Haunted Houses in former times were very common in every corner of England and Scotland, and many persistent traditions descended of unquiet spirits who were doomed to haunt for ever the spot on which they had wrought or suffered some deed of blood. Dim shadows of earthly forms, they continued into their ghostly existence the form and aspect that they wore in life, and the gaping and bleeding wounds of murder froze the heart of the beholder from age to age. Shrieks, wailings, wringing of the hands, knockings, infernal curses and blasphemies—such were some of the accessory horrors that the popular imagination cast around these ghostly creations, of whom many continued to possess, but in intensified form, all the power and disposition to evil which had belonged to them in life. These unquiet spirits could sometimes be laid, or compelled to rest finally in their graves, or the Red Sea, by the exhortations of clergymen of pre-eminent piety, who often contrived to exorcise them by passing a night of severe religious exercises alone in the haunted chamber or house. The inevitable decline of belief in the supernatural has swept away almost all our domestic ghosts, spite of the especial proneness of the popular imagination to this kind of belief. Of the haunted houses of Scotland, past or present, none are more famous than Glamis Castle, Cortachy Castle, and Spedlins Tower; no local ghosts were more persistent than those that haunted Newton Castle, Huntingtower, Allanbank, Woodhouselee, and Finhaven. In England, among the most striking cases are Corby Castle with its 'radiant boy,' Peel Castle with its 'Manthe Dog,' Ashley Hall, Skipsea Castle, Hilton Castle with its 'Cauld Lad,' Holland House, Rainham Hall with its 'Gray Lady,' Tharston Hall, Newstead Abbey, Powis Castle, and Caistor Castle, round the courtyard of which drives every year a ghostly carriage drawn by four headless horses. No less rich in stories of haunted houses are Ireland, Wales, Brittany, and Germany, and no stories of this class are more weird and gruesome than the examples in the folklore of Russia. Spectral animals as well as men and strange lights were seen at some places, and there are authentic stories of undignified apparitions of whose presence mortals were made aware by their sense of smell. The 'Shuck Dog' of Norfolk is of large size and black colour, with great yellow eyes, and brings sure death to any one he meets. Sometimes, however, he is headless, or with but one blazing eye in the centre of his forehead. Indeed, the whole subject of spectral apparitions opens up a large chapter in popular demonology, which has been somewhat grotesquely overlaid with the theological conception of the devil.
Countless stories, old and new, are told of spirits that have at various times infested houses to the terror of their earthly inmates. Of these classical examples are those connected with Tedworth, testified to by Joseph Glanvill, and with Epworth Rectory, on the still less impeachable evidence of John Wesley. An interesting modern example of how stories of this kind can be manufactured even in our day, out of hearsay and third-hand statements, is that of the haunted house in Berkeley Square, which seems to have received its popularity and fame from being identified through some accidental circumstances as the scene of a similar story related in Temple Bar for 1868 by Rhoda Broughton of a house in the country. Those who are sufficiently interested can follow the growth, if not the actual genesis, of the story in a series of communications to Notes and Queries, sixth series, vols. ii. and iii.
See the article APPARITIONS and the books enumerated there; and particularly John H. Ingram's Haunted Homes of Great Britain (1884), and the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, instituted in 1882.