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       The quiet of the maritime old city of Newburyport was upset for several months in 1872 and 1873 by the happenings in a primary schoolhouse at the corner of Charles Street and Purchas. The wooden building was of one story, of a very common type; I think it had been formerly a small church. The outside door opened into a shallow entry; from this entry two doors led to the school room beyond. Between the two doors was an inner window, sashed and paned in the ordinary way, looking into the schoolroom. At one side of the entry were steps leading up through a trap-door to a vacant cockloft. In the schoolroom, facing the window to the entry, were ranged the miniature desks occupied by from sixty to seventy small boys, the pupils of Miss Lucy Perkins. Her desk was in a corner commanding a view of the window giving upon the entry.

       So much of description of the locality is needed for an understanding of the "manifestations" which made the Newburyport school for a time extensively celebrated, and incidentally gave a young reporter his long-desired first experience of a whole night in a so-called haunted house. The advertised phenomena consisted of the usual rappings and movings of light and moderately heavy objects, the locking and unlocking of doors without visible presence, the agitation of window shades by hands unseen, and thunderous sounds in the cockloft, as if someone overhead was rolling lignum vitæ tenpin balls or round Edam cheeses along the flooring. Less frequent, but numbering up to dozens of times as the weeks went by, was the apparition, at the outside of the window toward the front entry or at one of the doors when open, of the figure of a tow-headed, blue-eyed boy of about ten, dressed in brown, pale of face and sad of expression; eyes open and pathetically beautiful; hands always crossed before his waist and slightly extended with the palms outward — hands thin and white, fingers wasted as if by long sickness. The school child ghost never spoke. He would stand quietly whenever he appeared, with head bent forward and palms held out like a real schoolboy deprecating punishment. When Miss Perkins attempted to grasp the intruder to ascertain what manner of thing it was, the figure either vanished like a dissolving view or fled up the steps to the cockloft. More than once the teacher courageously pursued it thither; the vanishing occurred at the top of the steps. When the trap-door was padlocked and the outside front door bolted from within it made no difference; the child ghost nevertheless was seen by all at the entry window.

       This was the story told by Lucy Perkins, the teacher, and corroborated by the nearly unanimous testimony of her sixty or seventy little boy co-witnesses. Curious visitors to the school during the early days of the manifestations declared that they, too, saw and heard these things; it soon became necessary for the school committee to forbid the admission of outsiders. The committee, including two clergymen, were inclined at first to pooh-pooh the whole affair and to attribute the ghost and the noises either to unknown tricksters or to hysterical exaggerations on the part of the teacher and to suggested beliefs in the minds of her pupils and visitors.

       Local opinion was divided on the trickery explanation but practically united in confidence in Miss Lucy Perkins's good faith. She was a graduate of the Newburyport high school, esteemed in the city throughout her life, knowing and caring nothing about spiritualism and its mysteries, and with no conceivable motive for a deception which could result only in the breaking up of the school and the loss of her own position and pay. When I talked with this modest, sensible young woman, evidently a person in whom there was no sensational impulse, no notoriety hunger, no desire even to dwell on the circumstances of her experience beyond straightforward replies to the questions asked, it seemed more difficult than ever to accept the theory of deliberate falsehood on her part and on the part of three score and more youngsters whom the most artful criminal lawyer in the Commonwealth could scarcely have coached to be consistent in any case of manufactured evidence. And yet it was still harder to believe in the ghost.

       The story locally current, I know not with what foundation in truth, told of a child who had been locked up years before in the cockloft and kept there so long in darkness and in fright that he developed a brain fever from which he died.

       Just before Washington's birthday in 1873, with a small party of newspaper men from Boston, I stayed all night in the haunted schoolhouse. The snow was falling quietly, making it impossible for anyone to approach the building without leaving tracks. We locked ourselves in, carefully examined all the window fastenings, assured ourselves that cellar and cockloft were vacant and inaccessible from outside, built a good fire in the stove, lit our dark lanterns and settled down at some of the pigmy desks to await events. On the wall was a big moon-faced clock, ticking away lustily. There was no other sound for at least two hours, except whispered remarks by the investigators. One of the more imaginative of these insisted that he saw a bluish, formless vapor hovering in the entry from time to time, but the fact was not sufficiently established to go into the record. Occasionally a large hanging map would flutter and fall back into position with an audible knock of its lower roller against the wall. Once or twice this happened in synchrony with some question addressed to the spirit or spirits and in a manner which over-eager faith might translate into intelligent response. These insignificant "manifestations" could be explained by natural currents of air and accidents of coincidence. After a couple of hours of waiting we became rather tired and sceptical and lit the lamp and began to play euchre and to smoke.

       Just before midnight, when we were weary both of cards and of non-appearing ghosts, one of the party stood up and raised his hand for silence. Silence supervened, unbroken as before except by the loud second strokes of the clock on the wall. "If there is any presence here," said the spokesman, seriously and respectfully, "any being or any influence that transcends the laws of nature as we understand them, will it not make itself manifest to us in some way, however trifling?"

       Immediately, and as if in answer to this challenge, the clock stopped ticking. Without a quiver the pendulum hung straight after it had swung its arc. There could not have been a more obvious response. It was as if some firm hand had grasped the escapement. The sudden cessation of a regular rhythmic sound to which the ears have become so accustomed that they take it for granted is generally more disturbing than even a violent unexpected noise. The circumstances in this case made the stoppage the more impressive. It happened so suddenly, so pertinently, that for a while we doubted our senses. We had come to have a friendly feeling for that healthy old timepiece. It was something more to us than a recorder of the slow-going hours. It was a companion which spoke to us in normal language and reassured us with its hearty voice at every succeeding second. You may imagine the looks of bewilderment that were exchanged. For a few moments there was not one of the party who would not have taken oath to the Newburyport ghost.

       Then it occurred to somebody to put the teacher's fat dictionary upon the teacher's chair and climb up and examine the interior of the responsive clock. The key was there. The applied key showed that the eight-day works had run down. When the janitor came after daybreak, at the end of a night yielding nothing further that is worth mention, he assured us that he had wound the clock only forty-eight hours before; but that this was a mistake the testimony of the key had evinced. I am recounting things as they were. Without much stretching of conscience any one of us could have told a story — and it is human nature to help out the marvellous — that would have added to the ghostly prestige of the schoolhouse. In subsequent experiences I learned how often the artistic suppression of an essential if commonplace fact is responsible for much public amazement. In this case I found sufficient cause for wonder in the coincidence which had made the clock run down at the exact moment of our solemn invocation.

       There must be people still living in Newburyport who remember the excitement of 1872 and 1873 and know better than myself the manner in which the affair terminated. Forty-five years later, when passing through the city in an automobile with my friend Judge Bartlett, it was difficult to find anybody who could direct us to the scene of the incident, or who even had heard of it; an illustration of the ephemeral fame of the best authenticated New England ghosts. Finally, a local historian indicated the whereabouts, and it is by his information that I have been able to locate the haunted schoolhouse. The judge and I went thither, past the church where rest the bones of George Whitefield and the house where William Lloyd Garrison was born; but at the corner of Charles and Purchas Streets we found that the old wooden building with its awful cockloft and its entryway of horror had been replaced by a modern structure for the primary education of the grandchildren of the little ghost-seers in Miss Perkins's school.

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