My Own True Ghost Story (Unabridged)

This tale was first published in The Week's News on 25 February 1888, and then included the same year in Volume 5 of the Indian Railway Library – The Phantom 'Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales. It was collected in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories in 1895, and in numerous later editions of that collection. The narrator stays the night in a rather sinister old dâk-bungalow. During the night he hears the 'unmistakable' sound of a game of billiards being played in the non-existent room next door. In the morning the ancient servant tells him that in old times there had been a billiard-room there, and that one night one of the sahibs had fallen dead across the table. The narrator is excited to have found what seems to be an authentic ghost story. But then he hears the sound again; it was a little rat running to and fro inside the ceiling cloth, and his imagination had done the rest.