care that went with her by land and lake, had something to do with her cure.
‘I hope you don’t forget that her mother makes mantles,’ Lotta said, warningly.
‘Or match-boxes: it is just the same thing, so far as I am concerned.’
‘You mean that in no circumstances could you think of marrying her?’
‘I mean that if ever I love a woman well enough to think of marrying her, riches or rank will count for nothing with me. But I fear–I fear your poor friend may not live to be any man’s wife.’
‘Do you think her so very ill?’
He sighed, and left the question unanswered.
One day, while they were gathering wild hyacinths in an upland meadow, Bella told Mr Stafford about her bad dream.
‘It is curious only because it is hardly like a dream,’ she said. ‘I daresay you could find some common-sense reason for it. The position of my head on my pillow, or the atmosphere, or something.’
And then she described her sensations; how in the midst of sleep there came a sudden sense of suffocation; and then those whirring wheels, so loud, so terrible; and then a blank, and then a coming back to waking consciousness.
‘Have you ever had chloroform given you–by a dentist, for instance?’
‘Never–Dr Parravicini asked me that question one day.
‘Lately?’
‘No, long ago, when we were in the train de luxe.’
‘Has Dr Parravicini prescribed for you since you began to feel weak and ill?’
‘Oh, he has given me a tonic from time to time, but I hate medicine, and took very little of the stuff. And then I am not ill, only weaker than I used to be. I was ridiculously strong and well when I lived at Walworth, and used to take long walks every day. Mother made me take those tramps to Dulwich or Norwood, for fear I should suffer from too much sewing-machine; sometimes–but very seldom–she went with me. She was generally toiling at home while I was enjoying fresh air and exercise. And she was very careful about our food–that, however plain it was, it should be always nourishing and ample. I owe at to her care that I grew up such a great, strong creature.’
‘You don’t look great or strong now, you poor dear,’ said Lotta.
‘I’m afraid Italy doesn’t agree with me.’
‘Perhaps it is not Italy, but being cooped up with Lady Ducayne that has made you ill.’
‘But I am never cooped up. Lady Ducayne is absurdly kind, and lets me roam about or sit in the balcony all day if I like. I have read more novels since I have been with her than in all the rest of my life.’
‘Then she is very different from the average old lady, who is usually a slave-driver,’ said Stafford. ‘I wonder why she carries a companion about with her if she has so little need of society.’
‘Oh, I am only part of her state. She is inordinately rich–and the salary she gives me doesn’t count. Apropos of Dr Parravicini, I know he is a clever doctor, for he cures my horrid mosquito bites.’
‘A little ammonia would do that, in the early stage of the mischief. But there are no mosquitoes to trouble you now.’
‘Oh, yes, there are, I had a bite just before we left Cap Ferrino.
She pushed up her loose lawn sleeve, and exhibited a scar, which he scrutinized intently, with a surprised and puzzled look.
‘This is no mosquito bite,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes it is–unless there are snakes or adders at Cap Ferrino.’
‘It is not a bite at all. You are trifling with me. Miss Rolleston–you have allowed that wretched Italian quack to bleed you. They killed the greatest man in modern Europe that way, remember. How very foolish of you.’
‘I was never bled in my life, Mr Stafford.’
‘Nonsense! Let me look at your other arm. Are there any more mosquito bites?’
‘Yes; Dr Parravicini says I have a bad skin for healing, and that the poison acts more virulently with me than with most people.’
Stafford examined both her arms in the broad sunlight, scars new and old.
‘You have been very badly bitten, Miss Rolleston,’ he said, ‘and if ever I find the mosquito I shall make him smart. But, now tell me, my dear girl, on your word of honour, tell me as you would tell a friend who is sincerely anxious for your health and happiness–as you would tell your mother if she were here to question you–have you no knowledge of any cause for these scars except mosquito bites–no suspicion even?’
‘No, indeed! No, upon my honour! I have never seen a mosquito biting my arm. One never does see the horrid little fiends. But I have heard them trumpeting under the curtains, and I know that I have often had one of the pestilent wretches buzzing about me.
Later in the day Bella and her friends were sitting at tea in the garden, while Lady Ducayne took her afternoon drive with her doctor.
‘How long do you mean to stop with Lady Ducayne, Miss Rolleston?’ Herbert Stafford asked, after a thoughtful silence, breaking suddenly upon the trivial talk of the two girls.
‘As long as she will go on paying me twenty-five pounds a quarter.’
