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Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu 28 August 1814 – 7 February 1873), popularly known as J. S. Le Fanu, was an Irish writer. He was one of the pioneers of early Gothic, mystery and horror literary works, and is considered by critics to be among the greatest ghost story writers of the Victorian era, as his works were central to the development of the genre.
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00:00Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
00:06In the late autumn of 1753, and somewhere about the 24th of October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr. Alderman Harper of High Street Dublin and my Lord Castle Mallard, who in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir's mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the tiled house, the subject of this
00:29Narrative, stood. This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it and put up hangings and otherwise went to considerable expense.
00:43Mr. and Mrs. Prosser came there sometime in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castle Mallard and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease
00:58because the house was subjected to annoyances, which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law's family had suffered there,
01:12not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.
01:22Lord Castle Mallard filed a bill in the equity side of the Exchequer to compel Mr. Alderman Harper to perform his contract by taking out the lease.
01:31But the Alderman drew an answer, supported by no less than seven long affidavits, copies of all which were furnished to his Lordship and with the desired effect.
01:40For rather than compel him to place them upon the file of the court, his Lordship struck and consented to release him.
01:47The annoyances described did not begin till the end of August, when, one evening, Mrs. Prosser, quite alone, was sitting in the twilight at the back parlour window, which was open, looking out into the orchard,
02:00and plainly saw a hand, stealthily placed upon the stone window sill outside, as if by someone beneath the window, at her right side, intending to climb up.
02:12There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the window sill.
02:20And it was not a very young hand, but one aged somewhere about forty, as she conjectured.
02:26It was only a few weeks before that the horrible robbery at Clondalkin had taken place, and the lady fancied that the hand was that of one of the miscreants,
02:35who was now about to scale the windows of the tiled house.
02:38She uttered a loud scream and an ejaculation of terror, and at the same moment the hand was quietly withdrawn.
02:47Search was made in the orchard, but there were no indications of any persons having been under the window,
02:53beneath which ranged along the wall stood a great column of flowerpots, which it seemed must have prevented anyone's coming within reach of it.
03:01The same night there came a hasty tapping, every now and then, at the window of the kitchen.
03:07The women grew frightened, and the servant man, taking firearms with him, opened the back door, but discovered nothing.
03:14As he shut it, however, he said, a thump came on it, and a pressure as of somebody striving to force his way in, which frightened him.
03:24And though the tapping went on upon the kitchen window panes, he made no further explorations.
03:30About six o'clock on the Saturday evening following, the cook, an honest, sober woman, now aged nigh sixty years,
03:38being alone in the kitchen, saw on looking up, it is supposed, the same fat but aristocratic looking hand,
03:45laid with its palm against the glass, as if feeling carefully for some inequality in its surface.
03:53She cried out, and said something like a prayer on seeing it, but it was not withdrawn for several seconds after.
04:02After this, for a great many nights, there came at first a low, and afterwards an angry rapping,
04:09as it seemed with a set of clenched knuckles at the back door.
04:13And the servant man would not open it, but called to know who was there, and there came no answer,
04:18only a sound, as if the palm of the hand was placed against it, and drawn slowly from side to side,
04:26with a sort of soft, groping motion.
04:30All this time, sitting in the back parlour, which for the time they used as a drawing-room,
04:36Mr. and Mrs. Prosser was heard by, sometimes very low and furtive, like a clandestine signal,
04:42and at others sudden and so loud as to threaten the breaking of the pane.
04:47This was all at the back of the house, which looked upon the orchard.
04:51But on a Tuesday night, at about half past nine, there came precisely the same rappings at the hall door,
04:57and went on, to the great annoyance of the master and terror of his wife, at intervals for nearly two hours.
05:04After this, for several days and nights, they had no annoyance whatsoever,
05:09and began to think that the nuisance had expended itself.
05:12But on the night of the 13th of September, Jane Easterbrook, an English maid,
05:17having gone into the pantry for the small silver bowl in which her mistress's posset was served,
05:21happening to look up at the little window of only four panes,
05:25observed through an auger hole which was drilled through the window frame,
05:30for the admission of a bolt to secure the shutter, a white pudgy finger.
