Lady Conway was not behind her guests in personal experiences.  Her ladyship was concerned with a good old-fashioned ghost.  We say ‘old-fashioned’ of set purpose, because while modern tales of ‘levitation’ and flighty furniture, of flying stones, of rappings, of spectral hands, of cold psychical winds, are exactly like the tales of old, a change, an observed change, has come over the ghost of the nineteenth century.  Readers of the Proceedings of the Psychical Society will see that the modern ghost is a purposeless creature.  He appears nobody knows why; he has no message to deliver, no secret crime to reveal, no appointment to keep, no treasure to disclose, no commissions to be executed, and, as an almost invariable rule, he does not speak, even if you speak to him.  The recent inquirers, notably Mr. Myers, remark with some severity on this vague and meaningless conduct of apparitions, and draw speculative conclusions to the effect that the ghost, as the Scotch say, ‘is not all there’.  But the ghosts of the seventeenth century were positively garrulous.  One remarkable specimen indeed behaved, at Valogne, more like a ghost of our time than of his own. {95} But, as a common rule, the ghosts in whom Lady Conway’s friends were interested had a purpose:  some revealed the spot where a skeleton lay; some urged the payment of a debt, or the performance of a neglected duty.  One modern spectre, reported by Mr. Myers, wandered disconsolate till a debt of three shillings and tenpence was defrayed. {96} This is, perhaps, the lowest figure cited as a pretext for appearing.  The ghost vouched for by Lady Conway was disturbed about a larger sum, twenty-eight shillings.  She, an elderly woman, persecuted by her visits David Hunter, ’neat-herd at the house of the Bishop of Down and Connor, at Portmore, in 1663’.  Mr. Hunter did not even know the ghost when she was alive; but she made herself so much at home in his dwelling that ’his little dog would follow her as well as his master’.  The ghost, however, was invisible to Mrs. Hunter.  When Hunter had at last executed her commission, she asked him to lift her up in his arms.  She was not substantial like fair Katie King, when embraced by Mr. Crookes, but ’felt just like a bag of feathers; so she vanished, and he heard most delicate music as she went off over his head’.  Lady Conway cross-examined Hunter on the spot, and expressed her belief in his narrative in a letter, dated Lisburn, April 29, 1663.  It is true that contemporary sceptics attributed the phenomena to potheen, but, as Lady Conway asks, how could potheen tell Hunter about the ghost’s debt, and reveal that the money to discharge it was hidden under her hearthstone?