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was the story as told by Mrs. Pennyman. Lord Halifax sent it to the Reverend Baring-Gould, who later sent him a letter he received from a reader of his account in the Cornhill Magazine . From this letter, it appeared that the haunted house had been transformed into a hotel in the 1880s. The reader—a lady—described how she and two friends had stayed at the Hotel du Lion d’Or in May 1887, and it is clear that one of the bedrooms they were given was the room in which the two servant girls had seen the ghost. The lady herself slept in the next room, and settled down after dinner to write letters. The hotel was very quiet—they were apparently the only guests—but toward midnight she heard footsteps on the landing outside the door. Then one of the ladies in the next bedroom—which was connected to her own—tapped on the door and asked if she was all right; she had been awakened by footsteps walking up and down. The two ladies unlocked the door and peered out on to the landing; but there was no one there, and no sound either. So they went back to bed. As she fell asleep, the lady continued to hear the slow, dragging steps which seemed to come from outside her door. They left Lille the next morning, and she thought no more about the experience until she read Baring-Gould’s account in the Cornhill and realized that she had probably heard the ghost of the Place du Lion d’Or.
    Stories of this type inevitably raise suspicions in the mind of the scientific investigator; they sound just a little too dramatic to be true—the young man confined in an iron cage, and so on. Yet since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, thousands of well-authenticated cases have been recorded. Sir Ernest Bennett’s Apparitions and Haunted Houses , for example, contains more than a hundred carefully documented cases, and many of these have the same suspiciously dramatic air that suggests an active imagination. Case five will serve as an illustration: a General Barter of County Cork describes seeing the ghost of a certain Lieutenant B. in India—riding on a pony in the moonlight, complete with two Hindu servants. The general said: “Hello, what the devil do you want?” The ghost came to a halt and looked down at him; and the general noticed that he now had a beard, and that his face was fatter than when he knew him some years before. Another officer who had known Lieutenant B. immediately before his death later verified that he had grown a beard and become stout, and that the pony he was riding had been purchased at Peshawur (where he died of some sickness) and killed through reckless riding.
    It certainly sounds a highly unlikely story. Yet it is confirmed (in writing) by an officer to whom the general told it immediately afterwards, by the general’s wife, and by a major. The wife also states that they heard a horse galloping at breakneck speed around their house at night on several occasions, and adds that the house was built by Lieutenant B. Finally, Bennett himself confirmed with the war office that Lieutenant B. had died at Peshawur in January 1854. So although only General Barter saw the ghost, the evidence for the truth of his story seems strong. Other ghosts cited by Bennett were witnessed by many people—for example, the ghost of a chimney sweep who died of cancer, and who returned to his cottage every night for two months, until the whole family (including five children) began to take it for granted.
    It is worth noting that nearly all ghosts mentioned in the records of the Society for Psychical Research look like ordinary solid human beings; so it seems probable that most people have at some time seen a ghost without realizing it. The late T. C. Lethbridge has described in his book Ghost and Ghoul how, when he was about to leave a friend’s room at Cambridge in 1922, he saw a man in a top hat come into the room—he presumed it was a college porter who had to give a message. The next day he asked his