Tuere is a haunted seat in the Reading Room of the British Museum, Those who sit in it are unable to concentrate, and feel as if they are being choked.
That is the belief of research students who have worked in the Reading Room for many years.
One is Mr. Dudley Wright, lecturer and author, who is 70 years of age, and has used the room for 52 years.
As he. sat in his Bloomsbury flat, remembering the days when Karl Marx and Lenin, William Morris and Cardinal Gasquet were his fellow students, Mr. Wright told me of the haunted seat.
"No one who knows about it will sit in it," he said. "Those who don't know sometimes start work there, but they seldom continue long. No, I don't think TIL tell you in which part of the Reading Room it is.
"But I've sat in it, and had the same experience as other people—inability to concentrate, and a choking, coughing sensation, "Someone is supposed to have died in that seat."
(Mr, Wright apparently is unacquainted with certain Shanghai barber chairs],
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.