CHAPTER III

MODERN GHOSTS

The ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He

is absolutely indestructible. He glides from the freshly-cut pages

of magazines and books bearing the date of the year of our Lord

nineteen hundred and seventeen as from the parchment rolls of ancient

manuscripts. He appears as unapologetically at home in twentieth

century fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology,

medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in

fiction but he never goes out of fashion. He is the really permanent

citizen of this earth, for mortals, at best, are but transients. Even

the athlete and the Methusaleh must in the end give up the flesh,

but the wraith goes on forever. In form, too, he wears well. Ghostly

substance of materialization, ethereal and vaporous as it appears

to be, is yet of an astonishing toughness. It seems to possess an

obstinate vitality akin to that attributed to the boll weevil in a

negro ballad, that went on undaunted by heat or cold, rain or drought,

time or tide. The ghost, like death, has all seasons for its own and

there is no closed season for spooks. It is much the case now as ever

that all the world loves a ghost, yet we like to take our ghosts

vicariously, preferably in fiction. We'd rather see than be one.

One point of difference between the ghostly fiction of the past and

of the present is in the matter of length. The Gothic novel was

often a three- or four-decker affair in whose perusal the reader aged

perceptibly before the ghost succeeded or was foiled in his haunting

designs. There was obviously much more leisure on the part of spooks as

well as mortals then than now. Consequently the ghost story of to-day

is told in short-story form for the most part. Poe knew better than

anybody before him what was necessary for the proper economy of thrills

when he gave his dictum concerning the desirable length for a story,

which rule applies more to the ghostly tale than to any other type, for

surely there is needed the unity of impression, the definiteness of

effect which only continuity in reading gives. The ghostly narrative

that is too long loses in impressiveness, whether it is altogether

supernatural or mixed with other elements. In either case, it is less

successful than the shorter, more poignant treatment possible in the

compressed form. The tabloid ghost can communicate more thrills than

the one in diluted narration.

The apparitions in later English fiction fall naturally into several

distinct classes with reference to the reality of their appearance.

There are the mistaken apparitions, there are the purely subjective

specters, evoked by the psychic state of the percipients, and there are

the objective ghosts, independent of the mental state of the witnesses,

appearing to persons who are not mentally prepared to see them.

The mistaken ghost is an old form, for most of Mrs. Radcliffe's

interesting apparitions belong to this class and others of the Gothic

writers used subterfuge to cheat the reader. In the early romance

there was frequently deliberate deception for a definite purpose, the

ghosts with the histrionic temperament using a make-up of phosphorus,

bones, and other contrivances to create the impression of unearthly

visitation. Recent fiction is more cleverly managed than that. Rarely

now does one find a story where the ghost-seer is deliberately imposed

upon, for in most modern cases the mistake occurs by accident or

misapprehension on the part of the percipient, for which nobody and

nothing but his own agitation is responsible. Yet there are occasional

hoax ghosts even yet, for example, _The Ghost of Miser Brimpson_,[74]

where a specter is rigged up as the scheme of a clever girl to win over

an obdurate lover, and _The Spectre Bridegroom_, which is a well-known

example of the pseudo-spook whose object is matrimony. _His Unquiet

Ghost_[75] is a delightful story of a fake burial to evade the revenue

officials. Watt, the "corp," says: "I was a powerful onchancy, onquiet

ghost. I even did my courtin' whilst in my reg'lar line o' business

a'harntin' a graveyard!" His sweetheart sobs out her confession of love

to "his pore ghost," an avowal she has denied the living man. Examples

of the apparitions that unwittingly deceive mortals are found in _The

Ghost at Point of Rock_,[76] where the young telegraph operator, alone

at night on a prairie, sees a beautiful girl who enters and announces

that she is dead,--how is he to know that she is in a somnambulistic

stupor, and has wandered from a train? Another is[77] a story where the

young man falls in love with what he thinks is a wraith of the water

luring him to his death, but learns that she is a perfectly proper

damsel whose family he knows. _The Night Call_[78] is less simple than

these, a problematic story that leaves one wondering as to just what is

meant.[79]

[74] By Eden Phillpotts.

[75] By Charles Egbert Craddock.

[76] By F. H. Spearman.

[77] _By the Waters of Paradise_, by F. Marion Crawford.

[78] By Henry Van Dyke.

[79] As Dr. Blanche Williams points out in her discussion of

the short story.

The subjective ghosts are legion in modern fiction. They are those

evoked by the mental state of the percipients so that they become

realities to those beholding them. The mind rendered morbid by grief

or remorse is readily prepared to see the spirits of the dead return

in love or with reproach. The apparitions in animistic beliefs, as in

classical stories and Gothic romance, were usually subjective, born

of brooding love or remorse or fear of retribution, appearing to the

persons who had cause to expect them and coming usually at night when

the beholders would be alone and given over to melancholy thought or

else to troubled sleep. Shakespeare's ghosts were in large measure

subjective, "selective apparitions." When Brutus asked the specter what

he was, the awful answer came, "Thy evil genius, Brutus!" Macbeth saw

the witches who embodied for him his own secret ambitions, and he alone

saw the ghost of Banquo, because he had the weight of murder on his

heart.

The subjective ghost story is difficult to write, as the effect must

be subtly managed yet inescapably impressive. If done well it is

admirable, and there are some writers who, to use Henry James's words

concerning his own work, are "more interested in situations obscure and

subject to interpretation than the gross rattle of the foreground." The

reader, as well as the writer, must put himself in the mental attitude

of acceptance of the supernatural else the effect is lacking, for the

ghostly thrill is incommunicable to those beyond the pale of at least

temporary credulity.

Kipling's _They_ is an extraordinary ghost story of suggestion rather

than of bald fact. It is like crushing the wings of a butterfly to

analyze it, but it represents the story of a man whose love for his own

dead child enabled him to see the spirits of other little children,

because he loved. As the blind woman told him, only those who were

spiritually prepared could see them, for "you must bear or lose!"

before glimpsing them. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's _Miss Mehitabel's Son_

is a humorously pathetic account of the subjective spirit of a child

that was never born. Algernon Blackwood's ghosts are to a great extent

subjective. As John Silence, the psychic doctor, says to the shuddering

man who has had a racking experience: "Your deeply introspective mood

had already reconstructed the past so intensely that you were _en

rapport_ at once with any forces of those past days that chanced to

be still lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly." In _The

Shell of Sense_,[80] the woman who is about to accept her dead sister's

husband feels such a sense of disloyalty that she sees the sister's

spirit reproaching her. Her conscience has prepared her for the vision.

Juliet Wilbur Tompkins shows us the spirit of a mother returning to

comfort the daughter who has in life misunderstood and neglected her,

but now, realizing the truth, is grieving her heart out for her.[81]

Ambrose Bierce tells of a prisoner who murders his jailer to escape,

but is arrested and brought back by the spirit of the dead man.[82] Any

number of instances might be given of ghosts appearing to those who are

mentally prepared to be receptive to supernatural visions, but these

will serve to illustrate the type.

[80] By Olivia Howard Dunbar.

[81] _They That Mourn._

[82] _An Arrest._

Objective ghosts are likewise very numerous in modern fiction. The

objective spirits are those that, while they may be subjective on the

part of the persons chiefly concerned, to begin with, are yet visible

to others as well, appearing not only to those mentally prepared

to see them but to others not thinking of such manifestations and

even sceptical of their possibility. The objective ghosts have more

definite visibility, more reality than the purely subjective spirits.

They are more impressive as haunters. There is a plausibility, a

corporeality about the later apparitions that shows their advance over

the diaphanous phantoms of the past. Ghosts that eat and drink, play

cards, dance, duel, and do anything they wish, that are so lifelike in

their materialization that they would deceive even a medium, are more

terrifying than the helpless specters of early times that could only

give orders for the living to carry out. The modern ghost has lost none

of his mortal powers but has gained additional supermortal abilities,

which gives him an unsportsmanlike advantage over the mere human being

he may take issue with.

Henry James's _The Turn of the Screw_ is a remarkable example of

the objective ghost story. It is one of the best ghostly stories

in English, because more philosophical, showing more knowledge of

the psychology not only of the adult but of the child, not only of

the human being but of the ghost, than most fiction of the type.

Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with their diabolical conspiracy of evil

against the two children are so real that they are seen not only by

the children they hound but by the unsuspecting governess as well.

She is able to describe them so accurately that those who knew them

in life--as she did not at all--recognize them instantly. In _The

Four-fifteen Express_,[83] John Derringer's ghost is seen by a man that

does not know he is dead, and who has not been thinking of him at all.

The ghost reveals incontrovertible proof of his presence, even leaving

his cigar-case behind him,--which raises the question as to whether

ghosts smoke in the hereafter in more ways than one. The ghastly

incident in Emily Brontë's _Wuthering Heights_ where the agonized

ghost comes to the window, gashing its wrist on the broken pane, is

strikingly objectified, for she comes to a person who never knew her

and is not thinking of any supernatural manifestation. _Shadows on the

Wall_,[84] that story of surpassing power of suggestion, is objective

in its method, for not only the man who has wronged his dead mother

sees his spirit returning, not in the ordinary way but as an accusing

shadow on the wall, but the sisters see it as well.

[83] By Amelia B. Edwards.

[84] By Mary Wilkins Freeman.

In _John Inglesant_,[85] the spirit of Lord Strafford is seen by the

young lad in the vestibule as well as by the king whose conscience

burns for having left him to die undefended. Frank R. Stockton's

transferred ghost is an objective apparition, for surely the guest in

the upper chamber was not expecting to see the shade of a living man

perch itself on the foot of his bed at midnight. The horrible specter

in _The Messenger_,[86] is seen by various persons at different times,

some of whom are totally unprepared for such exhibition. And many

similar instances might be given.

