hough I cannot state I
have ever heard it speak.

I believe it attracts phantasms in just the same way as do certain
people, myself included, and certain kinds of furniture. Its groanings
at night have constantly attracted, startled, and terrified me; they
have been quite different to the sounds I have heard it make in the
daytime; and often I could have sworn that, when I listened to its
groanings, I was listening to the groanings of some dying person, and,
what is more harrowing still, to some person I knew.

I have heard it said, too, that the most ghastly screams and gurgles
have been heard proceeding from the ash trees planted in or near the
site of murders or suicides, and as I sit here writing, a scene opens
before me, and I can see a plain with one solitary tree--an
ash--standing by a pool of water, on the margin of which are three
clusters of reeds. Dark clouds scud across the sky, and the moon only
shows itself at intervals. It is an intensely wild and lonely spot, and
the cold, dank air blowing across the barren wastes renders it all the
more inhospitable. No one, no living thing, no object is visible save
the ash. Suddenly it moves its livid trunk, sways violently,
unnaturally, backwards and forwards--once, twice, thrice; and there
comes from it a cry, a most piercing, agonising cry, half human, half
animal, that dies away in a wail and imparts to the atmosphere a
sensation of ice. I can hear the cry as I sit here writing; my memory
rehearses it; it was one of the most frightful, blood-curdling, hellish
sounds I ever endured; and the scene was on the Wicklow hills in
Ireland.

The narcotic plant, the mandrake, is also credited with groaning, though
I cannot say I have ever heard it. Though there is nothing particularly
psychic about the witch-hazel, in the hands of certain people who are
mediumistic, it will indicate the exact spot where water lies under the
ground. The people who possess this faculty of discovering the locality
of water by means of the hazel, are named dowsers, and my only wonder is
that their undeniably useful faculty is not more cultivated and
developed.

To my mind, there is no limit to the possibilities suggested by this
faculty; for surely, if one species of tree possesses attraction for a
certain object in nature, there can be no reason why other species of
trees should not possess a similar attraction for other objects in
nature. And if they possess this attraction for the physi