how did the canterville ghost scare people who came to his house (chp12)

The ghost's three hundred years old career had been brilliant and uninterrupted with several achievements such as the instance of the Dowager Duchess. The ghost had frightened her into such a fit as she stood before the glass in her lace and diamonds along with her four housemaids that she had been reduced to hysterics as he merely grinned at them. The parish rector whose candle he had blown out as he was coming late one night from the library was forced to be under the care of Sir William Gull ever since and a perfect martyr to nervous disorders. Old Madame de Tremouillac had seen a skeleton seated in an armchair by the fire reading her diary, had been confined to her bed for six weeks with an attack of brain fever and on her recovery had been reconciled to the Church, breaking off her connection with the notorious sceptic, Monsieur de Voltaire. The terrible night when the wicked Lord Canterville had been found choking in his dressing room with the knave of diamonds half-way down his throat and confessed just before he died that he had cheated Charles James Fox of £50,000 at Crockford's by means of that very card, he had sworn that the ghost had made him swallow it. From the butler who had shot himself in the pantry because he had seen a green hand tapping at the window-pane to the beautiful Lady Stutfield who was always obliged to wear a black velvet band round her throat to hide the mark of five fingers burnt on her white skin, it had been an illustrious career for the ghost. The latter had finally drowned herself in the carp-pond at the end of King's Walk. He had the enthusiastic egoism of the true artist who went over his most celebrated performances and basked in glory as he recalled his last appearance as 'Red Reuben or the Strangled Babe' or his debut as 'Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor. The ghost had also managed to create a furore one lovely June evening by merely playing ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground.

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