CHAPTER III
MODERN GHOSTS
The ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. Heis absolutely indestructible. He glides from the freshly-cut pagesof magazines and books bearing the date of the year of our Lordnineteen hundred and seventeen as from the parchment rolls of ancientmanuscripts. He appears as unapologetically at home in twentiethcentury fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology,medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles infiction but he never goes out of fashion. He is the really permanentcitizen of this earth, for mortals, at best, are but transients. Eventhe athlete and the Methusaleh must in the end give up the flesh,but the wraith goes on forever. In form, too, he wears well. Ghostlysubstance of materialization, ethereal and vaporous as it appearsto be, is yet of an astonishing toughness. It seems to possess anobstinate vitality akin to that attributed to the boll weevil in anegro 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 andthere is no closed season for spooks. It is much the case now as everthat all the world loves a ghost, yet we like to take our ghostsvicariously, preferably in fiction. We'd rather see than be one.
One point of difference between the ghostly fiction of the past andof the present is in the matter of length. The Gothic novel wasoften a three- or four-decker affair in whose perusal the reader agedperceptibly before the ghost succeeded or was foiled in his hauntingdesigns. There was obviously much more leisure on the part of spooks aswell as mortals then than now. Consequently the ghost story of to-dayis told in short-story form for the most part. Poe knew better thananybody before him what was necessary for the proper economy of thrillswhen he gave his dictum concerning the desirable length for a story,which rule applies more to the ghostly tale than to any other type, forsurely there is needed the unity of impression, the definiteness ofeffect which only continuity in reading gives. The ghostly narrativethat is too long loses in impressiveness, whether it is altogethersupernatural or mixed with other elements. In either case, it is lesssuccessful than the shorter, more poignant treatment possible in thecompressed form. The tabloid ghost can communicate more thrills thanthe one in diluted narration.
The apparitions in later English fiction fall naturally into severaldistinct classes with reference to the reality of their appearance.There are the mistaken apparitions, there are the purely subjectivespecters, evoked by the psychic state of the percipients, and there arethe 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'sinteresting apparitions belong to this class and others of the Gothicwriters used subterfuge to cheat the reader. In the early romancethere was frequently deliberate deception for a definite purpose, theghosts with the histrionic temperament using a make-up of phosphorus,bones, and other contrivances to create the impression of unearthlyvisitation. Recent fiction is more cleverly managed than that. Rarelynow does one find a story where the ghost-seer is deliberately imposedupon, for in most modern cases the mistake occurs by accident ormisapprehension on the part of the percipient, for which nobody andnothing but his own agitation is responsible. Yet there are occasionalhoax 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 overan obdurate lover, and _The Spectre Bridegroom_, which is a well-knownexample of the pseudo-spook whose object is matrimony. _His UnquietGhost_[75] is a delightful story of a fake burial to evade the revenueofficials. Watt, the "corp," says: "I was a powerful onchancy, onquietghost. I even did my courtin' whilst in my reg'lar line o' businessa'harntin' a graveyard!" His sweetheart sobs out her confession of loveto "his pore ghost," an avowal she has denied the living man. Examplesof the apparitions that unwittingly deceive mortals are found in _TheGhost at Point of Rock_,[76] where the young telegraph operator, aloneat night on a prairie, sees a beautiful girl who enters and announcesthat she is dead,--how is he to know that she is in a somnambulisticstupor, and has wandered from a train? Another is[77] a story where theyoung man falls in love with what he thinks is a wraith of the waterluring him to his death, but learns that she is a perfectly properdamsel whose family he knows. _The Night Call_[78] is less simple thanthese, a problematic story that leaves one wondering as to just what ismeant.[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 thoseevoked by the mental state of the percipients so that they becomerealities to those beholding them. The mind rendered morbid by griefor remorse is readily prepared to see the spirits of the dead returnin love or with reproach. The apparitions in animistic beliefs, as inclassical stories and Gothic romance, were usually subjective, bornof brooding love or remorse or fear of retribution, appearing to thepersons who had cause to expect them and coming usually at night whenthe beholders would be alone and given over to melancholy thought orelse to troubled sleep. Shakespeare's ghosts were in large measuresubjective, "selective apparitions." When Brutus asked the specter whathe was, the awful answer came, "Thy evil genius, Brutus!" Macbeth sawthe witches who embodied for him his own secret ambitions, and he alonesaw the ghost of Banquo, because he had the weight of murder on hisheart.
