n. The Rathgar house had a basement passage leading to
a door into the yard, and along this passage her mother and the children
used to hear dragging, limping steps, and the latch of the door rattling,
but no one could ever be found when search was made. The house-bells were
old and all in a row, and on one occasion they all rang, apparently of
their own accord. The lady narrator used to sleep in the back drawing
room, and always when the light was put out she heard strange noises, as
if some one was going round the room rubbing paper along the wall, while
she often had the feeling that a person was standing beside her bed. A
cousin, who was a nurse, once slept with her, and also noticed these
strange noises. On one occasion this room was given up to a very
matter-of-fact young man to sleep in, and next morning he said that the
room was very strange, with queer noises in it.

[Footnote 1: For September 1913.]

Her mother also had an extraordinary experience in the same house. One
evening she had just put the baby to bed, when she heard a voice calling
"mother." She left the bedroom, and called to her daughter, who was in a
lower room, "What do you want?" But the girl replied that she had _not_
called her; and then, in her turn, asked her mother if _she_ had been in
the front room, for she had just heard a noise as if some one was trying
to fasten the inside bars of the shutters across. But her mother had been
upstairs, and no one was in the front room. The experiences in the
Rathmines house were of a similar auditory nature, _i.e._ the young
ladies heard their names called, though it was found that no one in the
house had done so.

Occasionally it happens that ghosts inspire a law-suit. In the
seventeenth century they were to be found actively urging the adoption of
legal proceedings, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they
play a more passive part. A case about a haunted house took place in
Dublin in the year 1885, in which the ghost may be said to have won. A
Mr. Waldron, a solicitor's clerk, sued his next-door neighbour, one
Mr. Kiernan, a mate in the merchant service, to recover