The Ghost and the Condemned Man by Sidney Dickinson 1920 (A True Tale)
When I called upon the Colonial Secretary, in the Government Offices at Melbourne, with a request that I might be allowed to visit the prisoner as he lay in jail awaiting execution, I was informed that such permission was contrary to all precedent.
I had sat directly under the eye of the culprit four weary days while the evidence accumulated that should take away his life. I had watched his varied changes of expression as the tide of testimony ebbed and flowed, and finally swelled up and overwhelmed him. I had heard against him the verdict of "the twelve good men and true" who had sat so long as arbiters of his fate, and the words of the judge condemning him to "be hanged by the neck until he was dead," and commending his soul to the mercy of a God who seemed far aloof from the scheme of human justice so long and so laboriously planned.
Short shrift had been allowed him. Condemned and sentenced on a Monday, the date for his act of expiation had been set for the early morning of the Monday then a scant three weeks away; an appeal for a respite had been quickly and formally made, and as quickly and formally disallowed; the days granted for preparation had glided by with portentous speed, and now but five remained between him and his introduction to the gallows and the cord.
As a special and gruesome favor I had received one of the few cards issued for the execution; and it was perhaps due as much to this fact as to that of my newspaper connections (as already stated) that the Colonial Secretary finally consented to waive in my interest the usual rule of exclusion, and handed me his order for my admission to the jail. I cannot confess to any high exultation when the mandate of the Secretary, bravely stamped with the Great Seal of the Colony of Victoria, was placed in my hands—particularly as it was accompanied by a strict injunction that no public account should be given of the interview.
"At least," said the Colonial Secretary, "not at present. The trial has been so sensational, the crimes traced home to this unhappy man so atrocious, that popular feeling has risen to such a pitch as to make it desirable to add thereto no new occasion of excitement. Moreover, I have refused many requests similar to yours from the local newspapers; you may imagine the position I should find myself in if it became known that I had discriminated in favor of a foreign journalist—therefore I rely upon your discretion."
Thus the Colonial Secretary—in consideration of whose injunction I made no professional use of my opportunity at the time, and report upon it now only because of its relation to this present record of events. Not that I asseverate the existence of such a relation, or theorize upon it even if it were, for the sake of argument, accepted as containing the nucleus of a mystery that, after many years of consideration, remains a mystery still.
I was not alone in my visit to the condemned cell in which, heavily ironed and guarded day and night by the death-watch, Frederick Bailey Deeming awaited his doom. My wife, who was included in the warrant from the Colonial Secretary, accompanied me; she who had been my companion in journeys that had taken me twice around the globe, and who had shared with me many of the inexplicable experiences to which I have alluded in my "Preface;" and who, seeming throughout her life more sensitive than most of us to occult forces that at times appear to be in operation about us, has since crossed the frontier of the Undiscovered Country, there to find, perhaps, solution of some of the riddles that have perplexed both her and me. Intensely human as she was, and in all things womanly, her susceptibility to weird and uncomprehended influences must always seem a contradiction—and the more so since they always came upon her not only without invitation, but even in opposition to a will of unusual force and sanity, which, until the incidents occurred that I am about to relate, kept them measurably in control.
A memento of my interview with the murderer stands before me on the table as I write:—a memento also of my wife's skill in modeling, on account of which I had with difficulty induced her to be my companion on my sinister errand—an impression in plaster of his right hand; the hand against which had been proved the "deep damnation of the taking-off" of two women and four children, and in whose lines thus preserved those learned in such matters profess to discern the record of other like crimes that have been suspected of him, but could not be confirmed. I will not weary the reader with the histories that have been read to me from this grisly document, and no one now may ever know whether they be true or false:—at all events the hand that made this impress was duly found guilty of the atrocities I have recorded against it, and the price that was exacted for them will seem to none excessive, and to some a world too small.
I remember being much struck at the time with the interest which the condemned man manifested in assisting me to secure the record. My warrant from the Colonial Secretary included permission to obtain it, and the consent of the prisoner followed promptly on the asking. It came, in fact, with a sort of feverish readiness, and I fancied that his mind found in the operation some brief respite from the thoughts that his position, and the swift approach of his fate, forced upon him. He regarded with intentness the moistening of the plaster, and its manipulation into the proper degree of consistency; followed intelligently the instruction to lay his hand with even pressure upon the yielding mass, and when the cast had hardened, and was passed through the bars for his inspection, he examined it with an appearance of the liveliest satisfaction.
