What Was It by Fitz-James O'Brien

It is July 1854. Harry has just arrived No.28 Twenty-sixth Street, in New York City. It was built some fifteen or twenty years earlier by a well-known New York merchant, who five years earlier threw the commercial world into convulsions by a stupendous bank fraud. He escaped to Europe, and died not long after of a broken heart. Almost immediately after the news of his decease reached America, and was verified, the report spread in Twenty-sixth Street that No. 28 was haunted.

Before it was turned into a boarding-house, the caretaker and his wife, placed there by the house agent into whose hands it had passed for purposes of renting or sale, declared that they were troubled with unnatural noises. Doors were opened without any visible agency. The remnants of furniture scattered through the various rooms were, during the night, piled one upon the other by unknown hands. Invisible feet passed up and down the stairs in broad daylight, accompanied by the rustle of unseen silk dresses, and the gliding of viewless hands along the massive balusters. The care taker and his wife declared that they would live there no longer.

The house remained untenanted for three years before Mrs. Moffat took over, turining it into a boarding-house. And after spending a month there, Harry was forced to acknowledge that nothing in the remotest degree approaching the supernatural had manifested itself until one night...

What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien (31st December 1828 - 6th April 1862) was first published in "Harper's" in March 1859.

It was the first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the prototype of de Maupassant's Horla.

With Peter Marinker [Harry Crown], Blane Fairman [Doctor Stephen Hammond], and Helen Horton [Mrs. Moffatt].

28/06/1980

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