‘Even if you feel your health breaking down in her service?’
‘It is not the service that has injured my health. You can see that I have really nothing to do—to read aloud for an hour or so once or twice a week; to write a letter once in a way to a London tradesman. I shall never have such an easy time with anybody else. And nobody else would give me a hundred a year.’
‘Then you mean to go on till you break down; to die at your post?’
‘Like the other two companions? No! If ever I feel seriously ill–really ill–I shall put myself in a train and go back to Walworth without stopping.’
‘What about the other two companions?’
‘They both died. It was very unlucky for Lady Ducayne. That’s why she engaged me; she chose me because I was ruddy and robust. She must feel rather disgusted at my having grown white and weak. By-the-bye, when I told her about the good your tonic had done me, she said she would like to see you and have a little talk with you about her own case.
‘And I should like to see Lady Ducayne. When did she say this?’
‘The day before yesterday.’
‘Will you ask her if she will see me this evening?’
‘With pleasure I wonder what you will think of her? She looks rather terrible to a stranger; but Dr Parravicini says she was once a famous beauty.’
It was nearly ten o’clock when Mr Stafford was summoned by message from Lady Ducayne, whose courier came to conduct him to her ladyship’s salon. Bella was reading aloud when the visitor was admitted; and he noticed the languor in the low, sweet tones, the evident effort.
‘Shut up the book,’ said the querulous old voice. ‘You are beginning to drawl like Miss Blandy.’
Stafford saw a small, bent figure crouching over the piled-up olive logs; a shrunken old figure in a gorgeous garment of black and crimson brocade, a skinny throat emerging from a mass of old Venetian lace, clasped with diamonds that flashed like fire-flies as the trembling old head turned towards him.
The eyes that looked at him out of the face were almost as bright as the diamonds–the only living feature in that narrow parchment mask. He had seen terrible faces in the hospital–faces on which disease had set dreadful marks–but he had never seen a face that impressed him so painfully as this withered countenance, with its indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin-lid years and years ago.
The Italian physician was standing on the other side of the fireplace, smoking a cigarette, and looking down at the little old woman brooding over the hearth as if he were proud of her.
‘Good evening, Mr Stafford; you can go to your room, Bella, and write your everlasting letter to your mother at Walworth,’ said Lady Ducayne. ‘I believe she writes a page about every wild flower she discovers in the woods and meadows. I don’t know what else she can find to write about,’ she added, as Bella quietly withdrew to the pretty little bedroom opening out of Lady Ducayne’s spacious apartment. Here, as at Cap Ferrino, she slept in a room adjoining the old lady’s.
‘You are a medical man, I understand, Mr Stafford.’
‘I am a qualified practitioner, but I have not begun to practise.’
‘You have begun upon my companion, she tells me.’
‘I have prescribed for her, certainly, and I am happy to find my prescription has done her good; but I look upon that improvement as temporary. Her case will require more drastic treatment.
‘Never mind her case. There is nothing the matter with the girl–absolutely nothing–except girlish nonsense; too much liberty and not enough work.’
‘I understand that two of your ladyship’s previous companions died of the same disease,’ said Stafford, looking first at Lady Ducayne, who gave her tremulous old head an impatient jerk, and then at Parravicini, whose yellow complexion had paled a little under Stafford’s scrutiny.
‘Don’t bother me about my companions, sir,’ said Lady Ducayne. ‘I sent for you to consult you about myself–not about a parcel of anæmic girls. You are young, and medicine is a progressive science, the newspapers tell me. Where have you studied?’
‘In Edinburgh–and in Paris.’
‘Two good schools. And you know all the new-fangled theories, the modern discoveries–that remind one of the mediæval witchcraft, of Albertus Magnus, and George Ripley; you have studied hypnotism–electricity?’
‘And the transfusion of blood,’ said Stafford, very slowly, looking at Parravicini.
‘Have you made any discovery that teaches you to prolong human life–any elixir–any mode of treatment? I want my life prolonged, young man. That man there has been my physician for thirty years. He does all he can to keep me alive–after his lights. He studies all the new theories of all the scientists–but he is old; he gets older every day–his brain-power is going–he is bigoted–prejudiced–can’t receive new ideas–can’t grapple with new systems. He will let me die if I am not on my guard against him.’
‘You are of an unbelievable ingratitude, Ecclenza,’ said Parravicini.
