The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) by Peter Haining

Blackwood
     

    Prospectus
     
Address:
East 21st Street, New York, USA.
Property:
Former private residence now converted into a boarding house. The rooms are spacious with views to the East River and easy access to Manhattan. Top floor flat to let.
Viewing Date: 
Fall, 1906.
Agent:
Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) was born in London, the son of a nobleman. He rebelled against his strict upbringing and in his twenties went to America, where he became a reporter on the New York Sun . Here his interest in the supernatural lead him to investigate several haunted houses and start writing the stories that made him famous, in collections such as The Empty House (1906), Incredible Adventures (1914) and Strange Stories (1929). His reputation grew with radio and TV appearances, earning him the epithet “The Ghost Man”. There is much of Blackwood in the character of Jim Shorthouse in this story – and he, too, lived in East 21st Street . . .
     
    Jim Shorthouse was the sort of fellow who always made a mess of things. Everything with which his hands or mind came into contact issued from such contact in an unqualified and irremediable state of mess. His college days were a mess: he was twice rusticated. His schooldays were a mess: he went to half a dozen, each passing him on to the next with a worse character and in a more developed state of mess. His early boyhood was the sort of mess that copy-books and dictionaries spell with a big “M”, and his babyhood – ugh! was the embodiment of howling, yowling, screaming mess.
    At the age of forty, however, there came a change in his troubled life, when he met a girl with half a million in her own right, who consented to marry him, and who very soon succeeded in reducing his most messy existence into a state of comparative order and system.
    Certain incidents, important and otherwise, of Jim’s life would never have come to be told here but for the fact that in getting into his “messes” and out of them again he succeeded in drawing himself into the atmosphere of peculiar circumstances and strange happenings. He attracted to his path the curious adventures of life as unfailingly as meat attracts flies, and jam wasps. It is to the meat and jam of his life, so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became regular as the sun’s instead of erratic as a comet’s.
    The first experience in order of time that he related to me shows that somewhere latent behind his disarranged nervous system there lay psychic perceptions of an uncommon order. About the age of twenty-two – I think after his second rustication – his father’s purse and patience had equally given out, and Jim found himself stranded high and dry in a large American city. High and dry! And the only clothes that had no holes in them safely in the keeping of his uncle’s wardrobe.
    Careful reflection on a bench in one of the city parks led him to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to persuade the city editor of one of the daily journals that he possessed an observant mind and a ready pen, and that he could “do good work for your paper, sir, as a reporter”. This, then, he did, standing at a most unnatural angle between the editor and the window to conceal the whereabouts of the holes.
    “Guess we’ll have to give you a week’s trial,” said the editor, who, ever on the lookout for good chance material, took on shoals of men in that way and retained on the average one man per shoal. Anyhow it gave Jim Shorthouse the wherewithal to sew up the holes and relieve his uncle’s wardrobe of its burden.
    Then he went to find living quarters; and in this proceeding his unique characteristics already referred to – what theosophists would call his Karma – began unmistakably to assert themselves, for it was in the house he eventually selected that this sad