The subjective ghost story is difficult to write, as the effect mustbe subtly managed yet inescapably impressive. If done well it isadmirable, and there are some writers who, to use Henry James's wordsconcerning his own work, are "more interested in situations obscure andsubject to interpretation than the gross rattle of the foreground." Thereader, as well as the writer, must put himself in the mental attitudeof acceptance of the supernatural else the effect is lacking, for theghostly thrill is incommunicable to those beyond the pale of at leasttemporary credulity.
Kipling's _They_ is an extraordinary ghost story of suggestion ratherthan of bald fact. It is like crushing the wings of a butterfly toanalyze it, but it represents the story of a man whose love for his owndead child enabled him to see the spirits of other little children,because he loved. As the blind woman told him, only those who werespiritually 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 childthat was never born. Algernon Blackwood's ghosts are to a great extentsubjective. As John Silence, the psychic doctor, says to the shudderingman who has had a racking experience: "Your deeply introspective moodhad already reconstructed the past so intensely that you were _enrapport_ at once with any forces of those past days that chanced tobe still lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly." In _TheShell of Sense_,[80] the woman who is about to accept her dead sister'shusband feels such a sense of disloyalty that she sees the sister'sspirit reproaching her. Her conscience has prepared her for the vision.Juliet Wilbur Tompkins shows us the spirit of a mother returning tocomfort 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] Anynumber of instances might be given of ghosts appearing to those who arementally prepared to be receptive to supernatural visions, but thesewill 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. Theobjective spirits are those that, while they may be subjective on thepart of the persons chiefly concerned, to begin with, are yet visibleto others as well, appearing not only to t
hose mentally preparedto see them but to others not thinking of such manifestations andeven sceptical of their possibility. The objective ghosts have moredefinite visibility, more reality than the purely subjective spirits.They are more impressive as haunters. There is a plausibility, acorporeality about the later apparitions that shows their advance overthe diaphanous phantoms of the past. Ghosts that eat and drink, playcards, dance, duel, and do anything they wish, that are so lifelike intheir materialization that they would deceive even a medium, are moreterrifying than the helpless specters of early times that could onlygive orders for the living to carry out. The modern ghost has lost noneof his mortal powers but has gained additional supermortal abilities,which gives him an unsportsmanlike advantage over the mere human beinghe may take issue with.
Henry James's _The Turn of the Screw_ is a remarkable example ofthe objective ghost story. It is one of the best ghostly storiesin English, because more philosophical, showing more knowledge ofthe psychology not only of the adult but of the child, not only ofthe human being but of the ghost, than most fiction of the type.Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with their diabolical conspiracy of evilagainst the two children are so real that they are seen not only bythe children they hound but by the unsuspecting governess as well.She is able to describe them so accurately that those who knew themin life--as she did not at all--recognize them instantly. In _TheFour-fifteen Express_,[83] John Derringer's ghost is seen by a man thatdoes not know he is dead, and who has not been thinking of him at all.The ghost reveals incontrovertible proof of his presence, even leavinghis cigar-case behind him,--which raises the question as to whetherghosts smoke in the hereafter in more ways than one. The ghastlyincident in Emily Bronte's _Wuthering Heights_ where the agonizedghost comes to the window, gashing its wrist on the broken pane, isstrikingly objectified, for she comes to a person who never knew herand is not thinking of any supernatural manifestation. _Shadows on theWall_,[84] that story of surpassing power of suggestion, is objectivein its method, for not only the man who has wronged his dead mothersees his spirit returning, not in the ordinary way but as an accusingshadow 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 theyoung lad in the vestibule as well as by the king whose conscienceburns for having left him to die undefended. Frank R. Stockton'stransferred ghost is an objective apparition, for surely the guest inthe upper chamber was not expecting to see the shade of a living manperch itself on the foot of his bed at midnight. The horrible specterin _The Messenger_,[86] is seen by various persons at different times,some of whom are totally unprepared for such exhibition. And manysimilar instances might be given.