‘Oh, you needn’t complain. I have paid you thousands to keep me alive. Every year of my life has swollen your hoards; you know there is nothing to come to you when I am gone. My whole fortune is left to endow a home for indigent women of quality who have reached their ninetieth year. Come, Mr Stafford, I am a rich woman. Give me a few years more in the sunshine, a few years more above ground, and I will give you the price of a fashionable London practice–I will set you up at the West-end.’
‘How old are you, Lady Ducayne?’
‘I was born the day Louis XVI was guillotined.’
‘Then I think you have had your share of the sunshine and the pleasures of the earth, and that you should spend your few remaining days in repenting your sins and trying to make atonement for the young lives that have been sacrificed to your love of life.’
‘What do you mean by that, sir?’
‘Oh, Lady Ducayne, need I put your wickedness and your physician’s still greater wickedness in plain words? The poor girl who is now in your employment has been reduced from robust health to a condition of absolute danger by Dr Parravicini’s experimental surgery; and I have no doubt those other two young women who broke down in your service were treated by him in the same manner. I could take upon myself to demonstrate–by most convincing evidence, to a jury of medical men–that Dr Parravicini has been bleeding Miss Rolleston, after putting her under chloroform, at intervals, ever since she has been in your service. The deterioration in the girl’s health speaks for itself; the lancet marks upon the girl’s arms are unmistakable; and her description of a series of sensations, which she calls a dream, points unmistakably to the administration of chloroform while she was sleeping. A practice so nefarious, so murderous, must, if exposed, result in a sentence only less severe than the punishment of murder.’
‘I laugh,’ said Parravicini, with an airy motion of his skinny fingers; ‘I laugh at once at your theories and at your threats. I, Parravicini Leopold, have no fear that the law can question anything I have done.’
‘Take the girl away, and let me hear no more of her,’ cried Lady Ducayne, in the thin, old voice, which so poorly matched the energy and fire of the wicked old brain that guided its utterances. ‘Let her go back to her mother–I want no more girls to die in my service. There are girls enough and to spare in the world, God knows.’
‘If you ever engage another companion–or take another English girl into your service, Lady Ducayne, I will make all England ring with the story of your wickedness.’
‘I want no more girls. I don’t believe in his experiments. They have been full of danger for me as well as for the girl–an air bubble, and I should be gone. I’ll have no more of his dangerous quackery. I’ll find some new man–a better man than you, sir, a discoverer like Pasteur, or Virchow, a genius–to keep me alive. Take your girl away, young man. Marry her if you like.
I’ll write her a cheque for a thousand pounds, and let her go and live on beef and beer, and get strong and plump again. I’ll have no more such experiments. Do you hear, Parravicini?’ she screamed, vindictively, the yellow, wrinkled face distorted with fury, the eyes glaring at him.
The Staffords carried Bella Rolleston off to Varese next day, she very loth to leave Lady Ducayne, whose liberal salary afforded such help for the dear mother. Herbert Stafford insisted, however, treating Bella as coolly as if he had been the family physician, and she had been given over wholly to his care.
‘Do you suppose your mother would let you stop here to die?’ he asked. ‘If Mrs Rolleston knew how ill you are, she would come post haste to fetch you.
‘I shall never be well again till I get back to Walworth,’ answered Bella, who was low-spirited and inclined to tears this morning, a reaction after her good spirits of yesterday.
‘We’ll try a week or two at Varese first,’ said Stafford. ‘When you can walk half-way up Monte Generoso without palpitation of the heart, you shall go back to Walworth.’
‘Poor mother, how glad she will be to see me, and how sorry that I’ve lost such a good place.’
This conversation took place on the boat when they were leaving Bellaggio. Lotta had gone to her friend’s room at seven o’clock that morning, long before Lady Ducayne’s withered eyelids had opened to the daylight, before even Francine, the French maid, was astir, and had helped to pack a Gladstone bag with essentials, and hustled Bella downstairs and out of doors before she could make any strenuous resistance.
‘It’s all right.’ Lotta assured her. ‘Herbert had a good talk with Lady Ducayne last night and it was settled for you to leave this morning. She doesn’t like invalids, you see.’
‘No,’ sighed Bella, ‘she doesn’t like invalids. It was very unlucky that I should break down, just like Miss Tomson and Miss Blandy.’
‘At any rate, you are not dead, like them,’ answered Lotta, ‘and my brother says you are not going to die.’
It seemed rather a dreadful thing to be dismissed in that off-hand way, without a word of farewell from her employer.