"Do those lines mean anything?" he asked.
"Many think so," I replied, "and even profess to read a record from them. For myself, I am ignorant of the art."
"I have heard of that," he returned. "They call it 'palmistry,' don't they? I wish you could find out whether they are going to hang me next Monday. But they'll do that, right enough. I'm thirty-nine now, and my mother always said I would die before forty. She died a good while ago—but she keeps coming back. She comes every night, and of late she comes in the daytime, too. What does she bother me so for? Why can't she leave me alone?" (glancing over his shoulder.) "She's here now—over there in the corner. You can't see her? That's queer. Can't you see her?"—addressing the governor of the jail, who accompanied me, and who shook his head to the question. "I thought perhaps you could. But you don't miss much. She ain't pretty to look at, crying all the time and wringing her hands, and saying I'm bound to be hanged! I don't mind her so much in the daylight, but coming every night at two o'clock, and waking me up and tormenting me!—that's what I can't stand."
"Is this insanity?" I asked the governor as I came away.
"I don't know what it is," he replied. "We all thought at first it was shamming crazy, and the government sent in a lot of doctors to examine him; but he seemed sane enough when they talked with him—the only thing out about him was when he complained of his mother's visits; just as he did to you. And it is certainly true that he has a sort of fit about two o'clock every morning, and wakes up screaming and crying out that his mother is in the cell with him; and talks in a frightful, blood-curdling way to someone that nobody can see, and scares the death-watch half out of their wits. Insanity, hallucination, or an uneasy conscience—it might be any of them; I can't say. Whatever it is, it seems strange that he always talks about visitations from his mother, who, as far as I can learn, died quietly in her bed, and never of apparitions of his two wives and four children whose throats he cut with a knife held in the hand whose print you've got there under your arm. Perhaps you won't mind my saying it—but it strikes me you've got a queer taste for curiosities. I wouldn't be able to sleep with that thing in the house."
I laughed at the worthy governor's comment; yet, as it turned out, his words were pregnant with prophecy.
When I called upon the Colonial Secretary, in the Government Offices at Melbourne, with a request that I might be allowed to visit the prisoner as he lay in jail awaiting execution, I was informed that such permission was contrary to all precedent.
I had sat directly under the eye of the culprit four weary days while the evidence accumulated that should take away his life. I had watched his varied changes of expression as the tide of testimony ebbed and flowed, and finally swelled up and overwhelmed him. I had heard against him the verdict of "the twelve good men and true" who had sat so long as arbiters of his fate, and the words of the judge condemning him to "be hanged by the neck until he was dead," and commending his soul to the mercy of a God who seemed far aloof from the scheme of human justice so long and so laboriously planned.
Short shrift had been allowed him. Condemned and sentenced on a Monday, the date for his act of expiation had been set for the early morning of the Monday then a scant three weeks away; an appeal for a respite had been quickly and formally made, and as quickly and formally disallowed; the days granted for preparation had glided by with portentous speed, and now but five remained between him and his introduction to the gallows and the cord.
As a special and gruesome favor I had received one of the few cards issued for the execution; and it was perhaps due as much to this fact as to that of my newspaper connections (as already stated) that the Colonial Secretary finally consented to waive in my interest the usual rule of exclusion, and handed me his order for my admission to the jail. I cannot confess to any high exultation when the mandate of the Secretary, bravely stamped with the Great Seal of the Colony of Victoria, was placed in my hands—particularly as it was accompanied by a strict injunction that no public account should be given of the interview.
"At least," said the Colonial Secretary, "not at present. The trial has been so sensational, the crimes traced home to this unhappy man so atrocious, that popular feeling has risen to such a pitch as to make it desirable to add thereto no new occasion of excitement. Moreover, I have refused many requests similar to yours from the local newspapers; you may imagine the position I should find myself in if it became known that I had discriminated in favor of a foreign journalist—therefore I rely upon your discretion."
Thus the Colonial Secretary—in consideration of whose injunction I made no professional use of my opportunity at the time, and report upon it now only because of its relation to this present record of events. Not that I asseverate the existence of such a relation, or theorize upon it even if it were, for the sake of argument, accepted as containing the nucleus of a mystery that, after many years of consideration, remains a mystery still.