[85] By J. H. Shorthouse.

[86] By Robert W. Chambers.

Whether ghosts be mistaken, subjective or objective, their appearance

has always elicited considerable interest on the part of humanity.

Their substance of materialization, their bearing, dress, and general

demeanor are matters of definite concern to those who expect shortly

to become ghosts themselves. In some instances the modern ghost

sticks pretty closely to the animistic idea of spirit material, which

was that the shade was a sort of vapory projection of the body,

intangible, impalpable, yet easily recognized with reference to

previous personality. Chaucer describes some one as being "nat pale as

a forpyned goost," which illustrates the conception in his day, and the

Gothic specimen was usually a pallid specter, though Walpole furnished

one robust haunter of gigantic muscle. Yet for the most part the Gothic

ghosts were misty wraiths, through which the sword could plunge without

resistance. They were fragile and helpless as an eighteenth-century

heroine when it came to a real emergency, and were useful chiefly for

frightening the guilty and consoling the innocent. In some stories of

the present we have a similar materialization. The spirit woman in

Kipling's _Phantom Rickshaw_ is so ethereal that the horse and its

rider plunge through her without resistance, and Dickens's Mr. Marley

is of such vapory substance that Scrooge can see clear through him

to count the coat-tail buttons at his back. In a recent story, _The

Substitute_,[87] the spirit is said to evade her friend like a mist.

[87] By Georgia Wood Pangborn.

The Gothic ghost frequently walked forth as a skeleton, clad in nothing

but his bones and a lurid scowl. Skeletons still perambulate among us,

as in _The Messenger_, where the stripped-off mask shows a hideous

skull.

The skeleton burst from out the rotting robes and collapsed on the

ground before us. From between the staring ribs and the grinning

teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering the shrinking

grasses, and then the thing shuddered and fell over into the black

ooze of the bog.

The ghost of Zuleika[88] is described as "a skeleton woman robed in the

ragged remains of a black mantle. Near this crumbling earth body there

lay the spirit of Zuleika attached to it by a fine thread of magnetic

ether. Like the earthly body it was wrapped in a robe of black of which

it seemed the counterpart." Elliott O'Donnell has a story of a mummy

that in a soldier's tent at night sobs, breathes, moves, sits up, and

with ghastly fingers unfolds its cere-cloth wrappings, appearing to him

as the counterpart of his long-dead mother, looking at him with the

eyes he had worshiped in his boyhood.

I fell on my knees before her and kissed--what? Not the feet of my

mother but those of the long-buried dead! Sick with repulsion and

fear I looked up and there bending over me and peering into my eyes

was the face, the fleshless, mouldering face of the foul corpse!

[88] In _Ahrinziman_, by Anita Silvani.

But on the whole, though skeletons do appear in later fiction, the

rattle of bones is not heard as often as in Gothic times.

Ghostly apparitions are more varied in form than in early times. The

modern ghost does not require a whole skeleton for his purposes, but he

can take a single bone and put the hardiest to flight with it. It is

a dreadful thing to realize that a ghost can come in sections, which

indefinitely multiplies its powers of haunting. F. Marion Crawford has

a story of a diabolical skull, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts on

record. A man has murdered his wife by pouring melted lead into her

ear while she slept, in accordance with a suggestion from a casually

told story of a guest. The dead woman's skull--the husband cut the

head off for fear people would hear the lead rattle, and buried it in

the garden--comes back to haunt the husband, with that deadly rattle

of the lump of lead inside. The teeth bite him, the skull rolls up a

hill to follow him, and finally kills him, then sets in to haunt the

visitor who told the suggestive story.[89] Elsewhere as well Crawford

shows us skulls that have uncanny powers of motion and emotion. In

Wilkie Collins's _Haunted Hotel_ the specter is seen as a bodiless head

floating near the ceiling of the room where the man was murdered and

his body concealed. Thackeray[90] describes a ghost with its head on

its lap, and of course every one will remember the headless horseman

with his head carried on the pommel of his saddle that frightened poor

Ichabod Crane out of his wits.

[89] _The Screaming Skull._

[90] In _A Notch on the Axe_.

We get a rabble of headless apparitions in _Brissot's Ghost_, one

of the Anti-Jacobin parodies (ridiculing Richard Glover's ballad of

Hosier's Ghost):

Sudden up the staircase sounding

Hideous yells and shrieks were heard;

Then, each guest with fear confounding,

A grim train of ghosts appeared;

Each a head in anguish gasping

(Himself a trunk deformed with gore)

In his hand, terrific clasping,

Stalked across the wine-stained floor.

In Bulwer-Lytton's _The Haunters and the Haunted_ a woman's hand

without a body rises up to clutch the ancient letters, then withdraws,

while in his _Strange Story_ the supernatural manifestation comes as

a vast Eye seen in the distance, moving nearer and nearer, "seeming

to move from the ground at a height of some lofty giant." Then other

Eyes appear. "Those Eyes! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on legions! And

that tramp of numberless feet! _they_ are not seen, but the hollows of

the earth echo to their tread!" The supernatural phenomena in Ambrose

Bierce's stories have an individual horror. In _A Vine on the House_ he

shows a hideous revenge ghost manifested in a peculiar form. A couple

of men take refuge in a deserted house and note a strange vine covering

the porch that shakes unaccountably and violently. In mystification

they dig it up, to find the roots in the form of a woman's body,

lacking one foot, as had been the case with the woman who had lived

there and whose husband had killed her secretly and buried her beside

the porch.

The revenge ghost in modern fiction frequently manifests itself in this

form, mutilated or dismembered, each disfigurement of the mortal body

showing itself in a relentless immortality and adding to the horror

of the haunting. There seems to be no seat of ghostly mind or soul,

for the body can perform its function of haunting in whole or in part,

unaided by the head or heart, like a section of a snake that has life

apart from the main body. And this idea of detached part of the form

acting as a determined agent for revenge adds a new horror to fiction.

I haven't as yet found an instance of a woman's heart, bleeding and

broken, coming up all by itself to haunt the deserting lover, but

perhaps such stories will be written soon. And think what terrors would

await the careless physician or surgeon if each outraged organ or

dismembered limb came back to seek vengeance on him!

Ghosts of modern fiction are more convincing in their reality than the

specters of early times. They are stronger, more vital; there seems

to be a strengthening of ghostly tissue, a stiffening of supernatural

muscle in these days. Ghosts are more healthy, more active, more alive

than they used to be. There is now as before a strong resemblance to

the personality before death, the same immortality of looks that is

discouraging to the prospects of homely persons who have hoped to

be more handsome in a future state. Fiction gives no basis for such

hope. Peculiarities of appearance are carried over with distressing

faithfulness to detail, each freckle, each wrinkle, each gray

hair showing with the clearness of a photographic proof. Note the

lifelikeness of the governess's description of Peter Quint in _The Turn

of the Screw_.

He has red hair, very red, very close-curling, and a pale face,

long in shape, with straight, good features and little queer

whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow

darker and particularly arched as if they might move a good deal.

His eyes are sharp, strange, awful. His mouth is wide, his lips

thin.

This seems an unspectral description, for red hair is not wraith-like,

yet a red-headed ghost that lifted its eyebrows unnaturally would be

alarming. She says of him: "He was absolutely, on this occasion, a

living, dangerous, detestable presence."

Each minor disfigurement is retained, as the loss of the tooth in

Crawford's screaming skull, the missing toe in Bierce's _Middle Toe of

the Right Foot_, the lacking foot in the ghostly vine, and so forth.

Nothing is neglected to make identification absolute in present tales

of horror. The spirits described by Bram Stoker have red, voluptuous

lips and pink cheeks, and the spirit of Sir Oliver's mother, in De

Morgan's _An Affair of Dishonor_, that comes to meet him as he passes

her mausoleum on his way to the shameful duel, limps as in life, so

that he recognizes her, though the cloaked and hooded figure has its

face turned from him. Jessie Adelaide Middleton shows us one ghost with

half a face.

Ghostly apparel constitutes an interesting feature of supernaturalism

in literature. There seem to be as definite conventions concerning

spectral clothes as regarding the garb of the living fashionables. It

is more difficult to understand the immortality of clothes than of

humanity, for bodily tissue even of ghosts might quite conceivably

renew itself, but not so with the ghostly garments. Of what stuff are

ghost-clothes made? And why do they never wear out?

In olden times when people wore clothes of less radical styles than

now and fewer of them, masculine spirits were in part identified by

their familiar armor. Armor is so material and heavy that it seems

incongruous to the ghostly function, yet shields and accouterments were

necessary accompaniments of every knightly spook. He must be ever ready

to tilt with rival ghost. The Gothic phantoms were well panoplied and

one remembers particularly the giant armor in Walpole's novel. Nowadays

the law forbids the carrying of weapons, which restriction seems to

have been extended to ghostdom as well. Specters are thus placed at a

disadvantage, for one would scarcely expect to see even the wraith of a

Texas cow-boy toting a pistol.

Specters usually appear in the garments in which the beholder saw them

last in life. Styles seem petrified at death so that old-time ghosts

now look like figures from the movies or guests at a masquerade ball.

One other point to be noted is that women phantoms are frequently seen

in black or in white. White seems reminiscent of the shroud, as well as

of youth and innocence, so is appropriate, while black connotes gloom,

so is suitable, yet the really favored color is gray. Most of the

specters this season are dressed in gray. I scarcely know why this is

affected by shades, yet the fact remains that many wraiths both men and

women are thus attired. Gray is the tone that witches of modern tastes

choose also, whereas their ancient forbears went in black and red.

