Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 5, 2/7 by Estelle Roberts

The present owner agreed that these details confirmed the information she had obtained from other sources. She told us that, though many potential customers had come to look at the bed, none had liked it well enough to buy it. Her opinion, with which I agreed, was that prospective buyers were influenced by the bed’s evil emanations, though they were not conscious of this being the reason.

She told of a craftsman she had called in to make some repairs to the bed shortly after she had bought it. After making a survey of the work to be done he told her that he would prefer to have no more to do with it. “There’s something about that bed I don’t like,” he said. “There is a feeling of murder about it, and I would rather not touch it.”

Later she herself became aware of the bed’s disturbing influence, and began to think there was something in the craftsman’s vaguely expressed fears. At this stage I was called in. I had no doubt that my reading of the bed’s history was correct in every detail.

The clarity of the impressions I received permitted of no other version. The haunting was caused by the anxiety of the stabbed man for the safety of his hidden papers, important, perhaps to the heirs of his estate.

Whether the papers were later found in the hallowed out leg of the bed I never heard. Probably they were not, as news of their discovery would certainly have come to me. But failure to find them did not surprise me at all because, as I have said, it was an ornate bed with much rich carving.

A craftsman who could produce such exquisite work would have had no difficulty in concealing the entry to any hiding-place he cared to contrive behind its elaborate ornamentation.
I advised the owner to destroy the bed, not in an attempt to prove that it contained this secret receptacle but because it radiated so much terror and sorrow. No good, I felt, could come from preserving a piece of such melancholy memory.

In November 1935 I was invited to investigate a house, which, it turned out, was also haunted by an earthbound spirit in search of missing papers. The house, in Surrey, was owned by a wealthy businessman and shared by his secretary and housekeeper. Ever since they had taken possession they had been disturbed by sporadic visitations, but these had increased in frequency to such an extent that the occupants were becoming thoroughly unsettled.