The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

"I was to have slept again with him next night to look further into the matter, but a friend of his came from --- that day, so I could not renew the experiment, as I had fully determined to do. By-the-bye, I was troubled for months after by the same feeling that the clothes were being pulled off the bed. "And that's the yarn of the Black Dogs and the Thumbless Hand." "I think," said I, "that you did no harm in telling Bolter's young woman." "I never thought of it when I told her, or of her interest in the kennel; but, by George, she soon broke off her engagement." "Did you know Manning, the Pakeha Maori, the fellow who wrote Old New Zealand?" "No, what about him?" "He did not put it in his book, but he told the same yarn, without the dogs, as having happened to himself. He saw the whole arm, and the hand was leprous." "Ugh!" said the Beach-comber. "Next morning he was obliged to view the body of an old Maori, who had been murdered in his garden the night before. That old man's hand was the hand he saw. I know a room in an old house in England where plucking off the bed-clothes goes on, every now and then, and has gone on as long as the present occupants have been there. But I only heard lately, and they only heard from me, that the same thing used to occur, in the same room and no other, in the last generation, when another family lived there."