Can ghosts physically harm or even kill us? It seems so. Very rare testimonies report that ghosts were able to cause injuries which ultimately resulted in death.
This article published on January 23, 1925 relates several
killer ghosts ...
Abstracts:
“It is often asked if ghosts can really do
any physical harm. My reply is: ‘Yes ; there are
occasional
instances of it.’ What is more common, perhaps, is that ghosts
have killed through shock, or have caused such injury to the
constitution that death has eventually ensued. Let me quote a few
instances:
There is a house not far from the Waterloo Road, Dublin,
which contains a room that is periodically haunted by a very
terrifying ghost that imparts such realistic sensations of
strangulation to its victims as would certainly kill anyone
possessing a weak heart.
I had an experience there many years ago. I had gone up to
bed one night, and had just blown out the candle when I saw, some
paces away from me and apparently near the foot of the bed, a
faint, luminous glow that gradually materialised until it took the
form of a tall figure, that suddenly came straight towards
me.
I tried to move, but my limbs were paralysed ; and the
figure, bending over me, caught hold of me by the throat. Pressing
me back on the pillow, it held me there till I lost
consciousness.
On recovering, I lay for a while, too frightened to move ;
and then taking courage from the fact that I neither heard nor felt
anything, I cautiously put out my hand and strack a light. The room
was quite empty, and the door was locked on the inside and the
window fastened.
A house that at one time bore the most sinister reputation
for a very dangerous type of ghost is in Berkeley Square. It was
rumoured in the 'seventies that a servant girl who went into one of
the unoccupied rooms of the house one evening was picked up there
later on unconscious, qnd from her subsequent ravings it was
inferred that she had seen something almost too horrible for the
mind to conceive. Indeed, her mind never recovered from the
shock.
A gentleman, an utter sceptic where the supernatural was
concerned, hearing the story, obtained permission to sleep in the
room, the agreement that if he rang the bell twice, help should be
sent him. The eventful night came and the gentleman went to the
fatal apartment and shut himself in ; whilst his friends, remaining
in the lower part of the house, waited.
Just about midnight, or perhaps a little later, the bell of
the upstairs room rang very violently once. There was a slight
pause, and then a faint attempt to pull it a second time. At this,
all the listeners rushed upstairs in a body, and, bursting into the
haunted apartment, found the gentleman sitting upright on the bed,
a discharged revolver in one hand – dead!
There is another singularly sinister house near Portman
Square. Some years ago a lady and her husband lived there, and,
awaking one night, heard a big clock — outside their door,
apparently— slowly boom out thirteen, and, after a pause, strike
something else and then again something still
more.
As there was no such clock in the house, the lady and
gentleman were most impressed, and on the following morning a
memorandum of the event — which memorandum I was subsequently shown
— was duly recorded. Not long afterwards, whilst skating at a rink,
the husband met with a very singular accident, which resulted in
bis becoming insane, and eventually dying in that
condition.
Some years lates I met the lady at the theatre, and learned
from her that she had again heard the clock strike thirteen, and a
gong shortly afterwards sound three. She seemed to think that the
phenomena portended harm to a relative of hers who was ill at the
time, but a feeling came over me that the warning was intended for
her.
I advised her to leave the house at once, as I was sure
there was a presence in it that bitterly resented her being there.
She demurred, and two days later I heard that she had been killed
in a taxicab accident in Portman Square.”
Sources