Modern ghosts are at a disadvantage in the matter of clothes compared

with the earlier ones, since the styles now change so quickly and so

decidedly that a ghost is hopelessly _passé_ before he has time to

materialize at all in most instances.

Examples of ghostly garments in later fiction evidence their variety.

Katherine Fullerton Gerould[91] shows us three ghosts, one of a woman

in a blue dress, one of a rattlesnake, and one of a Zulu warrior

wearing only a loin-cloth, a nose-ring, and a scowl. (We do not

often see the nude in ghosts, perhaps because they have a shade of

modesty.) _Co-operative Ghosts_[92] depicts a man clad in the wraith

of a tweed suit, mid-Victorian, "with those familiar Matthew Arnold

side-whiskers." In addition to Mr. Morley's coat-tail buttons which

we glanced through him to see, we observe that he wears ghostly

spectacles, a pig-tail, tights and boots, and a prim waist-coat. In

Kipling's _They_ we see the glint of a small boy's blue blouse, while

another Kipling youngster, a war-ghost,[93] struts around in his

comical first trousers which he would not be robbed of even by the

German soldiers that murdered him. Other children in the same story

are said to have on "disgracefully dirty clothes." I do not recall any

soilure on Gothic garments, save spectral blood-stains and the mold

of graves. Neither did I discover any child wraith in Gothicism save

the pitiful spirits of baby victims in _The Albigenses_ and the baby

wraiths in Hogg's _The Wool-gatherer_. The Englishman driven mad by

the apparition of the woman he has wronged in Kipling's story[94] is

described by him as "wearing the dress in which I saw her last alive;

she carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand and the same

card-case in her left." (A woman eight months dead with a card-case!)

Blackwood shows us a ghost in purple knee-breeches and velvet coat;

in _The Gray Guest_[95] the returning Napoleon wears a long military

cloak of gray and military boots, while Crawford has one dreadful ghost

coming back to wreak revenge in wet oil-skins. The eccentric spook in

Josephine Daskam Bacon's _The Heritage_ is dressed in brown and sits

stolidly and silently on the side of the bed with its back turned.

Think of being haunted by an unbudging brown back! No wonder it drove

the young husband to spend his wedding night huddled on the stairs. We

have instances of a ghost in a red vest, a relentless revenge spirit

that hounds from ocean to ocean his murderer and the betrayer of his

daughter, and another of a ghost in a red shirt. There is on the whole

as much variety and appropriateness of costume in modern ghost fiction

as in Broadway melodrama.

[91] In _On the Stairs_.

[92] By F. Converse.

[93] In _Swept and Garnished_.

[94] _Phantom Rickshaw._

[95] By Laurence Clarke.

Another point of difference between the specters of to-day and those

of the past is in the extension of their avenues of approach to us.

Ghostly appeal to the senses is more varied now than in earlier times.

The classical as well as the Gothic ghosts appealed in general only to

the sight and hearing, as well as, of course, to the sixth sense that

realizes the presence of a supernatural being. Ghosts were seen and

heard and were content with that. But nowadays more points of contact

are open to them and they haunt us through the touch, the smell, as

well as sight and hearing. The taste as a medium of impression has

not yet been exploited by fiction writers though doubtless it will be

worked out soon. There is a folk-tale of the Skibos that wolves eat

ghosts and find them very appetizing and the devil in Poe's _Bon Bon_

says he eats the spirits of mortals. One might imagine what haunting

dyspepsia could result if an ill-tempered spook were devoured against

his will. It is conceivable, too, that gastronomic ghosts might haunt

cannibals; and who knows that the dark brown taste in the mouths of

riotous livers is not some specter striving to express itself through

that medium instead of being _merely_ riotous livers?

The appeal of ghosts to the sight has already been discussed so

need not be mentioned here. But the element of invisibility enters

in as a new and very terrible form of supernatural manifestation

in later fiction. In spite of the general visibility, some of the

most horrible tales turn on the fact that the haunter is unseen.

H. G. Wells's _Invisible Man_ is a human being, not a ghost; yet the

story has a curdling power that few straight ghost stories possess.

Maupassant's _La Horla_ is a nightmare story of an invisible being

that is terrific in its effect. The victim knows that an unseen

yet definite and determined something is shut in his room with him

night after night, eating, drinking, reading, sitting on his chest,

driving him mad. Ambrose Bierce's _The Damned Thing_ is a gruesome

story of invisibility, of a something that is abroad with unearthly

power of evil, whose movements can be measured by the bending of the

grasses, which shuts off the light from other objects as it passes,

which struggles with the dogs and with men, till it finally kills

and horribly mangles the man who has been studying it, but is never

seen. Another[96] has for its central figure a being that violently

attacks men and is overpowered and tied only by abnormal strength,

that struggles on the bed, showing its imprint on the mattress, that

is imprisoned in a plaster cast to have its mold taken, that is heard

breathing loudly till it dies of starvation, yet is absolutely never

visible. Blackwood's Fire Elemental may be seen moving along only by

the bending of the grass beneath it and by the trail it leaves behind,

for though it is audible yet it is never seen. As a brave man said of

it, "I am not afraid of anything that I can _see_!" so these stories

of supernatural invisibility have a chilling horror more intense than

that of most ghostly tales. The element of invisibility of unmistakably

present spirits is shown in other stories.

[96] _What Was It? A Mystery_, by Fitz-James O'Brien.

One tender story of an invisible ghost is told in _In No Strange

Land_,[97] of a man killed suddenly in a wreck while on his way home

to the birthday dinner his wife is preparing for him. He does not know

that he has been hurt; but while his dead body lies mangled under the

wreckage his spirit hurries home. He swears whimsically under his

breath at some interruption and thinks with joy of the happy little

group he will meet. But when he enters his home he cannot make them see

or hear him. They are vaguely aware of some strange influence, are awed

by it, and the little son with the poet's heart whispers that he hears

something, but that is all. The man stands by, impotently stretching

out his arms to them till he hears the messenger tell them that he is

dead.

[97] By Katherine Butler.

Ghosts are variable with respect to sounds as well as appearance. The

early ghosts were for the most part silent, yet could talk on occasion,

and classical apparitions were sometimes vocal and sometimes silent.

The Gothic ghost sometimes had an impediment in his speech while at

other times he could converse fluently. The Gothic specter, real as

well as faked, frequently lifted voice in song and brought terror to

the guilty bosom by such strains. Yet when he spoke he was usually

brief in utterance. Perhaps the reason for that lay in the lack of

surety on the part of the writers as to the proper ghostly diction.

Gothic authors were not overstrong on technique and they may have

hesitated to let their specters be too fluent lest they be guilty of

dialectic errors. It would seem incongruous for even an illiterate

ghost to murder the king's English, which presents a difficulty in the

matter of realism, so perchance the writers dodged the issue by giving

their ghosts brevity of speech, or in some cases by letting them look

volumes of threats but utter no word. This may explain the reason for

the non-speaking ghosts in classical and Elizabethan drama. There is

a similar variation in the later fiction, for many of the ghosts are

eloquently silent, while other phantoms are terrifyingly fluent. All

this goes to prove the freedom of the modern ghost for he does what he

takes a notion to do. The invisible ghosts are as a rule voiceless as

well.

The Gothic romance was fond of mysterious music as an accompaniment of

supernatural visitation, but ghostly music is less common than it used

to be. Yet it does come at times, as in _A Far-away Melody_,[98] where

two spinster sisters living alone hear heavenly music as portent of

their death. Ghostly song is heard in another case,[99] where a woman's

spirit comes back to sing in a duet at her funeral, and Crawford's

ghost[100] constantly whistles a tune he had been fond of during

life. In _Co-operative Ghosts_ the wraith of the young girl who in

Cromwellian times betrayed her father's cause to save her lover's life

sings sadly,

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honor more!"

[98] By Mary Wilkins Freeman.

[99] _Two Voices._

[100] In _Man Overboard_.

In Crawford's _A Doll's Ghost_, that peculiar example of preternatural

fiction, not a children's story as one might think, nor yet humorous,

the mechanical voice of the doll and the click of its tiny pattering

feet occur as strange sounds. Lord Strafford[101] walks with a firm,

audible tread on his way to appall the king, and in Blackwood's _Empty

House_ the ghosts move with sounds of heavy, rushing feet, followed

by a noise of scuffling and smothered screams as the ancient murder

is re-enacted, then the thud of a body thrown down the stairs,--after

which is a terrible silence. The awful effect of a sudden silence

after supernatural sounds is nowhere shown more tensely than in _The

Monkey's Paw_,[102] that story of superlative power of suggestion. When

the ghostly visitant knocks loudly at the outer door, we feel the same

thrill of chilling awe as in the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, and

more, for the two who hear are sure that this is a presence come back

from the dead. Then when the last magic wish has been breathed, utter

silence comes, a silence more dreadful in its import than the clamor

has been.

[101] In _John Inglesant_.

[102] By W. W. Jacobs.

