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My great aunt never impressed me as an especially imaginative woman. For as long as I'd known her, which of course was my entire life, she had very much kept herself to herself, even on those occasions when she threw the old house open for family gatherings. I would be touring those now familiar old hallways and rooms, breathing in the dusty history of so many generations of our family, and invariably I would find her sitting knitting in a far flung corner, happy to "leave all the merry-making to you young people."

And all of that is to explain why the story I am about to tell you still fills me with wonder. Because, if she was not an imaginative woman, that means everything she told me must be true. And, if it is true, then everything the world has taught me about life and death is a lie.

So I lay out her tale exactly as she told me, in her own words as much as I can, and with none of the embellishments and personal opinions with which I normally layer life. Turn your own lights low, then, and make yourself comfortable; and picture the scene, my great aunt a dignified woman in her eighties, seated in an armchair that was even older than she, her face animated by the flickering shadows of firelight; and her niece, myself, visiting for a week or so, and seated on the other side of the fireplace, listening as I always did while she relived her own years as a youth.

I struggle to put an exact date to her story, but I'd place it somewhere around the early 1840s, putting her in her very late teens or just stepping into her twenties, And she, like I, was visiting an elderly relative, a day-long coach ride away from home, in a barely populated corner of western Massachusetts.

She had believed, she told me, that she was the only visitor; that, aside from the servants, she and her relative were alone in the manor house. But several times since her arrival a few days earlier, she had caught the unmistakable odor of pipe tobacco, and seen - always fleetingly, from the corner of her eye - a young man, just leaving a room as she entered it, but always proffering a polite greeting before he left. So now I leave her to tell her strange story in her own voice.

I assumed (she told me) that perhaps another family member was also visiting. Ragleigh Manor was vast enough that a dozen people could mill around it without anyone else knowing they were there. But when I asked the cook, as we discussed that evening's menu, who the young man might be, she simply looked at me for a moment, then crossed herself and changed the subject.

Confounded, I took the same question to one of the other servants, a girl around my own age of 22, but she merely flushed bright red, giggled and told me ‘I'm sure I don't know, ma'am.' Finally, then, I took my question to my relative.

"So you've seen him too," she said softly. "I never have. I hear him and I smell that infernal pipe of his, but it's only the younger staff who actually see him. As for who he is, I'm not sure. The tradition is, he was the oldest son of the fifth Earl, killed in a hunting accident in 17-something. A bit of a rake, according to the stories, always an eye for the women." And she looked at me as she spoke those words and said, "and now he has an eye for you. Make certain that is all he has."

I laughed. "I return home on Saturday, just three nights hence. There is no man alive, in such a short time, who could turn my head in any direction that I do not wish it to turn," and with that, it was my relative's turn to laugh. "He is not alive," she reminded me. "But you are headstrong and sensible. As long as you remember that, you have nothing to fear."

We sat and talked until late, as was our habit every evening, and it was close to 11 before I made my way to my room, up on the second floor above the ballroom, and several closed doors down from my relative's chamber. The house was silent; if I listened very carefully I might hear the occasional scuffle or scratch of mice, or a door closing up in the servant's quarters, but that was all. I readied myself for bed, then settled down to read for a while by the light of a lantern.

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