Dennis Wheatley - The Haunting of Toby Jugg

As they picked me up I shouted: There's a man upstairs! A burglar! A burglar!'

Then, trembling with shock and excitement, I burst into tears and flung myself into Julia's arms.

The two men armed themselves with golf clubs and went upstairs. The women remained clustered about me in the hall anxiously listening for sounds of strife, but the only ones that reached us were the faint opening and shutting of doors.

Uncle Paul and his friend seemed to be away a long time, but at last they rejoined us. They said that they had searched every room, looked under all the beds and in all the cupboards, but they had not found the burglar, and as far as they could judge nothing had been taken or disturbed; so I must have imagined him.

'But I saw him!' I cried, repudiating the suggestion with indignation. 'He's a horrid, bald old man! He glared at me through the banisters and I thought he was going to spring at me. If he's not there now he must have got out on to the roof.'

Their attempts to reassure me were in vain. I flatly refused to go to bed until further search had been made. The burglar could not have come down the back' stairs because there weren't any, so I feared that he must be lurking somewhere and might come creeping into my room while the grownups were having dinner.

To quiet my fears the attics and roof were searched; but without result The moon had risen and in its light there was no place on the sloping tiles of that small, square house where a man could have remained hidden. As the gaps between the roof of The Willows and those of the houses on either side of it were far too wide for any man to jump, the only other possibility was that the burglar had got out of one of the second floor windows and shinned down a drainpipe. I insisted that he must have done so and was, perhaps, hiding outside, waiting to return when we were all asleep.

Julia made the two men go out into the garden with torches. There were flowerbeds all round the house and anyone coming down a drainpipe must have landed on one, but there was not a footmark to be seen on any of them.

My tears had long since dried, but I was still very excited and nothing could shake my conviction that I had seen a murderous looking thug crouching on the stairs. However, nothing more could be done about it, so I allowed myself to be taken up to bed while Florrie got a special supper that Julia ate with me; then she read me to sleep.

Next morning, of course, the whole affair was gone into again, but no fresh light was thrown upon it, and with the approach of Christmas I ceased to think about it any more. It was not until nearly eleven years later that there came a sequel to this strange affair.

One day just as I was leaving the mess at Biggin Hill, after lunch, a trim looking W.A.A.F. came up to me and said: 'Hello, Master Toby! Don't you remember me?'

She was rather a pert looking blonde of about thirty, and her face was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place her.

'I'm Florrie Meddows,' she said. 'I was housemaid at The Willows when you were a little boy. My, sir, how you've grown! But I would have known you anywhere. How's Mr. and Mrs. Jugg; in the pink, I hope?'

Of course, I recalled her then and we talked for a bit of old times. After a while she asked: 'Did you ever see any more spooks at The Willows?'

'Spooks!' I echoed. 'What on earth do you mean?'

'Why, ghosts, of course. Surely you remember the night when you scared us all stiff by insisting that you had seen a ghost?'

'You're mixing me up with someone else,' I laughed. 'I've never seen a ghost in my life.'

She shook her head. 'No, it was you all right. You came yelling downstairs fit to wake the dead. But I remember now, you thought it was a burglar; and I suppose your aunt, not wanting to frighten you, never told you different.'

At that the whole episode came back to my mind as clearly as though it had happened only the day before. 'I've certainly always thought it was a burglar,' I agreed in great surprise. 'Whatever makes you think it was a ghost? 1

'Well, a human being couldn't have flown out of the window,' Florrie countered, 'or disappeared like that without leaving a single trace, could he? Besides, your uncle and aunt may not have let on to you about it, but they were nuts about Spiritualism. There was hardly a night when they had friends down from London that they didn't go in for table turning, wall rapping, and all that It wasn't none of my business, and Cook and me just used to laugh about it, thinking them a bit cranky, till the night you gave us all such a fright That made us think very different, knowing what we did; and we were both so scared that we gave notice first thing next morning. We'd have sacrificed our money and left there and then if it hadn't been for letting Mrs. Jugg down over Christmas, and her promising not to hold any more sйances while we were in the house. If it was a burglar you saw, Master Toby, then I'm a policeman and Hitler's my Aunt Fanny. No good ever comes of calling on the spirits, and it was through them doing that some horrid thing started to haunt the house.'

Friday, 8th May

Another quiet night, although rather a restless one, owing to Julia never having turned up yesterday evening, as I hoped she would. Perhaps she decided to put off her visit till today and then stay over the weekend.

Fortunately, I became so interested in writing the account of my 'burglar' that I continued at it after dinner, and that occupied my mind enough to prevent my fretting over her non-appearance until Deb settled me down for the night.

I had better finish it off now. Actually, there is little more to tell; and I find it difficult to doubt that Florrie Meddows' explanation of the vanishing without trace of the figure that I saw must be the true one.

People do not tell children ghost stories or give them books about ghouls and vampires to read. Tales of witches who turn princes into frogs and giants who carry off princesses yes; but anything to do with the afterlife or the supernatural is taboo. Therefore, at the age of eight and a half I can scarcely have known what the word 'ghost' implied, hence my immediate assumption that the thing I saw was a man.

It is this, I think, that gives the occurrence peculiar and outstanding weight as proof that astral bodies are at times visible to humans. Everyone else in that house knew what was going on there, so, if any of them had seen what I did, one might fairly argue that thinking about the sйances had played Old Harry with their nerves, and that they had imagined it. But I could not possibly have done so, because before one can make a mental concept of anything it is essential to have some basic knowledge of it, and in my case this was entirely lacking.

The next time I saw Julia I tackled her about it. At first she hedged and pretended to have forgotten the whole affair; but when I told her about my meeting with Florrie she shrugged and said with her lazy smile:

'Of course it was an astral, darling. It's quite true that when you first came to us at The Willows we used to hold sйances now and then. But only for fun; and after you saw your "burglar" we were much too frightened ever to hold one again. When Paul had searched the house we knew that it couldn't have been a man who had scared you, and the only possible explanation was that one of our controls must be hovering about in visual form. Naturally, as you were only a child, we concealed the truth from you and tried to make you forget the fright you'd had as quickly as we could. I don't mind admitting now that we were pretty scared ourselves, and I was thankful that we had already arranged to move from The Willows soon after Christmas.'

I tried to get her to tell me about the sйances they had held, but she insisted that there was really nothing to tell, as she hadn't proved a very good medium and, apart from the totally unexpected appearance of my burglar, the results had been disappointing; so I did not press her. The important point is that she fully confirmed all that Florrie had said.