New sounds are introduced in modern ghostly tales, such as the peculiar

hissing that is a manifestation of the presence of the ancient

spirit[103] followed by the crackling and crashing of the enchanted

flames. In Blackwood's _Keeping His Promise_ the heavy, stertorous

breathing of the invisible Thing is heard, and the creaking of the

bed weighted down by the body. Mary Wilkins Freeman brings in ghostly

crying in a story, while Blackwood speaks of his Wendigo as having "a

sort of windy, crying voice, as of something lonely and untamed, wild

and of abominable power." Kipling introduces novel and touching sounds

in his stories of ghostly children. The child-wraiths are gay, yet

sometimes near to tears. He speaks of "the utterly happy chuckle of a

child absorbed in some light mischief," "sudden, squeaking giggles of

childhood," "the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet in the room

beyond," "joyous chuckles of evasion," and so forth. These essentially

childlike and lifelike sounds are deeply pathetic as coming from the

ghosts of little ones that hover, homesick, near the earth they dread

to leave. The little ghost boy in Richard Middleton's story,[104]

manifests himself, invisibly, through the little prancing steps, the

rustling of the leaves through which he runs, and the heart-breaking

imitations of an automobile. Later ghostly fiction introduces few of

the clankings of chains and lugubrious groans that made the Gothic

romance mournful, and the modern specters are less wailful than the

earlier, but more articulate in their expression. There are definite

ghostly sounds that recur in various stories, such as the death-rap

above the bed of the dying, the oft-mentioned mocking laughter in

empty places, the cry of the banshee which is the presage of death not

only of the body but of the soul, as well. On the whole, the sounds

in modern supernatural stories are more varied in their types, more

expressive of separate and individual horror, and with an intensified

power of haunting suggestion than was the case with the earlier forms.

[103] In _A Nemesis of Fire_, by Blackwood.

[104] _The Passing of Edward._

The sense of smell was not noticeably exploited in the ancient or

Gothic ghost stories, though certain folk-tales, as Hawaiian stories

of the lower world, speak of it. The devil was supposed to be in bad

odor, for he was usually accompanied by sulphurous scents, as we notice

in Calderon's drama,[105] and some of the Gothic novels, but that seems

to be about the extent of the matter. But moderns, while not so partial

to brimstone, pay considerable attention to supernatural odors. The

devil has been dry-cleaned, but the evil odors of later fiction are

more objectionable than the fumes of the pit, are more variant, more

individual and distinctive. Odors seem less subjective than sights

or sounds, and are not so conventionalized in ghostly fiction, hence

when they are cleverly evoked they are unusually effective. These

supernatural scents have a very lasting quality too, for they linger on

after the other manifestations of the preternatural are past. In _The

Haunted Hotel_,[106] the ghost manifests itself through the nostrils.

In room number thirteen there is an awful stench for which no one can

account, and which cannot be removed by any disinfectants. Finally

when a woman especially sympathetic to a man mysteriously dead is put

in the room, the ghost appears as a decaying head, floating near the

ceiling and emitting an intolerable odor. _The Upper Berth_[107] tells

of a strange, foul sea odor that infests a certain stateroom and that

no amount of fumigating or airing will remove. As the Thing comes out

of the sea to carry its victim away with it, the man in the lower

berth gets the full force of the unearthly smell. There are definite

foul supernatural odors associated with supernatural animals in recent

ghostly tales, as that "ghost of an unforgettable strange odor, of a

queer, acrid, pungent smell like the odor of lions," which announces

the presence of the awful out-door something called by the Indians, the

Wendigo. In Kipling's story[108] of a man whose soul has been stolen

by Indian magic through the curse of a leper priest and a beast's soul

put in its place,--his companions are sickened by an intolerable stench

as of wild beasts, and when the curse is removed and he comes back to

himself, he sniffs the air and asks what causes "such a horrid doggy

smell in the air."

[105] _El Magico Prodigioso._

[106] By Wilkie Collins.

[107] By F. Marion Crawford.

[108] _The Mark of the Beast._

Sometimes the ghastly presence comes as a whiff of perfume,[109] where

the spirit of the dead woman brings with it flowers in masses, with a

heavenly perfume which lingers after the spirit in visible form has

departed. The subtlest and most delicately haunting story of this type

is O. Henry's,[110] where the loved, dead girl reveals herself to the

man who is desperately hunting the big city over for her, merely as a

whiff of mignonette, the flower she most loved.

[109] As in _Here and There_, by Alice Brown.

[110] _The Furnished Room._

But it is through the sense of touch that the worst form of haunting

comes. Seeing a supernatural visitant is terrible, hearing him is

direful, smelling him is loathsome, but having him touch you is the

climax of horror. This element comes in much in recent stories. The

earlier ghosts seemed to be more reserved, to know their spectral place

better, were not so ready to presume on unwelcome familiarities as

those in later fiction, but spooks have doubtless followed the fashion

of mortals in this easy, relaxed age and have become a shade too free

in their manners. Of course, one remembers the crushing specter in

Otranto castle that flattened the hapless youth out so effectually,

and there are other instances less striking. But as a general thing

the Gothic ghost was content to stand at a distance and hurl curses.

Fortunately for our ancestors' nerves, he did not incline much to the

laying on of hands. Modern ghosts, however, have not been taught to

restrain their impulses and they venture on liberties that Radcliffian

romance would have disapproved of.

_The Damned Thing_ gives an example of muscular supernaturalism, for

the mysterious being kills a dog in a stiff fight, then later slays the

master after a terrible struggle in which the man is disfigured beyond

words to describe. O'Brien shows a terrible being of abnormal power

that is tied only after a tremendous effort, and which fights violently

to free itself. And the Thing in the upper berth had an awesome

strength.

It was something ghostly, horrible, beyond words, and it moved in

my grasp. It was like the body of a man long dead and yet it moved,

and had the strength of ten men living, but I gripped it with all

my might, the slippery, oozy, horrible thing. I wrestled with the

dead thing; it thrust itself upon me and nearly broke my arms; it

wound its corpselike arms around my neck, the living death, and

overpowered me, so that at the last I cried aloud and fell and left

my hold.

As I fell the thing sprang across me and seemed to throw itself

upon the captain. When I last saw him on his feet his face was

white and his lips set. It seemed to me that he struck a violent

blow at the dead being, and then, he, too, fell forward on his face.

The ghostly touch is frequently described, not only in fiction but in

reports of the Psychical Society as well, as being of supernatural

chill or of burning heat. _Afterwards_[111] brings in the icy touch of

the spirit hand. In certain cases the ghost touch leaves a burn or mark

that never goes away.

[111] By Fred C. Smale.

Yet the touch of horror is not the only one introduced in fiction

of the supernatural. There are tender and loving touches as well,

expressing yearning love and a longing to communicate with the living.

What could be more beautiful than the incident in _They_? "I felt

my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a

child. The little brushing kiss fell in the center of my palm--as gift

on which the fingers were _once_ expected to close--a fragment of a

mute code devised very long ago." And in a similar story,[112] the

woman says, "I will swear to my dying day that two little hands stole

and rested--for a moment only--in mine!" Wilkie Collins speaks of his

story, _The Ghost's Touch_, as follows:

The course of this narrative leads the reader on new and strange

ground. It describes the return of a disembodied spirit to

earth--not occurring in the obscurity of midnight but in the

searching light of day; neither seen as a vision nor heard as a

voice--revealing itself to mortal knowledge through the sense that

is least easily self-deceived, the sense that feels.

[112] _A Pair of Hands_, by Quiller-Couch.

The widow feels the clasp of her husband's hands, not only psychically

but physically, and when she asks for a further sign, the ghost kisses

her unmistakably on the lips. Another widow[113] feels her hand clasped

by the hand of her husband who has mysteriously disappeared after

having presumably absconded with trust funds--and knows that he is dead

and seeking to give her some message. His hand gently leads her to the

edge of the cliff where he has fallen over and been killed, so that she

may know the truth. The lover in Poe's _Eleonora_ feels a "spiritual

kiss" from the lips of his beloved. The ghost touch is an impressive

motif of strength in recent fiction and marks an advance over the

earlier forms, showing an access of imaginative power and psychological

analysis.

[113] In _Our Last Walk_, by Hugh Conway.

* * * * *

Another point of contrast between the modern and the older ghosts is

in the greater freedom enjoyed by those of to-day. The ghosts of our

ancestors were weak and helpless creatures in the main and the Gothic

specter was tyrannized over to such an extent that he hardly dared

call his shade his own. The spook of to-day has acquired a latchkey

and asserted his independence. He may have a local habitation but he

isn't obliged to stay there. Now-a-days even the spectral women are

setting up to be feminists and have privileges that would have caused

the Gothic wraiths to swoon with horror. Ghosts are not so sensitive to

the barometer now as they used to be, nor do they have such an active

influence over the weather as did the Gothic phantoms. They do not

need a tempest for their materialization nor a supernatural play of

lightning for their wild threats, and comparatively few storms occur

in later fiction. Yet there is certainly no lessening of the ghostly

thrill in consequence.

Neither are the spirits of to-day limited to any set hours as was the

rule in Gothicism. The tyranny of the dark, the autocratic rule of

twelve or one o'clock as the arbitrary hour for apparitions, has been

removed. Katherine Fullerton Gerould shows an interesting collection

of ghosts that come at eleven o'clock in the morning, Georgia Wood

Pangborn brings one out on the seashore in mid-afternoon, and Kipling

has various ghosts that appear in daylight and in the open air.

Ghosts in modern fiction are not dependent upon a setting of sullen

scenery as in Gothicism, but may choose any surroundings they like.

Since modern household arrangements do not include family vaults as

a general thing, and since cemeteries are inconveniently located,

there is a tendency on the part of haunters to desert such quarters.

Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charles Egbert Craddock each has one ghost

story located in a graveyard, and _The Last Ghost in Harmony_[114]

is set in a burying-ground, but the specter complains loudly of the

unsentimental mind of the town which has lost interest in ghosts, and

leaves in disgust. Likewise the domination of the Gothic castles, those

"ghaist-alluring edifices," has passed away and modern spooks are not

confined to any one locality as in the past. They appear where they

will, in the most prosaic places, in cheap lodging-houses, in hall

bedrooms, in bungalows, in the staterooms of steamers, on tramp ships,

and so forth. Algernon Blackwood has set a number of thrilling ghost

stories out in the open, in the woods, in the desert sand wastes, and

similar places. One effect of such realistic and unspectral setting

is to give a greater verisimilitude to the events described, and the

modern tale bears out Leigh Hunt's suggestion that "a ghost story, to

be a good one, should unite, as much as possible, objects as they are

in life, with a preternatural spirit." Yet here are ghosts that do

haunt certain rooms as relentlessly as ever Gothic specter did.

