THE ROANOKE TIMES — AUGUST 6, 1893
A SUPERNATURAL STORY ♢ The Contents of a Paper Found on
the Person of an Insane Suicide.
Here is a story of the supernatural. It happened more than 100 years ago, so that you may hope that it is not true. Yet in those days the invention of news was not yet known, and the paper which contains this story was a sober and honest journal. One of the patients in a madhouse—a parish madhouse, I think that of Launceston—escaped. That was no new thing. They all wanted to escape. As the woman, although very mad indeed, was quite harmless, they went about their search in a leisurely fashion. At last they found her drowned in a shallow ditch and carried her back to the madhouse.
On preparing the unhappy woman for the grave they found in her corset—then called her stays—something that rustled. They cut the thing open and discovered a small parcel rolled up tight in some waterproof stuff—whatever was then invented. The parcel was a document written on parchment. It was written very small and misspelled, but this was how it ran:
“The man came along after dark. He stopped at our door and said he was a stranger, and would my aunt take him in for the night? He seemed a sailor and said he was respectable and showed money. ‘Elizabeth,’ said aunt, ’he can have your room, and you shall sleep with me.’ There were two bedrooms in the cottage, up a ladder, both garrets. During the evening he sent me out for drink, and he had a
