2 - The rise of optical apparitions

Summary

Published in The Keepsake for 1829, Walter Scott's “The Tapestried Chamber, or the Lady in the Sacque” concerns the eerie nocturnal experience of one General Richard Browne, retired from military service, whose tour of the English countryside accidentally leads him to the ancestral mansion of his long-lost friend Lord Frank Woodville. Browne accepts Woodville's invitation to stay for the night, but the following morning appears much disturbed and informs his host that he must leave on urgent business. Pressed by Woodville to explain himself, he reluctantly admits that the real reason for his departure is that he has been visited by an apparition, a spectral woman with, as he describes her, a “diabolical countenance” and “a grin which seemed to intimate the malice and the derision of an incarnate fiend” (“TC,” pp. 136–7). As the other rooms had already been occupied before Browne's arrival, Woodville had had no choice but to put his guest in the haunted chamber. Yet Browne's unexpected visit, the nobleman confesses, also “seemed the most favourable opportunity of removing the unpleasant rumours which attached to the room.” Browne, it turns out, had been the unwitting guinea pig of an impromptu experiment, the ideal candidate for assisting Woodville in an exorcism – not of a ghost, that is, but merely of the embarrassing rumours concerning the notorious room – as his “courage was indubitable, and … mind free of any preoccupation on the subject” (“TC,” p. 139).