[114] By N. M. Lloyd.

The modern ghost has power over certain localities rather than mere

houses or apartments. If the house he calls his own is torn down, he

bides his time and haunts the new structure built on the same spot.

Or if no new house goes up, he hangs around and haunts the vacant

lot, which is a more reprehensible procedure than the ordinary habits

of spooks. One story concerns a house so persistently ghosted that

its owner took it down section by section, trying to arrive at the

location of the curse, but to no avail. When the whole building had

been razed and the site plowed over, the ghost undiscouraged haunted

merrily on. Then the owner left in disgust. Algernon Blackwood is

fond of situations where localities are haunted by evil spirits,[115]

where a whole village is inhabited by the ghosts of long-dead witches,

or _Secret Worship_ that relates the experience of a man who wanders

within the limits of a place made horrible by devil-worshipers,

long-dead, but life-like, and inhabiting a house that has been torn

down years before but appears as usual, where they entrap the souls of

the living for their fiendish sacrifice. Another[116] is the record of

a spirit of frightful evil that haunts a house built on the spot where

an older house once stood, whose diabolism lingers on to curse the

living. The spirit that haunts a locality rather than one room or house

has a more malignant power than the more restricted ghost and this adds

a new element of definite supernaturalism to modern fiction. But as

houses are so much less permanent now than formerly, ghosts would be at

a terrible disadvantage if they had to be evicted every time a building

was torn down.

[115] As in _Ancient Sorceries_.

[116] _A Psychic Invasion._

* * * * *

Ghostly psychology is a fascinating study. The development of spectral

personality is one of the evident facts gained from a historical survey

of supernatural fiction. The modern ghost has more individuality,

more distinctiveness, in the main, than his forbears. The ghosts of

medievalism, of ancient superstition, and the drama were for the most

part pallid, colorless beings in character as in materialization.

The ancient ghosts were more mournful than the moderns, since the

state of the dead in early times was by no means enviable. The most

one could hope for then was Hades, while the spirits who hadn't been

buried couldn't find entrance even there but were forced by relentless

spectral police to keep forever moving. The Christian religion

furnishes a more cheerful outlook, so in later manifestations the gloom

is considerably lightened. Yet even so the Gothic ghosts were morbid,

low-minded specters not much happier than the unlucky wights they felt

it their business to haunt. Their woe-begone visages, their clanking

chains, and other accompaniments of woe betokened anything but cheer.

There are some unhappy spirits in recent fiction, but not such a large

proportion as in the past. And there is usually some basis for their

joylessness; they don't have general melancholia with no grounds for

it. The ghost of the dead wife in _Readjustment_[117] is miserable

because she has never understood her husband, either in life or in

death, and she comes back seeking an explanation. Another spectral

woman[118] is wretched because she has the double crime of murder and

suicide on her soul. Poor Marley grieves because he is doomed to see

the opportunities that life has offered him to serve others and that he

has neglected, being forced to see with the clear vision of the other

world the evil results of his own neglect, which is enough to make any

one wretched. A guilty conscience is like the burning heart that each

spirit in the Hall of Eblis bore in his breast. In _The Roll-call of

the Reef_,[119] the troop of drowned soldiers, infantry, and horsemen,

come rising out of the surf to answer to their names. Each man is asked

by name, "How is it with you?" and answers with the deadly sin that

has damned him. In Wilkie Collins's gruesome tale[120] there is one

spirit that is unhappy because his body lies unburied, a recurrence of

a theme frequent in classical stories and Gothic romance, but rare in

later fiction. For the most part the later ghosts are something more

than merely unhappy spirits. They are more positive, more active, more

individualistic, too philosophical to waste time in useless grieving.

[117] By M. H. Austin.

[118] In _The Closed Cabinet_.

[119] By A. T. Quiller-Couch.

[120] _The Queen of Hearts._

Nor are there many simply happy spirits, perhaps because the joyous

souls are likely to seek their paradise and forget about the earth. Yet

there are instances, such as the light-hearted spirits of children in

various stories, that with the resilience of childhood shake off gloom

and are gay; Rosamond,[121] that comes back to tell her friend how

happy the other life is, the peacefully content mother,[122] and others.

[121] In _Here and There_.

[122] In _They That Mourn_.

The ghosts that are actively vicious are the most vivid and numerous

in later fiction. The spirits of evil seem to have a terrible

cumulative force, being far more maleficent than the earlier ones,

and more powerful in carrying out their purposes. Every aspect of

supernaturalism seems to be keyed up to a higher pitch of terror. Evil

seems to have a strangely greater power of immortality over that of

good, judging from the proportion employed in modern fiction. Has evil

so much more strength of will, so much more permanence of power that

it lives on through the years and centuries, while good deeds perish

with the body? It would appear so from fiction. The ghosts of good

actions do not linger round the abode of the living to any noticeable

extent, but evil deeds are deathless. We have many stories of places

and persons haunted by the embodied evil of the past, but few by the

embodied good. The revenge ghosts outnumber the grateful dead by

legions.

Modern specters have a more complex power than the old. They are more

awful in their import, for they haunt not merely the body, but the

soul. The wicked spirits will to work dreadful harm to the soul as

well as the body, and drive the victim to spiritual insanity, seeking

to damn him for the life everlasting, making him, not merely their

victim, but through eternity their co-worker in awful evil. The victim

of the vampire, for instance, who dies as a result of the attack, has

to become in his turn a loathsome vampire to prey on other souls and

bodies. Blackwood's Devil-worshipers seek to kill the soul as well

as the body of their victim. The deathlessness of evil is shown in

Lytton's[123] and in many of Blackwood's stories, as where the psychic

doctor says to a man, "You are now in touch with certain violent

emotions, passions, purposes, still active in this house, that were

produced in the past by some powerful and evil personality that lived

here."

[123] _The Haunters and the Haunted._

Few writers have equaled F. Marion Crawford in the modern ghost story.

His tales have a curdling intensity, a racking horror that set them far

above the ordinary supernatural fiction. They linger in the mind long

after one has tried in vain to forget them, if indeed one ever does

forget their sense of evil power. There is in each of his stories an

individual horror that marks it as distinct from its fellows, a power

chiefly won by delineation of this immortality of evil, as in _The Dead

Smile_, with its description of the hideous smile that pollutes the

lips of the living and of the dead. "Nurse McDonald said that when Sir

Hugh Ockram smiled, he saw the faces of two women in hell, two dead

women he had betrayed." His vicious impulses last after death and from

his grave he reaches out to curse his own children, seeking to drive

them to awful, though unconscious sin.

Henry James has drawn for us two characters of unmitigated evil in

Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who, he says, are "hovering, prowling,

blighting presences." They are agents on whom is laid the dire duty of

causing the air to reek with evil. He says, "I recognize that they are

not ghosts at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps,

demons. The essence of the matter was the villainy of the motive in the

evoked predatory creature." What he wishes to do in this story is to

express a general sense of spiritual infamy, not specialized, as the

hot breath of the Pit usually confines itself to some one particular

psychical brutality, but as capable of everything, the worst that can

be conceived. How well he has succeeded in his effort, those who know

the story can testify.

Ambrose Bierce's stories are in many instances remarkable examples

of this psychic horror. _The Death of Halpin Frazer_ has a touch of

almost unbearable dreadfulness. Frazer is assaulted by an evil spirit

in a wood at night and choked to death, the spirit inhabiting the dead

body of the man's own mother who has idolized him. His dead mother's

face, transfixed with diabolical hate, is thrust upon him, and the

loved hands that have caressed him strangle him. This is similar to

the situation of an evil spirit occupying the body of a loved dead

mother in _The Mummy's Tale_, by Elliot O'Donnell. Bierce's stories

beat upon the mind like bludgeons and his morbid plots are among the

most dreadful in our literature. One wonders what abnormality of

mind conceives such themes, evolves such situations. If it be true,

as Macaulay suggests, that not only every poet but every person who

appreciates poetry is slightly unbalanced mentally, surely every writer

of such extreme and horrific stories must be abnormal. There is more

than one writer of modern ghostly fiction of whom it might be said that

"his soul is open on the Hell side."

Another temperament found distinctively in the later fiction is the

humorous ghost. He is a recent development, and as might be supposed,

is characteristically American. There were a few burlesque ghosts

in Elizabethan drama, the Ghost of Jack,[124] for instance, and

one colored ghost that would seem to connote mirth, but the really

humorous specter did not come till later. It remained for the Yankee

to evoke the spook with a sense of humor. Ghosts are not essentially

laughable, and to make them comic without coarseness or irreverence

is an achievement. Numerous writers have busied their pens with the

funny spook and now we have ghostly laughter that is mirthful and not

horrisonous as in other types. Specters now laugh with us instead of at

us, and instead of the mocking laughter heard in lonely places we have

"heart-easing mirth." Washington Irving evokes several humorous hoax

ghosts, such as the headless horseman that created excitement in Sleepy

Hollow and the serenading phantom in _The Specter Bridegroom_.

[124] In Peele's _Old Wives Tales_.

Richard Middleton in his _Ghost Ship_ shows some very informal humorous

ghosts. The girls and boys rise from their graves to flirt over their

tombstones on moonlight nights, and the children play with the village

specters as companions, their favorite being the man that sits on the

wellcurbing with his severed head held in his hands. The cottagers

rebuke the spooks overhead when they grow too noisy, and a general

good-fellowship prevails. Into this setting the ghost ship sails one

night, anchoring itself in the middle of a turnip patch, and the

riotous captain demoralizes the men of the village, ghosts and all,

with his rum and his jokes. After a stay of some time, one night in a

storm the villagers look out.

