The Blood Cleaned Up All
Right When You Were About It, But Kept On Turning Up In Other
Places, And
In the one you had just cleaned as soon as you left off
and went elsewhere; and the morning came
And found things in much
the same state until "before suntime," say about 10 o'clock, when it
faded away.
I cautiously tried to get my stately, touchy dowager duchess to
explain how it was that there was such a lot of blood, and how it
was it got into the house. She just said "it had to go somewhere,"
and refused to give rational explanations as Chambers's Journal does
after telling a good ghost story. I found afterwards that it was
quite decided it was a case of "blood come before," and at Okyon,
Miss Slessor told me, in regard to the similar case there, that this
was the opinion held regarding the phenomenon. It is always held
uncanny in Africa if a person dies without shedding blood. You see,
the blood is the life, and if you see it come out, you know the
going of the thing, as it were. If you do not, it is mysterious.
At Okyon, a few days after the blood appeared, a nephew of the
person whose house it came into was killed while felling a tree in
the forest; a bough struck him and broke his neck, without shedding
a drop of blood, and this bore out the theory, for the blood having
"to go somewhere" came before.
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