"I have been here before." Sir Walter's Experience.

Explanations.

The Knot in the Shutter.
Transition to Stranger Dreams.
Arbuthnot, in his humorous work on Political Lying, commends the Whigs for occasionally trying the people with "great swingeing falsehoods".
When these are once got down by the populace, anything may follow without difficulty.

Excellently as this practice has worked in politics (compare the warming-pan lie of 1688), in the telling of ghost stories a different plan has its merits.

Beginning with the common-place and familiar, and therefore credible, with the thin end of the wedge, in fact, a wise narrator will advance to the rather unusual, the extremely rare, the undeniably startling, and so arrive at statements which, without this discreet and gradual initiation, a hasty reader might, justly or unjustly, dismiss as "great swingeing falsehoods".
The nature of things and of men has fortunately made this method at once easy, obvious, and scientific.