Over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars,

was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord's field. Her

portholes and her windows were ablaze with lights and there was a

noise of singing and fiddling on her decks.... They do say that

since then the turnips on landlord's field have tasted of rum.

Olive Harper tells[125] of a reporter who is invited by a cordial

spook--who has been a New York social leader--to a spectral banquet

and ball underneath Old Trinity. She satirizes human foibles and

weaknesses, showing ghosts that gossip and gormandize, simper and

swear as they did in life. They learn to play poker, dance, and

kill time as they used to do. Frank R. Stockton has written several

delicious drolleries of supernaturalism, as _The Transferred Ghost_,

where the spook of a living man, the irascible uncle of the charming

Madeline, terrifies the young suitor who lacks courage to propose.

The audacious and ever-present ghost swings his feet from the porch

railing, invisible to the girl as inaudible by her, and breaks in on

the conversation in a most disconcerting way. The young man at last

cries out in desperation, "What are you waiting for? I have nothing

to say to you?" whereat the girl, who has been undoubtedly waiting to

hear the proposal the embarrassed youth was trying to make, thinks he

is speaking to her and departs in high dudgeon. On a later occasion the

specter comes to announce to him that he has got his transfer and may

be somebody else's ghost instead of that of the man who was expected to

die and didn't, when the lover cries out, "I wish to Heaven you were

mine!" And Madeline, melting in a sigh, whispers, "I am yours!" The

sequel to this is also comic.[126]

[125] In _The Sociable Ghost_.

[126] _The Spectral Mortgage._

Brander Matthews has several stories of humorous supernaturalism,

_Rival Ghosts_ being the account of ancestral spooks belonging to

a young bridegroom, and who resent being brought into enforced

companionship by his sudden elevation to a title, since one ghost

must haunt the house and one the heir. The ingenious groom, at last

harassed to invention by the continual squabbling of the ghosts, brings

about a wedding between them. This is the only instance I have found

of a wedding between two specters, though there are various cases on

record of marriage between one living and one spectral personage.

John Kendrick Bangs devotes several volumes to the doings and sayings

of spooks, describing parties in a house-boat on the Styx, where the

shades of the departed great gather together and engage in festivities

and discussions, and showing types of water-ghosts and various kinds

of spooks. The humorous ghost is a more frequent person than one would

suppose without giving some thought to the subject, for many writers

have sharpened their wits on the comic haunt.

As may be seen from the examples mentioned, the ghost has made

perceptible progress in psychology. The modern apparition is much more

complex in personality than the crude early type, and shows much more

variety. The up-to-date spook who has a chance to talk things over

with William James, and knows the labyrinths of the human mind is much

better adapted to inflict psychal terrors than the illiterate specter

of the past. He can evolve mental tortures more subtle and varied than

ever, or he can amuse a downcast mortal by his gambols.

* * * * *

Stories of to-day show a decided advance over the Gothic in the matter

of motives for spectral appearance. There are, it is true, certain

motives in common between them, but the present-day spirit is less

limited, for he has gained the new without loss of the old, if he

wishes to keep the old. The principal impulse that impelled classical

shades to walk the earth was to request burial, since lacking that he

could not enter into the abode of the dead. This appears frequently

also in Gothic romance. It is shown but little in recent fiction,

perhaps because the modern ghost is reconciled to cremation or is

blithely indifferent to what becomes of his body since it no longer

rules him. _The Queen of Hearts_ is one of the few instances of its

use in modern fiction, for it is a vanishing motive for the most part.

Gothic ghosts were also wont to return to show the hiding-place of

treasure, but that, too, is dying out as an incentive to haunting. The

prosaic explanation here may be that now persons put their treasure in

safety deposits, hence there is scant occasion for mystery concerning

its location after death. Gothic spooks came back on occasion to reveal

parentage, for parents, like valuables, were frequently mislaid in

terror romance. This is not so important now, since vital statistics

usually keep such matters duly recorded, yet instances do sometimes

occur.

Ghosts in the terror romance came to make requests, apart from the

petition for burial, which tendency is still observed on the part of

later spooks, though not to the same extent as formerly. The requests

are psychologically interesting, as they usually relate to simple

ties of affection, illustrated by the mother-spirit[127] who asks her

friend to take her children. Gothic spirits came back often to make

revelations concerning the manner of their death, which is not often

the case now, though it does sometimes happen. And Dickens shows us one

ghost returning to influence the jury that is trying a man for murder.

Specters used to appear to forewarn the living against impending

danger, which impulse is rather lacking in later fiction though it

still occurs. The curious element of futurity enters into several

of these ghostly warnings, as in Dickens's _The Signal Man_ where

the apparition presages the man's death, as in Algernon Blackwood's

story[128] is related the incident of a man who saw the two Indians

scalp a white man and drag his body away, at last crying out, "I saw

the body, and _the face was my own_." Warning spirits of futurity are

seen in _On the Stairs_, where each man beholds his own destiny,--one

seeing the spectral snake that afterwards kills him in a hunting

expedition, one the ghost of a Zulu, the savage that almost destroys

him some time afterwards, and the last the ghost of a young woman in a

blue dress, the woman whom he marries and who hounds him to his death.

She presently sees her own fate, too, but what it is the author does

not tell us. One curious incident in the story is the instantaneous

appearance on the stairs of the woman herself and her ghostly double,

one in a white dress, one in the fatal blue. This sort of spectral

warning, this wireless service for the conveyance of bad news and hint

of threatening danger, serves to link the ghost story of the present

with those of the past. The records of the Psychical Society show

hundreds of such instances, and much use is made in fiction of plots

hinging on such motif. Scott's White Lady of Avenel appears as a death

portent, as also the "Bahr-geist" in another novel.

[127] In _The Substitute_.

[128] In _A Haunted Island_.

The revenge ghost looms large in fiction as in the drama. He was

the most important figure in Elizabethan as in classical drama, and

Shakespeare's ghosts are principally of that class. A terrible example

of the type is in Robert Lovell Beddoes' _Death's Jest-Book_, that

extraordinary example of dramatic supernaturalism, where the ghost of

the murdered man comes back embodied from the grave and is an active

character to the end of the play. He is summoned to life through a

hideous mistake, the murderer having asked the magician to call up

the spirit of his dead wife, but the body of his victim having been

secretly buried beside her so that the murderer may have no rest

even in the grave, the awful accusing spirit rises to confront him,

instead of his wife's phantom. The revenge ghost is both objective

and subjective in his manifestation and his impelling motive adds a

touch of frozen horror to his appearance. He appears in various forms,

as dismembered parts of the body--illustrated in the stories above

referred to,--in a horrific invisibility, in a shape of fear visible

only to the guilty, or in a body so objectified as to seem absolutely

real and living to others beside the one haunted. The apparently

casual, idle figure that strolls about the docks and streets in _The

Detective_, seen by different persons and taken for a man interested

only in his own pursuits, is a revenge ghost so relentless that he

hounds his victim from country to country, at last killing him by sheer

force of terror as he sits on his bed at night, leaving the imprint

of his body on the mattress beside the dead man whose face is rigid

with mad horror. He has come back in physical embodiment to avenge

the betrayal of his daughter. Ambrose Bierce shows us many spirits

animated by cold and awful revenge, sometimes visible and sometimes

unseen, as where a soldier killed for striking an officer answers,

"Here!" to the roll-call, just at which moment a mysterious bullet from

nowhere strikes the officer through the heart.[129] Crawford sends

a drowned sailor back in wet oil-skins to slay his twin brother who

has impersonated him to win the girl they both loved. When the two

bodies wash ashore one is a newly dead corpse, the other a skeleton

in oil skins; while the dreadful rattle of the accusing lump of lead

in the wife's skull in another story is a turn of the screw of her

horrid revenge. The revenge ghost in modern fiction is more varied in

forms of manifestation, at times more subtle in suggestion and ghostly

psychology, than the conventionalized type of the drama and remains one

of the most dreadful of the forms of fear.

[129] In _His Two Military Executions_.

In general, the modern stories show a greater intensity of power in

employing the motives that earlier forms had used as well as far

greater range of motivation. The earlier ghosts were limited in their

impulses, and their psychology was comparatively simple. Not so with

the apparitions of to-day. They have a far wider range of motives,

are moved by more complex impulses and mixed motivation in many cases

difficult to analyze.

The Gothic ghost had some conscience about whom he haunted. He had

too much reserve to force himself needlessly upon those that had no

connection with his past. If he knew someone that deserved punishment

for wrong done him or his, he tried to haunt him and let others alone.

The modern ghost is not so considerate. He is actuated in many cases

by sheer evil that wreaks itself upon anyone in range. Death gives

a terrible immortality and access of power to those whose lives have

been particularly evil, and the results are dangerous to society.

Dark discarnate hate manifests itself to those within reach. Algernon

Blackwood would have us believe that all around us are reservoirs of

unspeakable horror and that any moment of weakness on our part may

bring down the hosts of damnation upon us. This is illustrated in

such stories as _With Intent to Steal_, where the spirit of a man who

has hanged himself comes back with hypnotic power forcing others to

take their lives in the same way, or in another,[130] showing power

exerted viciously against human beings in a certain building, or still

another[131] where the witchcraft holds the village in thrall, and

elsewhere. Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, F. Marion Crawford, and Arthur

Machen have written a number of stories bringing out this side of

ghostly psychology, showing the bands of outlawed spirits that prey on

society. There are spectral bandits and bravos that answer the call of

any force hostile to man, or act of their own accord from an impulse of

malicious mischief.