[85] By J. H. Shorthouse.
[86] By Robert W. Chambers.
Whether ghosts be mistaken, subjective or objective, their appearancehas always elicited considerable interest on the part of humanity.Their substance of materialization, their bearing, dress, and generaldemeanor are matters of definite concern to those who expect shortlyto become ghosts themselves. In some instances the modern ghoststicks pretty closely to the animistic idea of spirit material, whichwas that the shade was a sort of vapory projection of the body,intangible, impalpable, yet easily recognized with reference toprevious personality. Chaucer describes some one as being "nat pale asa forpyned goost," which illustrates the conception in his day, and theGothic specimen was usually a pallid specter, though Walpole furnishedone robust haunter of gigantic muscle. Yet for the most part the Gothicghosts were misty wraiths, through which the sword could plunge withoutresistance. They were fragile and helpless as an eighteenth-centuryheroine when it came to a real emergency, and were useful chiefly forfrightening the guilty and consoling the innocent. In some stories ofthe present we have a similar materialization. The spirit woman inKipling's _Phantom Rickshaw_ is so ethereal that the horse and itsrider plunge through her without resistance, and Dickens's Mr. Marleyis of such vapory substance that Scrooge can see clear through himto count the coat-tail buttons at his back. In a recent story, _TheSubstitute_,[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 nothingbut his bones and a lurid scowl. Skeletons still perambulate among us,as in _The Messenger_, where the stripped-off mask shows a hideousskull.
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 theragged remains of a black mantle. Near this crumbling earth body therelay the spirit of Zuleika attached to it by a fine thread of magneticether. Like the earthly body it was wrapped in a robe of black of whichit seemed the counterpart." Elliott O'Donnell has a story of a mummythat in a soldier's tent at night sobs, breathes, moves, sits up, andwith ghastly fingers unfolds its cere-cloth wrappings, appearing to himas the counterpart of his long-dead mother, looking at him with theeyes 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, therattle of bones is not heard as often as in Gothic times.
Ghostly apparitions are more varied in form than in early times. Themodern ghost does not require a whole skeleton for his purposes, but hecan take a single bone and put the hardiest to flight with it. It isa dreadful thing to realize that a ghost can come in sections, whichindefinitely multiplies its powers of haunting. F. Marion Crawford hasa story of a diabolical skull, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts onrecord. A man has murdered his wife by pouring melted lead into herear while she slept, in accordance with a suggestion from a casuallytold story of a guest. The dead woman's skull--the husband cut thehead off for fear people would hear the lead rattle, and buried it inthe garden--comes back to haunt the husband, with that deadly rattleof the lump of lead inside. The teeth bite him, the skull rolls up ahill to follow him, and finally kills him, then sets in to haunt thevisitor who told the suggestive story.[89] Elsewhere as well Crawfordshows us skulls that have uncanny powers of motion and emotion. InWilkie Collins's _Haunted Hotel_ the specter is seen as a bodiless headfloating near the ceiling of the room where the man was murdered andhis body concealed. Thackeray[90] describes a ghost with its head onits lap, and of course every one will remember the headless horsemanwith his head carried on the pommel of his saddle that frightened poorIchabod 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_, oneof the Anti-Jacobin parodies (ridiculing Richard Glover's ballad ofHosier'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 handwithout a body rises up to clutch the ancient letters, then withdraws,while in his _Strange Story_ the supernatural manifestation comes asa vast Eye seen in the distance, moving nearer and nearer, "seemingto move from the ground at a height of some lofty giant." Then otherEyes appear. "Those Eyes! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on legions! Andthat tramp of numberless feet! _they_ are not seen, but the hollows ofthe earth echo to their tread!" The supernatur
al phenomena in AmbroseBierce's stories have an individual horror. In _A Vine on the House_ heshows a hideous revenge ghost manifested in a peculiar form. A coupleof men take refuge in a deserted house and note a strange vine coveringthe porch that shakes unaccountably and violently. In mystificationthey 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 livedthere and whose husband had killed her secretly and buried her besidethe porch.
