The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

Mrs. Ricketts' "resolution remained firm," but her health was impaired; she tried changing her room, without results. The disturbances pursued her. Her brother now returned. She told him nothing, and he heard nothing, but next day she unbosomed herself. Captain Jervis therefore sat up with Captain Luttrell and his own man. He was rewarded by noises which he in vain tried to pursue. "I should do great injustice to my sister" (he writes to Mr. Ricketts on 9th August, 1771), "if I did not acknowledge to have heard what I could not, after the most diligent search and serious reflection, any way account for." Captain Jervis during a whole week slept by day, and watched, armed, by night. Even by day he was disturbed by a sound as of immense weights falling from the ceiling to the floor of his room. He finally obliged his sister to leave the house. What occurred after Mrs. Ricketts abandoned Hinton is not very distinct. Apparently Captain Jervis's second stay of a week, when he did hear the noises, was from 1st August to 8th August. From a statement by Mrs. Ricketts it appears that, when her brother joined his ship, the Alarm (9th August), she retired to Dame Camis's house, that of her coachman's mother. Thence she went, and made another attempt to live at Hinton, but was "soon after assailed by a noise I never before heard, very near me, and the terror I felt not to be described". She therefore went to the Newbolts, and thence to the old Palace at Winton; later, on Mr. Ricketts' return, to the Parsonage, and then to Longwood (to the old house there) near Alresford.