[130] _The Empty House._

[131] _Secret Worship._

The jealous ghost is somewhat common of late, showing that human

emotions are carried over into the life beyond. In various stories we

find the dead wife interfering to prevent a second marriage, or to

make life wretched for the interloper even after the ceremony. But the

most extreme case of jealousy--even exceeding the instance of the man

whose wife and physician conspired to give him an overdose to put him

out of the way and who is frantic to prevent their marriage--is found

in Arnold Bennett's novel, _The Ghost_. Here the spirit of a man who

has madly loved an opera-singer haunts every suitor of hers and either

drives him to abandon his courtship or kills him, till finally the

singer begs the ghost to spare the man she loves, which he sadly does,

and departs. This is reminiscent of one of Marie de France's _lais_.

The varying motives for appearance may be illustrated by reference to

a few ghosts in modern fiction, such as the woman[132] who comes to

drive away a writer's sense of humor,--than which there could be no

greater spiritual brutality,--and set him to writing vile, debased

tragedies. Perhaps she has transferred her attentions to other authors

than the one in the story! Other instances are the little Gray Ghost

in Cornelia A. P. Comer's story by that name, who impels a stranger to

take her child from an orphan asylum and adopt it, much against his

will; the immortal lovers that haunt a woman who has made a marriage

of convenience--which has turned out to be a marriage of inconvenience

for her husband[133]; the talkative spook in Andrew Lang's _In Castle

Perilous_, that discourses learnedly on its own materialization,

speaking in technical terms, pokes fun at Shakespeare for the glow-worm

on a winter night, and the cockcrow in his _Hamlet_, and--but these are

perhaps enough. If one may judge from ghostly fiction, death subtracts

nothing from human emotion but rather adds to it, so that the spectral

impulses are more poignant and intense. The darker passions are

retained with cumulative power, and there is a terrible immortality of

hate, of jealousy and revenge.

[132] In _A Psychic Invasion_.

[133] In _The Long Chamber_.

There is no more impressive revenant than one Coleridge gives in his

_Wanderings of Cain_, the mournful phantom of Abel appearing to Cain

and his little son, Enos. The child says to his father, "I saw a man in

unclean garments and he uttered a sweet voice, full of lamentations."

Cain asks the unhappy spirit, "But didst thou not find favor in the

sight of the Lord thy God?" to which the shape answers, "The Lord is

God of the living only. The dead have another God!"

"Cain ran after the shape and the shape fled shrieking over the

sands, and the sands rose like white mists behind the steps of Cain

but the feet of him that was like Abel disturbed not the sands."

One of the most interesting phases of comparative ghost-lore is the

study of the intricate personality of specters. With respect to dual

personality the late supernatural stories are curiously reminiscent of

the animistic belief that a ghost is a double of the mortal, a vapory

projection of his actual body, to be detached at will during life

and permanently at death. I do not know of any instances of doubles

in classical literature, nor is the idea used in Gothic romance.

Likewise Shakespeare's ghosts are all spirits of persons safely dead.

It remained for the modern writer with his expertness in psychology

and psychiatry to evoke the ghosts of the living persons, the strange

cases of dual personality and of separate personalities supernaturally

merged into one, and those inexplicable ghosts of subliminal memories.

All these forms appear in elusive analysis, in complex suggestiveness,

in modern uncanny stories, and constitute one of the distinct marks of

advance over the earlier types.

The double, a frequent figure in English fiction, bears a resemblance

to the Doppelgänger of German folk-tales. Numerous examples of dual

personality, of one being appearing in two forms, are seen, with

different twists to the idea, yet much alike. It has been suggested

that these stories have their germinal origin in Calderon's play,[134]

where a man is haunted by himself. Poe's _William Wilson_ is a tense

and tragic story of a man pursued by his double, till in desperation

he kills him, only to realize that he has slain his better self, his

conscience. His duplicate cries out, "Henceforward thou art also dead,

dead to the world, to Heaven and to hope! In me thou didst exist and

in my death, see by this thine image, which is thine own, how utterly

thou hast murdered thyself!" Stevenson's _Markheim_ shows in the person

of the stranger the incarnate conscience, an embodiment of a man's

nobler self that leads him through the labyrinth of self-examination

to the knowledge of the soul's truth. The stranger tests the murderer

by offering him a way of escape, by suggesting further crime to him,

by showing him relentlessly what the consequence of each act will be,

till in despair Markheim, realizing that his life is hopelessly weak

and involved, decides to surrender it rather than to sin further.

Step by step the nameless visitor leads him, Markheim shuddering

back from the evil that is suggested, thinking the stranger is a

demonic tempter, till at last the transfigured face shows him to

be the nobler angel. Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ is, of

course, the best-known instance of this sort of dual personality, this

walking forth in physical form of the evil in one's own nature, with

a separate existence of its own. No writer could hope to express this

idea more powerfully than has been done in this chemical allegory,

this biological dissection of the soul. The thrill of suspense, the

seemingly inexplicable mystery, the dramatic tenseness of the closing

scenes make this sermon in story form unforgettable. Kipling has given

a striking story of a man haunted by his own phantom body, in _At the

End of the Passage_. His own figure slipped silently before him as he

went through his lonely house. "When he came in to dinner he found

himself seated at the table. The vision rose and walked out hastily.

Except that it cast no shadow it was in all respects real." The horror

of this haunting specter of himself, this double of his own body and

soul, drives the man to suicide, after which a peculiar twist of

horror is given by the detail at the close, of the discovery by his

comrade, of the man's own photograph imprinted on the dead retina and

reproduced by the camera hours after his death. In Julian Hawthorne's

allegory,[135] the dead man's spirit meets the devil, who is his own

evil self incarnate.

[134] _El Embozado._

[135] _Lovers in Heaven._

Edith Wharton's _Triumph of Night_ reveals a ghost of a living man

standing behind his double's chair, visible to the person opposite

and showing on the ghostly face the evil impulses that the living

countenance cleverly masks. John Kendrick Bangs has his hero say,[136]

"I came face to face with myself, with that other self in which I

recognized, developed to the fullest extent, every bit of my capacity

for an evil life," and Blackwood[137] relates the meeting of a

musician and his ghostly double in an opera hall. Mr. Titbottom,[138]

through the power of his magic spectacles reflecting his image in a

mirror, sees himself as he really is, as he looks to God, and flees

horror-stricken from the sight. This symbolic representation is akin to

the _Prophetic Pictures_ of Hawthorne, where a woman's griefs and marks

of age are shown in her pictured face before they are revealed in her

actual experience, a pictured futurity. The most impressive instance

of this relation between a human being and his portrait is in Oscar

Wilde's _Picture of Dorian Gray_, that strange study of a man's real

nature expressing itself on his painted likeness, while the living face

bears no mark of sin or shame or age, until the tragic revelation at

the end. Edith Wharton[139] also represents a supernatural dualism, the

woman's statue showing on its marble face the changing horror of her

own stricken countenance. _The White Sleep of Auber Hurn_ is a curious

story of a spiritual double, a psychological study of a man who was in

two places at once, seen by various persons who knew him in each case,

being killed in a train wreck many miles away from his room where he

was lying asleep in his bed,--a sleep that knows no waking.[140]

[136] In _Thurlow's Christmas Story_.

[137] In _The Man from the Gods_.

[138] In George William Curtis's _Prue and I_.

[139] In her _Duchess at Prayer_.

[140] Other stories of double personality are _The Ivory Gate_,

by Walter Besant; _The Man with a Shadow_, by George M. Fenn;

_The Jolly Corner_, by Henry James; _The Transferred Ghost_,

by Frank R. Stockton; _On the Stairs_, by Katherine Fullerton

Gerould; _Elixiere des Teufels_, by E. T. A. Hoffmann; _Howe's

Masquerade_, by Hawthorne; _The Recent Carnival of Crime in

Connecticut_, by Mark Twain; _The Queen of Sheba_, by Thomas

Bailey Aldrich; _The Doppelgänger_, by Elizabeth Bisland

Wetmore.

Georg Brandes, in his article, "Romantic Reduplication

and Psychology," in _Main Currents of Nineteenth Century

Literature_, points out the prevalence of this motif in German

fiction. He says: "It finds its first expression in Jean

Paul's _Leibgeber Schappe_, and is to be found in almost all

of Hoffmann's tales, reaching its climax in _Die Elixiere des

Teufels_. It crops up in the writings of all the Romanticists,

in Kleist's _Amphitryon_, in Achim von Arnim's _Die Beiden

Waldemar_, in Chamisso's _Erscheinung_. Brentano treats it

comically in _Die Mehreren Wehmüller_."

Distinct from the expression of one personality in two bodies, the

supernatural merging of two separate personalities into one appears

in recent ghostly fiction. It forms a subtle psychologic study and is

uncannily effective. H. G. Wells's _Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham_

is a peculiar narrative of a transfer of personality as the result of

a mysterious drink, by which an old man takes possession of a young

man's body, leaving the youth to inhabit the worn-out shell of the

dotard. Algernon Blackwood in _The Terror of the Twins_ describes a

supernatural merging of two natures into one by the power of a dead

father's insane curse. The younger son loses his vitality, his mind,

his personality, all of which is supermortally given to his older

brother, while the deprived son dies a drivelling idiot of sheer

inertia and utter absence of vital power. Mary Heaton Vorse[141]

describes a neurotic woman who comes back from the grave to obsess and

possess the interloper in her home, through the immortal force of her

jealousy, making the living woman actually become the reincarnation

of the dead wife. This story naturally suggests Poe's _Ligeia_ which

is the climax of ghostly horror of this motif, with its thesis that

"man doth not yield himself to the angels nor unto death utterly save

through the weakness of his own feeble will" expressed in a terrible

crescendo of ghastly horror. Poe's _Morella_ is a similar study of the

supernatural merging of an exterior personality into a living body,

where the dead mother and her child are literally one flesh and one

spirit. Blackwood's _The Return_ is an example of the compact-ghost,

that comes back at the hour of death to reveal himself to his friend

as he long ago promised he would. The dead artist manifests himself

through a sudden and wonderful realization of the beauty of the world

to which the materialistic friend has heretofore been blinded and

indifferent. Feeling this sudden rapturous sweep of beauty through his

soul, the living man knows that his artist friend is dead and that

his spirit has become a part of his own being. In the same manner the

little lonely soul in Granville Barker's wonderful piece of symbolism,

_Souls on Fifth_, enters into the being of the man who has the

understanding heart and continues her existence as a part of him.