The revenge ghost in modern fiction frequently manifests itself in thisform, mutilated or dismembered, each disfigurement of the mortal bodyshowing itself in a relentless immortality and adding to the horrorof 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 lifeapart from the main body. And this idea of detached part of the formacting 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 andbroken, coming up all by itself to haunt the deserting lover, butperhaps such stories will be written soon. And think what terrors wouldawait the careless physician or surgeon if each outraged organ ordismembered limb came back to seek vengeance on him!
Ghosts of modern fiction are more convincing in their reality than thespecters of early times. They are stronger, more vital; there seemsto be a strengthening of ghostly tissue, a stiffening of supernaturalmuscle in these days. Ghosts are more healthy, more active, more alivethan they used to be. There is now as before a strong resemblance tothe personality before death, the same immortality of looks that isdiscouraging to the prospects of homely persons who have hoped tobe more handsome in a future state. Fiction gives no basis for suchhope. Peculiarities of appearance are carried over with distressingfaithfulness to detail, each freckle, each wrinkle, each grayhair showing with the clearness of a photographic proof. Note thelifelikeness of the governess's description of Peter Quint in _The Turnof 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 bealarming. She says of him: "He was absolutely, on this occasion, aliving, dangerous, detestable presence."
Each minor disfigurement is retained, as the loss of the tooth inCrawford's screaming skull, the missing toe in Bierce's _Middle Toe ofthe Right Foot_, the lacking foot in the ghostly vine, and so forth.Nothing is neglected to make identification absolute in present talesof horror. The spirits described by Bram Stoker have red, voluptuouslips and pink cheeks, and the spirit of Sir Oliver's mother, in DeMorgan's _An Affair of Dishonor_, that comes to meet him as he passesher mausoleum on his way to the shameful duel, limps as in life, sothat he recognizes her, though the cloaked and hooded figure has itsface turned from him. Jessie Adelaide Middleton shows us one ghost withhalf a face.
Ghostly apparel constitutes an interesting feature of supernaturalismin literature. There seem to be as definite conventions concerningspectral clothes as regarding the garb of the living fashionables. Itis more difficult to understand the immortality of clothes than ofhumanity, for bodily tissue even of ghosts might quite conceivablyrenew itself, but not so with the ghostly garments. Of what stuff areghost-clothes made? And why do they never wear out?
In olden times when people wore clothes of less radical styles thannow and fewer of them, masculine spirits were in part identified bytheir familiar armor. Armor is so material and heavy that it seemsincongruous to the ghostly function, yet shields and accouterments werenecessary accompaniments of every knightly spook. He must be ever readyto tilt with rival ghost. The Gothic phantoms were well panoplied andone remembers particularly the giant armor in Walpole's novel. Nowadaysthe law forbids the carrying of weapons, which restriction seems tohave been extended to ghostdom as well. Specters are thus placed at adisadvantage, for one would scarcely expect to see even the wraith of aTexas cow-boy toting a pistol.
