An Encounter with a Damned Soul

(Found here)

“[A woman] was in London, the winter of 1847 to 1848. She was a widow, about twenty-nine years old, very worldly, very rich, and very good-looking. Among [those] who frequented her [parlor] was noted a young lord...whose behavior was anything but edifying.

...one night (for it was already past midnight) she was reading in her bed I don’t know what novel, waiting for sleep to come. It struck one hour by her clock; she blew out her taper. She was about to fall asleep when, to her great astonishment, she noticed that a wan, strange glimmer of light...spread gradually in her room and increased from one moment to the other. Stupefied, she put her eyes wide open, not knowing what this could mean. She got frightened when she saw the door slowly open and the young lord, the accomplice in her disorders, enter her room. Before she could have said a single word to him, he was near her, seized her left arm at the wrist, and said to her in English, in a striding voice: ‘There is a hell!’ The pain she felt in her arm was so great that she lost her senses.

When she came to again, half an hour later...she noticed on her wrist a burn so deep that the bone was laid bare and the flesh nearly consumed; this burn was the size of a man’s hand. Moreover, she remarked that the carpet from the door of the [parlor] to the bed, and from the bed to this same door, bore the imprint of a man’s steps...

The next day, the unhappy lady learned, with a terror that is easy to imagine, that on that very night, close upon one o’clock in the morning, her lord had been found dead-drunk under the table, that his servants had carried him to his room and that he had died in their arms.

...[this lady] in order to keep out of sight the traces of her sinister burn...wears on her left wrist...a broad gold band, which she does not take off day or night.

...all these details [come] from her nearest relative, a serious Christian...In the family itself, they are never spoken of...”
~Gerard van den Aardweg