[141] In _The Second Wife_.

An essentially modern type of ghost story is that which has its

explanation on the basis of subliminal memories. It seems that all

around us are reservoirs of ancestral memories, records of the vital

thoughts and actions of the long dead, psychical incarnations of

their supreme moments, their striking hours, into which the living

at times stumble and are submerged. Some slight spiritual accident

may bring down upon mortals the poignant suffering and bliss of the

dead in whose personality they are curiously duplicated. These ghosts

of dead selves from the past are different from the doubles that are

projections of the living, or prophetic specters of the future, and

are clearly distinguished. _The Borderland_, by Francis Parsons,

tells of a young army officer who is obsessed by subliminal self,

the ghost of his grandfather. He feels that he _is_ his grandfather,

living another existence, yet he lacks the pluck, the manhood, that

the old pioneer possessed. At a crisis in his military affairs, the

old frontiersman comes visibly forward to give him the courage that is

needed, after which he manifests himself no more. The scene of this

subliminal haunting is a Texas prairie, during a border fight, rather

an unghostly setting yet one which makes the supernatural seem more

actual. Arthur Johnson[142] presents the case of a man who sees the

ghosts of ancestral memory in a vivid form. He sees and hears his own

double wildly accuse his wife--who is the double of his own--betrothed,

after having killed her lover. His hand is wounded and the fingers

leave bloodstains as they snatch at the gray chiffon round his wife's

throat. After a fit of unconsciousness into which he falls is over, the

modern man awakes to find his hand strangely wounded, and on the floor

of the upper room he picks up a scrap of bloodstained gray chiffon!

Blackwood's _Old Clothes_ shows a little girl obsessed by subliminal

memories. She is haunted by terrible experiences in which she says that

she and some of those around her have been concerned. She goes into

convulsions if anything is fastened around her waist, and she cries

out that some cruel man has shut her up in the wall to die and has cut

off Philip's hands so that he cannot save her. Investigations bring

to light the facts that a long-dead ancestress, living in the same

house, had been walled up alive by her husband after he had cut off her

lover's hands before her face. The skeleton is found chained by the

waist inside the ancient wall. Blackwood's _Ancient Sorceries_ depicts

the ghosts of buried life, of a whole village enchanted by the past

and living over again the witchcraft of the long ago. As John Silence,

the psychic doctor, tells of the Englishman who drops casually into the

village and is drawn into the magic:

Vesin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the

intense activities of a past life and lived over again a scene in

which he had often played a part centuries ago. For strong actions

set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves that they

may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not

complete enough to render the illusion perfect, so the little man

was confused between the present and the past.

[142] In _Mr. Eberdeen's House_.

That story of unusual psychical experience, _An Adventure_, by two

Oxford women, can be explained on no other basis than some such theory

as this. The book claims to be a truthful account of a happening

at Versailles, where two English women, teachers and daughters of

clergymen, saw in broad daylight the ghosts of the past, the figures of

Marie Antoinette and her court. The writers offer the explanation that

they stumbled into a sort of pocket of the unhappy queen's memories

and saw the past relived before their eyes because she had felt it so

keenly and vividly long ago. Other instances might be given, but these

are sufficient to illustrate the type. Such stories have a curious

haunting power and are among the most effective narratives. The idea is

modern and illustrates the complexity of later thought as compared with

the simplicity of earlier times.

A comparative study of ghost stories leads one to the conclusion

that the ghost is the most modern of ancients and the most ancient

of moderns. In some respects the present specter is like and in some

unlike the previous forms. Ghosts, whether regarded as conjective or

purely subjective, are closely related to the percipients' thoughts.

Primitive times produced a primitive supernaturalism and the gradual

advance in intellectual development has brought about a heightening and

complexity of the weird story. 'Tis in ourselves that ghosts are thus

and so!

The spook of to-day is of a higher nervous organization than his

forbears. In many instances the latter-day ghost is so distracted by

circumstances that he hardly knows where he's at, as for instance,

the ghost in such case as _The Tryst_, by Alice Brown, where a

man is thought to be drowned and his ghost comes out to comfort

his sweetheart, only to have the drowned man brought back to life

presently; and in _The Woman from Yonder_, by Stephen French Whitman,

where a scientist with impertinent zeal brings life back to the body

of a woman who had bled to death while Hannibal was crossing the Alps

and been buried in a glacier till the glacier spat her out. Now,

what was the status of those ghosts? Was there a ghost if the person

wasn't really dead? But if a woman isn't dead after she has been in an

ice-pack for two thousand years or thereabouts what surety is there for

the standing of any ghost?

The apparitions of to-day have more lines of interest than the ancient

ghosts. The Gothic specter was a one-idea creature, with a single-track

brain. He was not a ghost-of-all-work as are some of the later spooks.

He was a simple-souled being who felt a call to haunt somebody for some

purpose or other, so he just went and did it. The specters of to-day

are more versatile,--they can turn their hand to any kind of haunting

that is desired and show an admirable power of adaptability, though

there are highly developed specialists as well. The psychology of the

primitive ghost and of the Gothic specter was simple. They knew only

the elemental passions of love and hate. Gothic spooks haunted the

villain or villainess to foil them in their wicked designs or punish

them for past misdeeds, or hovered over the hero or heroine to advise,

comfort, and chaperon them. But the modern ghosts are not satisfied

with such sit-by-the-fire jobs as these. They like to keep in the

van of activity and do what mortals do. They run the whole scale of

human motions and emotions and one needs as much handy psychology to

interpret their hauntings as to read George Meredith. They are actuated

by subtle motivations of jealousy, ardent love, tempered friendship,

curiosity, mischief, vindictiveness, revenge, hate, gratitude, and all

other conceivable impulses. The Billy Sunday sort of ghost who wants to

convert the world, the philanthropic spirit who wants to help humanity,

the socialist specter that reads the magazine, the friendly visitor

that sends its hands back to wash the dishes, the little shepherd lad

that returns to tend the sheep, are among the new concepts in fiction

of the supernatural. The ghost of awful malice, to be explained only on

the basis of compound interest of evil stored up for many years, is a

new force.

Though the ghostly narrative has shifted its center of gravity from

the novel to the short story since Gothic times, and many more of the

modern instances are in that form, the supernatural novel has recently

taken on a new lease of life. Honors are almost even between the

English and the American ghost story, as most of the representative

writers on each side turn their pen at some time to write terror

tales. The ghost has never lost his power over the human mind. Judging

from the past, one may say that the popularity of the ghost story

will continue undiminished and will perhaps increase. Certainly there

has been a new influx of stories within later times. What mines of

horror yet remain untouched for writers of the future, it would be

hard to say, yet we do not fear for the exhaustion of the type. On the

contrary, ghosts in fiction are becoming so numerous that one wonders

if the Malthusian theory will not in time affect them. We are too fond

of being fooled by phantoms to surrender them, for "the slow touch of a

frozen finger tracing out the spine" is an awesome joy. For ourselves,

we are content for the present to function on one plane, but we love to

adventure on another plane through spectral substitutes. We may give up

the mortal but we'll not willingly give up the ghost. We love him. We

believe in him. Our attitude towards specters is much like that of the

little black boy that Ellis Parker Butler tells about in _Dey Ain't No

Ghosts_, who sees a terrifying array of "all de sperits in de world,

an' all de ha'nt in de world, an' all de hobgoblins in de world, an'

all spicters in de world, an' all de ghostes in de world," come out to

bring a fearsome message to a frightened pickaninny.

De king ob de ghostes, whut name old Skull-an'-Bones, he place he

hand on de head ob li'l black Mose, an' de hand feel like a wet

rag, an' he say:

"Dey ain'no ghosts!"

An' one ob de hairs on de head ob li'l black Mose turn' white.

An' de monstrous big ha'nt what he name Bloody Bones he lay he hand

on de head ob li'l black Mose, an' he hand feel like a toad-stool

in de cool ob de day, an' he say:

"Dey ain' no ghosts!"

An' anudder one ob de hairs whut on de head ob li'l black Mose

turn' white.

An' a heejus sperit whut he name Moldy Pa'm place he hand on de

head ob li'l black Mose, an' he hand feel like de yunner side ob a

lizard, an' he say:

"Dey ain' no ghosts!"

And so on through the assembly. Small wonder that the terrified

youngster is loath to go up to the loft to bed alone that night and

demurs to the demand.

So he ma she say, "Git erlong wid you! Whut you skeered ob when dey

ain' no ghosts?"

An' li'l black Mose he scrooge an' he twist an' he pucker up he

mouf an' he rub he eyes an' prisintly he say right low:

"I ain' skeered ob de ghosts whut am, ca'se dey ain' no ghosts."

"Den whut _am_ you skeered ob?" ask he ma.

"Nuffin," say de li'l black boy whut he name am Mose, "but I jes'

feel kinder oneasy 'bout de ghosts whut ain't!"

Jes' lack white folks. Jes' lack white folks.