Mr Gray's Strange Story

I am a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, fifty years old,
in sound health of body and mind. I have never had any belief in
spiritualism, clairvoyance or any similar psychical delusions. My
favourite studies at college were logic and mathematics, and no one
who knew me could suspect me of belonging to that class of enthusiasts
in which ghosts and other preternatural manifestations have their
origin. Yet I have had one strange experience in my life which
apparently contradicts all my theories of the universe and its laws,
nor have I ever been able to explain it on any rational hypothesis.
That there is some reasonable explanation I believe, and as there is
no one living now, except myself, whom the facts concern, I have
determined to give them to the world for the benefit of those who are
interested in abnormal phenomena.

Twenty-five years ago I was minister of a newly built church, in a
village on the shore of Lake Erie. The village had sprung up round the
saw mills of Mason and Company, lately erected to turn the giant pines
that grew on the sandy borders of the lake into lumber. When the pines
were all worked up, the great saw mills and lumber yards sought
another locality, and the village which had never had any
individuality of its own dropped out of existence.

There was no manse, and I boarded in the house of the chief member of
my congregation, Mr. Michael Forrest, who owned a fine farm of four
hundred acres dose to the village.

The Red House Farm, as it was called from the colour of the paint
Michael Forrest liberally bestowed on his buildings and fences, was in
those days a pleasant place. There peace and plenty reigned, and
everything within and without testified to good management, order and
comfort.

My story opens in the parlour of the Red House, where, in the early
afternoon of a splendid Indian summer day, a young man was writing at
a desk placed under an open window that looked into a spacious
verandah enclosed by cedar posts round which climbing plants were
twined in picturesque profusion. This "best room" was never used by
the family except on Sundays and festal occasions, and at other times
was given up to the minister, the Rev. Gilbert Gray, who writes this
narrative.