Speaker 1: A phantom toe. I am not a superstitious man, far
from it. But despite all my efforts to the contrary,
I could not help thinking directly I had taken a
survey of my chamber that I should never quit it
without going through a strange adventure. There was something in
its immense size, heaviness and gloom that seemed to annihilate,
at one blow all my resolute skepticism as regards supernatural visitations.
It appeared to me totally impossible to go into that
room and disbelieve in ghosts. The fact is I had
incautiously partaken at supper of that favorite Dutch dish, sauer Kraut,
and I suppose it had disagreed with me and put
strange fancies into my head. Be this as it may,
I only know that after parting with my friend the night,
I gradually worked myself up into such a state of
fidgettiness that at last I wasn't sure whether I hadn't
become a ghost myself. Supposing ruminated, I supposing the landlord
himself should be a practical robber and should have taken
the lock and bolt from off this door for the
purpose of entering here in the dead of the night,
abstracting all my property and perhaps murdering me. I thought
the dog had a very cut throat air about him. Now,
I had never had any such idea until that moment,
for my host was a fat all Dutchmen are fat,
stupid looking fellow who I don't believe had sense enough
to understand what a robbery or murder meant. But somehow
or other, whenever we have anything really to annoy us,
and it certainly was not pleasant to go to bed
in a strange place without being able to fasten one's door,
we are sure to aggravate it by myriads of chimeras
of our own brain. So on the present occasion, in
the midst of a thousand disagreeable reveries, some of the
most wild absurdity, it jumped very gloomily into bed, having
first put out my candle for total darkness was far
preferable to its flickering ghostly light, which transformed rather than
revealed objects, and soon fell asleep, perfectly tired out with
my day's riding. How long I lay asleep, I don't know,
but I suddenly awoke from a disagreeable dream of cut throats,
ghosts and long winding passages in a haunted inn. An
indescribable feeling such as I never before experienced, hung upon me.
It seemed as if every nerve in my body had
a hundred spirits tickling it. And this was accompanied by
so great a heat that, inwardly cursing mine host's sour
kraut and wondering how the dutch Men could endure such poison,
I was forced to sit up in bed to cool myself.
The whole of the room was profoundly dark, excepting at
one place, where the moonlight, falling through a crevice in
the shutters, through a straight line of about an inch
or so thick upon the floor, clear, sharp, and intensely
brilliant against the darkness. I leave you to conceive my
horror when, upon looking at this said line of light,
I saw there a naked human toe, nothing more. For
the first instant I thought the vision must be some
effect of moonlight. Then that I was only half awake
and could not see distinctly. So I rubbed my eyes
two or three times and looked again. Still there was
the accursed thing, plain, distinct, immovable, marble like in its
fixedness and rigidity, but in everything else horribly human. I
am not an easily frightened man, no one who has
traveled so much and seen so much, and been exposed
to so many dangers as I can be. But there
was something so mysterious and unusual in the appearance of
this single toe that for a short time I could
not think what to be at, so I did nothing
but stare at it in a state of utter bewilderment.
At length, however, as the toe did not vanish under
my steady gaze, I thought I might as well change
my tactics, and, remembering that all midnight invaders, be they thieves, ghosts,
or devils, dislike nothing so much as a good noise,
I shouted out in a loud voice, Who's there? The
toe immediately disappeared in the darkness. Almost simultaneously with my words,
I leaped out of bed and rushed toward the place
where I had beheld the strange appearance. The next instant,
I ran against something and felt an iron grip round
my body. After this, I have no distinct recollection of
what occurred, excepting that a fearful struggle ensued between me
and my unseen opponent. That every now and then we
were violently hurled to the floor, from which we always
rose again in an instant, locked in a deadly embrace,
that we tugged and strained and pulled and pushed I
in the convulsive and frantic energy of a fight for life.
He For by this time I had discovered that the
intruder was a human being, actuated by some passion of
which I was ignorant. That we whirled round and round,
cheek to cheek, and arm to arm in fierce contest,
until the room appeared to whiz round with us, and
that at least a dozen people, my fellow traveler among them, roused,
I suppose by our repeated falls, came pouring into the
room with lights and showed me struggling with a man
having nothing on but a shirt, whose long tangled hair
and wild, unsettled eyes told me he was insane. And then,
for the first time I became aware that I had
received in the conflict several gashes from a knife, which
my opponent still held in his hand. To conclude my
story in a few words, for I dare say, all
of you, by this time are getting very tired. It
turned out that my midnight visitor was a madman who
was being conveyed to a lunatic asylum at the Hague,
and that he and his caper had been obliged to
stop at Delphi on their way. The poor fellow had
contrived during the night to escape from his keeper, who
had carelessly forgotten to lock the door of his chamber,
and with that irresistible desire to shed blood peculiar to
many insane people, had possessed himself of a pocket knife
belonging to the man who had charge of him. Entered
my room, which was most likely the only one in
the house unfastened, and was probably meditating the fatal stroke
when I saw his toe in the moonlight, the rest
of his body being hidden in the shade. After this
terrible freak of his he was watched with much greater strictness,
But I ought to observe as some excuse for the
keeper's negligence, that this was the first act of violence
he had ever attempted, and of a phantom toe