Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/135



HE ruins of historic old Wrightstone Castle still rear their crumbling towers above the dreary Hampton Bog, near Manchester, a fast decaying but fitting memorial to the foul deeds and fiendish proceedings that have taken place within its bleak walls. The counts of Wrightstone and their families have long since removed to more favorable London, abandoning the old ancestral home to gloomy memories.

The following tale was told me by old Sir Mandeville Wright, forty-seventh count of Wrightstone, as it was related to him by his father, and thus came the legend down through the centuries from early days in England's history.

Previous to, and in the early reign of James I, many strange and weird stories were told among the peasants of the castle and its aristocratic owners, then residing at the court. The villagers told of how a specter horse bearing a figure in flashing armor pranced before the raised drawbridge. Then came the news of Count Charles' death at the court by an emissary of the king. Then the priestess—the Specter Priestess of Wrightstone, as the apparition was termed—appeared, claiming as her victim a poor peasant found wandering near the edge of the bog after dark.

After the death of his father, the late Count Charles, the eldest son, young Count Richard of Wrightstone, decided to leave the fashionable court and pay a visit to his ancestral home, which he had never seen. After making his intentions known, the young nobleman was astonished by the peculiar actions of his father's old and trusted servants. Young Richard, on several occasions, had found them conversing together in low tones and caught his name mingled with that of a "priestess" in their mysterious conversations. They tried in various ways to dissuade him from going, and when questioned as to their peculiar actions they became quite sullen and silent.

Richard, not to be dictated to by the servants, determined to see Castle Wrightstone. Finally the day arrived when he was to leave for the home of his ancestors. Seated inside the coach with Scrooge, the old family butler, while the other servants perched on the front and rear outer seats, the young man started for the castle.

FTER several hours of weary travel in silence, old Scrooge suddenly demanded, "Master Robert, have you by any chance ever heard of the druid priestess of Wrightstone castle?"