I was not alone in my visit to the condemned cell in which, heavily ironed and guarded day and night by the death-watch, Frederick Bailey Deeming awaited his doom. My wife, who was included in the warrant from the Colonial Secretary, accompanied me; she who had been my companion in journeys that had taken me twice around the globe, and who had shared with me many of the inexplicable experiences to which I have alluded in my "Preface;" and who, seeming throughout her life more sensitive than most of us to occult forces that at times appear to be in operation about us, has since crossed the frontier of the Undiscovered Country, there to find, perhaps, solution of some of the riddles that have perplexed both her and me. Intensely human as she was, and in all things womanly, her susceptibility to weird and uncomprehended influences must always seem a contradiction—and the more so since they always came upon her not only without invitation, but even in opposition to a will of unusual force and sanity, which, until the incidents occurred that I am about to relate, kept them measurably in control.
A memento of my interview with the murderer stands before me on the table as I write:—a memento also of my wife's skill in modeling, on account of which I had with difficulty induced her to be my companion on my sinister errand—an impression in plaster of his right hand; the hand against which had been proved the "deep damnation of the taking-off" of two women and four children, and in whose lines thus preserved those learned in such matters profess to discern the record of other like crimes that have been suspected of him, but could not be confirmed. I will not weary the reader with the histories that have been read to me from this grisly document, and no one now may ever know whether they be true or false:—at all events the hand that made this impress was duly found guilty of the atrocities I have recorded against it, and the price that was exacted for them will seem to none excessive, and to some a world too small.
I remember being much struck at the time with the interest which the condemned man manifested in assisting me to secure the record. My warrant from the Colonial Secretary included permission to obtain it, and the consent of the prisoner followed promptly on the asking. It came, in fact, with a sort of feverish readiness, and I fancied that his mind found in the operation some brief respite from the thoughts that his position, and the swift approach of his fate, forced upon him. He regarded with intentness the moistening of the plaster, and its manipulation into the proper degree of consistency; followed intelligently the instruction to lay his hand with even pressure upon the yielding mass, and when the cast had hardened, and was passed through the bars for his inspection, he examined it with an appearance of the liveliest satisfaction.
"Do those lines mean anything?" he asked.
"Many think so," I replied, "and even profess to read a record from them. For myself, I am ignorant of the art."
"I have heard of that," he returned. "They call it 'palmistry,' don't they? I wish you could find out whether they are going to hang me next Monday. But they'll do that, right enough. I'm thirty-nine now, and my mother always said I would die before forty. She died a good while ago—but she keeps coming back. She comes every night, and of late she comes in the daytime, too. What does she bother me so for? Why can't she leave me alone?" (glancing over his shoulder.) "She's here now—over there in the corner. You can't see her? That's queer. Can't you see her?"—addressing the governor of the jail, who accompanied me, and who shook his head to the question. "I thought perhaps you could. But you don't miss much. She ain't pretty to look at, crying all the time and wringing her hands, and saying I'm bound to be hanged! I don't mind her so much in the daylight, but coming every night at two o'clock, and waking me up and tormenting me!—that's what I can't stand."
"Is this insanity?" I asked the governor as I came away.
"I don't know what it is," he replied. "We all thought at first it was shamming crazy, and the government sent in a lot of doctors to examine him; but he seemed sane enough when they talked with him—the only thing out about him was when he complained of his mother's visits; just as he did to you. And it is certainly true that he has a sort of fit about two o'clock every morning, and wakes up screaming and crying out that his mother is in the cell with him; and talks in a frightful, blood-curdling way to someone that nobody can see, and scares the death-watch half out of their wits. Insanity, hallucination, or an uneasy conscience—it might be any of them; I can't say. Whatever it is, it seems strange that he always talks about visitations from his mother, who, as far as I can learn, died quietly in her bed, and never of apparitions of his two wives and four children whose throats he cut with a knife held in the hand whose print you've got there under your arm. Perhaps you won't mind my saying it—but it strikes me you've got a queer taste for curiosities. I wouldn't be able to sleep with that thing in the house."
I laughed at the worthy governor's comment; yet, as it turned out, his words were pregnant with prophecy.
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