The Last House in C---Street by Dinah Mulock

I am not a believer in ghosts in general; I see no good in them. They come--that is, are reported to come--so irrelevantly, purposelessly-- so ridiculously, in short--that one's common sense as regards this world, one's supernatural sense of the other, are alike revolted. Then nine out of ten 'capital ghost stories' are so easily accounted for; and in the tenth, when all natural explanation fails, one who has discovered the extraordinary difficulty there is in all society in getting hold of that very slippery article called a fact, is strongly inclined to shake a dubious head, ejaculating, 'Evidence! it is all a question of evidence!'

But my unbelief springs from no dogged or contemptuous scepticism as to the possibility--however great the improbability--of that strange impression upon, or communication to, spirit in matter, from spirit wholly immaterialised, which is vulgarly called 'a ghost'. There is no credulity more blind, no ignorance more childish, that that of the sage who tries to measure 'heaven and earth and the things under the earth', with the small two-foot rule of his own brains.