Vintage Scary Stories for the Modern Ghost Volume 2

Was It an Illusion?

By Amelia B. Edwards

The facts which I am about to relate happened to myself some sixteen or eighteen years ago, at which time I
served Her Majesty as an Inspector of Schools. Now, the Provincial Inspector is perpetually on the move; and I was still young enough to enjoy a life of constant travelling.

There are, indeed, many less agreeable ways in which an unbeneficed parson may contrive to scorn delights and
live laborious days. In remote places where strangers are scarce, his annual visit is an important event; and though
at the close of a long day's work he would sometimes prefer the quiet of a country inn, he generally finds himself the destined guest of the rector or the squire.

It rests with himself to turn these opportunities to account. If he makes himself pleasant, he forms agreeable friendships and sees English home life under one of its most attractive aspects; and sometimes, even in these days of universal common placeness, he may have the luck to meet with an adventure.

My first appointment was to a West of England district largely peopled with my personal friends and connections.
It was, therefore, much to my annoyance that I found myself, after a couple of years of very pleasant work, transferred to what a policeman would call 'a new beat,'
up in the North.

Unfortunately for me, my new beat−a rambling, thinly populated area of something under 1,800 square miles−was three times as large as the old one, and more than proportionately unmanageable.

Intersected at right angles by two ranges of barren hills and cut off to a large extent from the main lines of railway, it united about every inconvenience that a district could possess. The villages lay wide apart, often separated by long tracts of moorland; and in place of the well warmed railway compartment and the frequent manor house, I now spent half my time in hired vehicles and lonely country inns.

I had been in possession of this district for some three months or so, and winter was near at hand, when I paid my first visit of inspection to Pit End, an outlying hamlet in the most northerly corner of my county, just twenty two
miles from the nearest station.

Haying slept overnight at a place called Drumley, and inspected Drumley schools in the morning, I started for Pit End, with fourteen miles of railway and twenty two of hilly crossroads between myself and my journey's end.

I made, of course, all the enquiries I could think of before leaving; but neither the Drumley schoolmaster nor the landlord of the Drumley 'Feathers' knew much more of Pit End than its name. My predecessor, it seemed, had been in the habit of taking Pit End 'from the other side', the roads, though longer, being less hilly that way. That the place boasted some kind of inn was certain; but it was an inn unknown to fame, and to mine host of the 'Feathers'. Be it good or bad, however, I should have to put up at it.

Upon this scant information I started. My fourteen miles of railway journey soon ended at a place called Bramsford Road, whence an omnibus conveyed passengers to a dull little town called Bramsford Market. Here I found a horse and 'trap' to carry me on to my destination; the horse being a rawboned grey with a profile like a camel, and the trap a ricketty high gig which had probably done commercial travelling in the days of its youth.

From Bramsford Market the way lay over a succession of long hills, rising to a barren, high level plateau. It was
a dull, raw afternoon of mid November, growing duller and more raw as the day waned and the east wind blew
keener..

'How much further now, driver?' I asked, as we alighted at the foot of a longer and a stiffer hill than any we had yet passed over.

He turned a straw in his mouth, and grunted something about 'fewer or foive mile by the rooad'.