05:36First the tip, and then the two first joints introduced,
05:40and turned about this way and that, crooked against the inside,
05:45as if in search of a fastening which its owner designed to push aside.
05:50When the maid got back into the kitchen, we are told, she fell into a swoon,
05:56and was all the next day, very weak.
05:59Mr Prosser, being, I have heard, a hard-headed and conceited sort of fellow,
06:04scouted the ghost and sneered at the fears of his family.
06:08He was privately of opinion that the whole affair was a practical joke or a fraud,
06:12and waited an opportunity of catching the rogue, flagrante delicto.
06:16He did not long keep this theory to himself, but let it out by degrees,
06:21with no stint of oaths and threats, believing that some domestic traitor
06:26held the thread of the conspiracy.
06:28Indeed, it was time something were done, as himself had grown to look unhappy and anxious.
06:34They kept at home from the hour of sunset, and would not venture about the house after nightfall, except in couples.
06:41The knocking had ceased for about a week, when one night Mrs Prosser, being in the nursery,
06:49her husband, who was in the parlour, heard it begin very softly at the hall door.
06:55The air was quite still, which favoured his hearing distinctly.
07:00This was the first time there had been any disturbance at that side of the house, and the character of the summons was changed.
07:08Mr Prosser, leaving the parlour door open, it seems, went quietly into the hall.
07:14The sound was that of beating on the outside of the stout door, softly and regularly, with the flat of the hand.
07:23He was going to open it suddenly, but changed his mind, and went back very quietly,
07:28and on to the head of the kitchen stair, where was a strong closet over the pantry, in which he kept his firearms, swords and canes.
07:36Here he called his manservant, whom he believed to be honest, and with a pair of loaded pistols in his own coat pockets,
07:43and giving another pair to him, he went as lightly as he could, followed by the man, and with a stout walking cane in his hand, forward to the door.
07:51Everything went as Mr Prosser wished. The besieger of his house, so far from taking fright at their approach, grew more impatient,
08:00and the sort of patting which had aroused his attention at first assumed the rhythm and emphasis of a series of double knocks.
08:07Mr Prosser, angry, opened the door with his right arm across, cane in hand. Looking, he saw nothing.
08:15But his arm was jerked up, oddly, as it might be with a hollow of a hand, and something passed under it, with a kind of gentle squeeze.
08:26The servant neither saw nor felt anything, and did not know why his master looked back so hastily, cutting with his cane and shutting the door with so sudden a slam.
08:36From that time, Mr Prosser discontinued his angry talk and swearing about it, and seemed nearly as averse from the subject as the rest of his family.
08:45He grew, in fact, very uncomfortable, feeling an inward persuasion that when, in answer to the summons, he had opened the hall door, he had actually given admission to the besieger.
08:57He said nothing to Mrs Prosser, but went up earlier to his bedroom, where he read a while in his Bible and said his prayers.
09:06I hope the particular relation of this circumstance does not indicate its singularity.
09:11He lay awake for a good while, it appears, and, as he supposed, about a quarter past twelve, he heard the soft palm of a hand patting on the outside of the bedroom door, and then brushed slowly along it.
09:27Up danced Mr Prosser, very much frightened, and locked the door, crying,
09:32Who's there?
09:33But receiving no answer but the same brushing sound of a soft hand drawn over the panels, which he knew only too well.
09:42In the morning the housemaid was terrified by the impression of a hand in the dust of the little parlour table, where they had been unpacking Delft and other things the day before.
09:53The print of the naked foot in the sea sand did not frighten Robinson Crusoe half so much.
09:59They were by this time all nervous, and some of them half crazed about the hand.
10:06Mr Prosser went to examine the mark, and made light of it, but, as he swore afterwards, rather to quiet his servants than from any comfortable feeling about it in his own mind.
10:17However, he had them all, one by one, into the room, and made each place his or her hand palm downward on the same table, thus taking a similar impression from every person in the house, including himself and his wife.
10:32And his athlete David deposed that the formation of the hand so impressed differed altogether from those of the living inhabitants of the house, and corresponded with that of the hand seen by Mrs Prosser and by the cook.
10:46Ever, or whatever the owner of that hand might be, they all felt this subtle demonstration to mean that it was declared he was no longer out of doors, but had established himself in the house.
