here. Again and again, as I have been passing after nightfall,
through tree-girt glen, forest, or avenue, I have seen all sorts of
curious forms and shapes move noiselessly from tree to tree. Hooded
figures, with death's-heads, have glided surreptitiously through
moon-kissed spaces; icy hands have touched me on the shoulders; whilst,
pacing alongside me, I have oft-times heard footsteps, light and heavy,
though I have seen nothing.

Miss Frances Sinclair tells me that, once, when walking along a country
lane, she espied some odd-looking object lying on the ground at the foot
of a tree. She approached it, and found to her horror it was a human
finger swimming in a pool of blood. She turned round to attract the
attention of her friends, and when she looked again the finger had
vanished. On this very spot, she was subsequently informed, the murder
of a child had taken place.

Trees are, I believe, frequently haunted by spirits that suggest crime.
I have no doubt that numbers of people have hanged themselves on the
same tree in just the same way as countless people have committed
suicide by jumping over certain bridges. Why? For the very simple reason
that hovering about these bridges are influences antagonistic to the
human race, spirits whose chief and fiendish delight is to breathe
thoughts of self-destruction into the brains of passers-by. I once heard
of a man, medically pronounced sane, who frequently complained that he
was tormented by a voice whispering in his ear, "Shoot yourself! Shoot
yourself!"--advice which he eventually found himself bound to follow.
And of a man, likewise stated to be sane, who journeyed a considerable
distance to jump over a notorious bridge because he was for ever being
haunted by the phantasm of a weirdly beautiful woman who told him to do
so. If bridges have their attendant sinister spirits, so undoubtedly
have trees--spirits ever anxious to entice within the magnetic circle of
their baleful influence anyone of the human race.

Many tales of trees being haunted in this way have come to me from India
and the East. I quoted one in my _Ghostly Phenomena_, and the following
was told me by a lady whom I met recently, when on a visit to my wife's
relations in the Midlands.

"I was riding with my husband along a very lonely mountain road in
Assam," my informant began, "when I suddenly discovered I had lost my
silk scarf, which happened to be a rather costly one. I had a pretty
shrewd idea wh