"I fell asleep, and remained so for an hour or more, when I suddenly awoke with a great jerk, and found confronting me the most awful apparition you can imagine. It was a dwarfed, tubby figure with a face like a pig, perfectly naked, in a strong bright light. The whole figure resembled in appearance the scalded body of a pig of average size, but the legs and arms were those of a human being brutalised, male or female I could not say. In ten or fifteen seconds it vanished, leaving me in a profuse perspiration and trembling, from which I did not recover for some time. But I slept off the rest of the night.
"When the landlady came to call me (she slept on the third floor back) she pointed out that a picture on the connecting door had fallen down between my bed and the next room. Doubtless it was the fall of the picture that waked me up with a start. But what about the apparition? I can only assign it to some occult cause.
"I remain, dear Sir, "Yours faithfully, "'I. WALTON.'"
In this instance it is, of course, very difficult to tell whether the phenomena is Subjective or Objective. Presuming it to be Objective, which I am inclined to believe it was, then it was either the earth-bound spirit of some particularly vicious person who was in some way connected with the house, or else it was a Vice Elemental attracted to the house either by the foul thoughts of some occupant or by some murder formerly committed there.
Writing to me again on June 13th, 1910, Mr. "I. Walton" says:--
"I am quite willing that you should find a place for my experience in your forthcoming book. I think I omitted one detail of the spectre: it had bright yellow hair worn in ringlets extending barely as far as the shoulders.
Another case in which there is little or no doubt of the apparition being a Vice Elemental was related to me by Mrs. Bruce, whose husband was recently stationed in India. Her narrative is as follows:--
"We once lived in a bungalow that had been built on the site of a house whose inhabitants had been barbarously murdered by the Sepoys during the Indian Mutiny, and we had not occupied it many days before we were disturbed by hearing a curious, crooning noise coming from various parts of the building. The moment we entered a room, whence the noise seemed to proceed, there was silence, while the instant our backs were turned it recommenced. We never saw anything, however, until one day when my husband, hearing the sounds, hurriedly entered the room in which he fancied he could locate them. He then saw the blurred outlines of something--he could only describe as semi-human--suddenly rise from one of the corners and dart past him. The disturbances were so worrying that we eventually left the house."