The Ghost in the Tower: An Episode in Jacobia

Earl Howell Reed

Jan 1907 · Library of Alexandria

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A GHOST never makes the mistake of appearing before more than one person at a time. There may be much logic in this, for the element of mystery, which is one of the essential attributes to comfortable ghostly existence, would be destroyed if that existence should be established at some one time and place by a preponderance of unimpeachable testimony.

There is a ghost in my friend Jacobs’ water tower over in Michigan, or at least there was one there last Christmas eve. To me he was visible most of the time during a long interview I had with him, and to me he had all of the elements of reality. Nobody who reads this narrative will be in a position to dispute his existence, for, so far as I know, he and I were the only occupants of the tower at the time. If my nebulous friend should choose to make himself known to somebody else, it may furnish material for discussion and comparison of experiences in the future, but in the meantime controversy is quite useless.

To those who do not live in the world of romance and errant fancy, the winter landscapes along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan offer few allurements. The sweeping miles of piled and broken ice, the bleak and desolate bluffs, with their pale brows—fringed with naked trees—in moody relief against the dull skies, that are flecked with the white forms of the roving winter gulls, seem to repel every thought except that of hoped for creature comforts in some human habitation beyond. If it were not for these distant aureoles of hope—mirages though they often are—how gray and dreary the world would be.

Notwithstanding a love of Nature in her sterner moods, it was not for this that I journeyed to my friend’s country retreat in the winter time. I knew that warm hearted hospitality awaited me in the little farm house, nestled among the knolls back of the bluffs.

High up on one of the hills of “Jacobia,” the tower bares its lofty brow to the blasts of the gales. The huge structure seems calmly to defy the winter winds whistling through its upper casements and pounding against its sturdy sides. The swirling snows envelop its weather scarred top in the darkness, and an atmosphere of loneliness and isolation seems to pervade the great bulk, silhouetted against the flying legions of shredded and angry clouds, scudding across the gloomy and storm embattled skies at night.