10:59And now Mrs Prosser began to be troubled with strange and horrible dreams, and really very appalling nightmares.
11:08But one night, as Mr Prosser closed his bedchamber door, he was struck somewhat by the utter silence of the sound of breathing, which seemed unaccountable to him, as he knew his wife was in bed, and his ears were particularly sharp.
11:23There was a candle burning on a small table at the foot of the bed, besides the one he held in one hand, a heavy ledger connected with his father-in-law's business being under his arm.
11:34He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew.
11:48And on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was, as he first thought, a toad, but really the same fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple.
12:07Mr Prosser, with a horrified jerk, pitched the ledger right at the curtains, behind which the owner of the hand might be supposed to stand.
12:15The hand was instantaneously and smoothly snatched away.
12:19The curtains made a great wave, and Mr Prosser got round the bed in time to see the closet door, which was at the other side, pulled to by the same white, puffy hand, as he believed.
12:31He drew the door open with a fling, and stared in, but the closet was empty, except for the clothes hanging from the pegs on the wall, and the dressing table and looking glass facing the windows.
12:43He shut it sharply and locked it, and felt for a minute, he says, as if he were like to lose his wits.
12:49Then, ringing at the bell, he brought the servants, and with much ado, they recovered, Mrs Prosser, from a sort of trance, in which he says, from her looks, she seemed to have suffered the pains of death.
13:02But the occurrence, which seems to have determined the crisis, was the strange sickness of the child.
13:09A little between two and three years.
13:11He lay awake, seemingly in paroxysms of terror, and the doctors, who were called in, set down the symptoms to incipient water on the brain.
13:20Mrs Prosser used to sit up with the nurse by the nursery fire, much troubled in mind about the condition of her child.
13:27His bed was placed sideways along the wall, with its head against the door of a cupboard, which, however, did not shut quite close.
13:36There was a little valance, about a foot deep, around the top of the child's bed, and this descended within some ten or twelve inches of the pillow on which it lay.
13:46They observed that the little creature was quieter whenever they took it up, and held it on their laps.
13:52They had just replaced him, as he seemed to have grown quite sleepy and tranquil.
13:57But he was not five minutes in his bed, when he began to scream in one of his frenzies of terror.
14:03At the same moment, the nurse, for the first time, detected, and Mrs Prosser equally plainly saw, following the direction of her eyes, the real cause of the child's sufferings.
14:15Protruding through the aperture of the cupboard, and shrouded in the shade of the valance, they plainly saw the white, fat hand, palm downwards, presented towards the head of the child.
14:29The mother uttered a scream, and snatched the child from its little bed, and she and the nurse ran down to the ladies' sleeping room, where Mr Prosser was in bed, shutting the door as they entered.
14:39And they had hardly done so, when a gentle tap came to it from the outside.
14:45There is a great deal more, but this will suffice.
14:49The singularity of the narrative seems to me to be this, that it describes the ghost of a hand, and no more.
14:57The person to whom that hand belonged never once appeared.
15:01Nor was it a hand, if a body only a hand so manifested and introduced, that its owner was always by some crafty accident, hidden from view.
15:10In the year 1819, at a college breakfast, I met a Mr Prosser, a thin, grave, but rather chatty old gentleman, with very white hair drawn back into a pigtail.
15:23And he told us all, with a concise particularity, a story of his cousin, James Prosser, who, when an infant, had slept for some time in what his mother said, was a haunted nursery in an old house near Chapel Izzard.
15:36And who, whenever he was ill, over-fatigued, or in any wise feverish, suffered all through his life, as he had done from a time he could scarcely remember, from a vision of a certain gentleman, fat and pale, every curl of whose wig, every button and fold of whose laced clothes,
15:54and every feature and line, of whose sensual and unwholesome face, was as minutely drawn to the dress of his grandfather's portrait, which hung before him every day, at breakfast, dinner, and supper.
16:06Mr Prosser mentioned this as an instance of a curiously monotonous, individualised, and persistent nightmare, and hinted the extreme horror and anxiety with which his cousin, of whom he spoke in the past tense, as poor Jemmy, was at any time induced to mention it.
16:28you
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