Specters usually appear in the garments in which the beholder saw themlast in life. Styles seem petrified at death so that old-time ghostsnow look like figures from the movies or guests at a masquerade ball.One other point to be noted is that women phantoms are frequently seenin black or in white. White seems reminiscent of the shroud, as well asof youth and innocence, so is appropriate, while black connotes gloom,so is suitable, yet the really favored color is gray. Most of thespecters this season are dressed in gray. I scarcely know why this isaffected by shades, yet the fact remains that many wraiths both men andwomen are thus attired. Gray is the tone that witches of modern tasteschoose also, whereas their ancient forbears went in black and red.Modern ghosts are at a disadvantage in the matter of clothes comparedwith the earlier ones, since the styles now change so quickly and sodecidedly that a ghost is hopelessly _passe_ before he has time tomaterialize 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 womanin a blue dress, one of a rattlesnake, and one of a Zulu warriorwearing only a loin-cloth, a nose-ring, and a scowl. (We do notoften see the nude in ghosts, perhaps because they have a shade ofmodesty.) _Co-operative Ghosts_[92] depicts a man clad in the wraithof a tweed suit, mid-Victorian, "with those familiar Matthew Arnoldside-whiskers." In addition to Mr. Morley's coat-tail buttons whichwe glanced through him to see, we observe that he wears ghostlyspectacles, a pig-tail, tights and boots, and a prim waist-coat. InKipling's _They_ we see the glint of a small boy's blue blouse, whileanother Kipling youngster, a war-ghost,[93] struts around in hiscomical first trousers which he would not be robbed of even by theGerman soldiers that murdered him. Other children in the same storyare said to have on "disgracefully dirty clothes." I do not recall anysoilure on Gothic garments, save spectral blood-stains and the moldof graves. Neither did I discover any child wraith in Gothicism savethe pitiful spirits of baby victims in _The Albigenses_ and the babywraiths in Hogg's _The Wool-gatherer_. The Englishman driven mad bythe apparition of the woman he has wronged in Kipling's story[94] isdescribed 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 samecard-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 militarycloak of gray and military boots, while Crawford has one dreadful ghostcoming back to wreak revenge in wet oil-skins. The eccentric spook inJosephine Daskam Bacon's _The Heritage_ is dressed in brown and sitsstolidly and silently on the side of the bed with its back turned.Think of being haunted by an unbudging brown back! No wonder it drovethe young husband to spend his wedding night huddled on the stairs. Wehave instances of a ghost in a red vest, a relentless revenge spiritthat hounds from ocean to ocean his murderer and the betrayer of hisdaughter, and another of a ghost in a red shirt. There is on the wholeas much variety and appropriateness of costume in modern ghost fictionas 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 thoseof 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 tothe sight and hearing, as well as, of course, to the sixth sense thatrealizes the presence of a supernatural being. Ghosts were seen andheard and were content with that. But nowadays more points of contactare open to them and they haunt
us through the touch, the smell, aswell as sight and hearing. The taste as a medium of impression hasnot yet been exploited by fiction writers though doubtless it will beworked out soon. There is a folk-tale of the Skibos that wolves eatghosts and find them very appetizing and the devil in Poe's _Bon Bon_says he eats the spirits of mortals. One might imagine what hauntingdyspepsia could result if an ill-tempered spook were devoured againsthis will. It is conceivable, too, that gastronomic ghosts might hauntcannibals; and who knows that the dark brown taste in the mouths ofriotous livers is not some specter striving to express itself throughthat medium instead of being _merely_ riotous livers?
The appeal of ghosts to the sight has already been discussed soneed not be mentioned here. But the element of invisibility entersin as a new and very terrible form of supernatural manifestationin later fiction. In spite of the general visibility, some of themost 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 thestory has a curdling power that few straight ghost stories possess.Maupassant's _La Horla_ is a nightmare story of an invisible beingthat is terrific in its effect. The victim knows that an unseenyet definite and determined something is shut in his room with himnight after night, eating, drinking, reading, sitting on his chest,driving him mad. Ambrose Bierce's _The Damned Thing_ is a gruesomestory of invisibility, of a something that is abroad with unearthlypower of evil, whose movements can be measured by the bending of thegrasses, which shuts off the light from other objects as it passes,which struggles with the dogs and with men, till it finally killsand horribly mangles the man who has been studying it, but is neverseen. Another[96] has for its central figure a being that violentlyattacks men and is overpowered and tied only by abnormal strength,that struggles on the bed, showing its imprint on the mattress, thatis imprisoned in a plaster cast to have its mold taken, that is heardbreathing loudly till it dies of starvation, yet is absolutely nevervisible. Blackwood's Fire Elemental may be seen moving along only bythe 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 ofit, "I am not afraid of anything that I can _see_!" so these storiesof supernatural invisibility have a chilling horror more intense thanthat of most ghostly tales. The element of invisibility of unmistakablypresent 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 StrangeLand_,[97] of a man killed suddenly in a wreck while on his way hometo the birthday dinner his wife is preparing for him. He does not knowthat he has been hurt; but while his dead body lies mangled under thewreckage his spirit hurries home. He swears whimsically under hisbreath at some interruption and thinks with joy of the happy littlegroup he will meet. But when he enters his home he cannot make them seeor hear him. They are vaguely aware of some strange influence, are awedby it, and the little son with the poet's heart whispers that he hearssomething, but that is all. The man stands by, impotently stretchingout his arms to them till he hears the messenger tell them that he isdead.