‘I wonder what Miss Torpinter will say when I go to her for another situation,’ Bella speculated, ruefully, while she and her friends were breakfasting on board the steamer.
‘Perhaps you may never want another situation,’ said Stafford.
‘You mean that I may never be well enough to be useful to anybody?’
‘No, I don’t mean anything of the kind.’
It was after dinner at Varese, when Bella had been induced to take a whole glass of Chianti, and quite sparkled after that unaccustomed stimulant, that Mr Stafford produced a letter from his pocket.
‘I forgot to give you Lady Ducayne’s letter of adieu,’ he said.
‘What, did she write to me? I am so glad–I hated to leave her in such a cool way; for after all she was very kind to me, and if I didn’t like her it was only because she was too dreadfully old.’
She tore open the envelope. The letter was short and to the point:
‘Goodbye, child. Go and marry your doctor. I enclose a farewell gift for your trousseau.—Adeline Ducayne.’
‘A hundred pounds, a whole year’s salary–no–why, it’s for a–A cheque for a thousand!’ cried Bella. ‘What a generous old soul! She really is the dearest old thing.’
‘She just missed being very dear to you, Bella,’ said Stafford.
He had dropped into the use of her Christian name while they were on board the boat. It seemed natural now that she was to be in his charge till they all three went back to England.
‘I shall take upon myself the privileges of an elder brother till we land at Dover,’ he said; ‘after that–well, it must be as you please.’
The question of their future relations must have been satisfactorily settled before they crossed the Channel, for Bella’s next letter to her mother communicated three startling facts.
First, that the enclosed cheque for £1,000 was to be invested in debenture stock in Mrs Rolleston’s name, and was to be her very own, income and principal, for the rest of her life.
Next, that Bella was going home to Walworth immediately.
And last, that she was going to be married to Mr Herbert Stafford in the following autumn.
‘And I am sure you will adore him, mother, as much as I do,’ wrote Bella. ‘It is all good Lady Ducayne’s doing. I never could have married if I had not secured that little nest-egg for you.
Herbert says we shall be able to add to it as the years go by, and that wherever we live there shall be always a room in our house for you. The word “mother-in-law” has no terrors for him.’
What really happened around the Pollingsried Chapel, and its supposed plague cemetery? Is there really a curse around the area? As far as the ringing of the bells can be heard?
Searching for its name, the utburd ghost from Norwegian folklore haunts the forests, waters and houses its parents left them to die. For the most part, they remained in folk tales, but sometimes, the stories about the dead children got real life consequences.
Perhaps one of the most well known figures from Irish mythology is the Banshee, the omen of death, wailing as death comes to a house. But where does she come from? And what does she want from the dead?
Before meeting a vampire in Transylvania, a short story places Jonathan Harket facing the undead outside of Munich. Could it have a connection to the village that according to legend, vanished suddenly in the middle ages.
One of the dark entities on the emerald island, there is the Death Coach who comes to collect the souls of the dead. Pulled by headless horses, the Cóiste Bodhar stops at nothing before its mission is complete, and misfortune happens upon those getting in its way.
In 1687, the ghost of a murdered child started to testify against its mother in northern Norway and people took it seriously. Today, the Utburd of Skåvoll or the Nille-case is remembered as the ghost story that condemned a woman to her death.
Have a look at some of the most haunted places in Dublin, from the mysteries of the Hellfire Club, churches where you can supposedly summon the devil and the dead lingering in the dusty libraries and colleges.
After strange knocking and poltergeist activity made the people at Erstad Farm believe it was haunted. And when they asked the ghost what it wanted, it unraveled the lives of more than one person forever.
Was there an iberian vampire before the European vampire panic in Eastern Europe? Who was really Conde Estruch, the vampire of Catalonia, and what happened to the witches of Llers Castle the count was said to use as his lair.
Join a haunted pub crawl through Dublin’s ancient streets for ghosts and a pint of Guinness. From plotting revolutionaries to somber writers, these pubs and bars are said to be a place where some of the patrons have been lingering for a long time.
In 1852, the alleged psychic Erika Larsdatter Bogen, arrived at Børholmen, a small island in western Norway. She claimed that she had found the ghost and corpse of the dead child, and she named the mother who allegedly buried it. But what was the truth?
An online magazine about the paranormal, haunted and macabre. We collect the ghost stories from all around the world as well as review horror and gothic media.
