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A sort of panic had seized him . His doctor had instructed him to stop carrying the 70-pound mail bags he normally unloaded from a truck by hand . The house , the vicar said , was old - - but there needed no vicar to tell Oleron that ; it was reputed ( 0leron pricked up his-ears ) to be haunted - - but there were few old houses about which some such rumour did not circulate among ignorant ; and the deplorable lack of Faith of the modern world , the vicar thought , did not tend to dissipate these superstitions . He had not been able to be either challenged or brow beaten into anything more definite than a muttered farrago in which the words " Certain things . He had seized the cord to darken the window over the seat in which he had found the harp-bag , and was standing with his back well protected in the embrasure , when he thought he saw the tail of a black-and-white check skirt disappear round the corner of the house . He would n't have taken it had he known about the heart attack risk , lawyer Chris Seeger told jurors.Merck repeatedly reminded jurors that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved it as safe and effective on four occasions for use against different types of pain , the last a month before Merck recalled it.The company 's lawyers cited Humeston 's elevated blood pressure , weight and stress from an ongoing dispute he was having with his U.S. Postal Service bosses , saying they were to blame for his heart attack , not Vioxx.The night before the heart attack , Humeston was called by his personal physician in response to an office visit by Postal Service fraud investigators in which they showed him a secretly-recorded videotape of Humeston working on a car at his home.Merck 's expert cardiologist testified that that call was the " absolute trigger " for the heart attack.While Humeston made for a sympathetic plaintiff , he also was a relatively healthy one , appearing in court for nearly every day of testimony and taking the stand for one day.In the Texas case , the victim was a Wal-Mart produce manager who died after taking Vioxx ; his widow was the plaintiff.Merck 's lawyers also told jurors there was no scientific link between short-term Vioxx use and heart attacks . Two months before , the words " a haunted house , " applied to his lovely bemusing dwelling , would have chilled his marrow ; now , his scale of sensation becoming depressed , he could ask " Haunted by what ?