[97] By Katherine Butler.
Ghosts are variable with respect to sounds as well as appearance. Theearly 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 atother times he could converse fluently. The Gothic specter, real aswell as faked, frequently lifted voice in song and brought terror tothe guilty bosom by such strains. Yet when he spoke he was usuallybrief in utterance. Perhaps the reason for that lay in the lack ofsurety on the part of the writers as to the proper ghostly diction.Gothic authors were not overstrong on technique and they may havehesitated to let their specters be too fluent lest they be guilty ofdialectic errors. It would seem incongruous for even an illiterateghost to murder the king's English, which presents a difficulty in thematter of realism, so perchance the writers dodged the issue by givingtheir ghosts brevity of speech, or in some cases by letting them lookvolumes of threats but utter no word. This may explain the reason forthe non-speaking ghosts in classical and Elizabethan drama. There isa similar variation in the later fiction, for many of the ghosts areeloquently silent, while other phantoms are terrifyingly fluent. Allthis goes to prove the freedom of the modern ghost for he does what hetakes a notion to do. The invisible ghosts are as a rule voiceless aswell.
The Gothic romance was fond of mysterious music as an accompaniment ofsupernatural visitation, but ghostly music is less common than it usedto be. Yet it does come at times, as in _A Far-away Melody_,[98] wheretwo spinster sisters living alone hear heavenly music as portent oftheir death. Ghostly song is heard in another case,[99] where a woman'sspirit comes back to sing in a duet at her funeral, and Crawford'sghost[100] constantly whistles a tune he had been fond of duringlife. In _Co-operative Ghosts_ the wraith of the young girl who inCromwellian times betrayed her father's cause to save her lover's lifesings 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 preternaturalfiction, not a children's story as one might think, nor yet humorous,the mechanical voice of the doll and the click of its tiny patteringfeet occur as strange sounds. Lord Strafford[101] walks with a firm,audible tread on his way to appall the king, and in Blackwood's _EmptyHouse_ the ghosts move with sounds of heavy, rushing feet, followedby a noise of scuffling and smothered screams as the ancient murderis re-enacted, then the thud of a body thrown down the stairs,--afterwhich is a terrible silence. The awful effect of a sudden silenceafter supernatural sounds is nowhere shown more tensely than in _TheMonkey's Paw_,[102] that story of superlative power of suggestion. Whenthe ghostly visitant knocks loudly at the outer door, we feel the samethrill of chilling awe as in the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, andmore, for the two who hear are sure that this is a presence come backfrom the dead. Then when the last magic wish has been breathed, uttersilence comes, a silence more dreadful in its import than the clamorhas been.
[101] In _John Inglesant_.
[102] By W. W. Jacobs.
New sounds are introduced in modern ghostly tales, such as the peculiarhissing that is a manifestation of the presence of the ancientspirit[103] followed by the crackling and crashing of the enchantedflames. In Blackwood's _Keeping His Promise_ the heavy, stertorousbreathing of the invisible Thing is heard, and the creaking of thebed weighted down by the body. Mary Wilkins Freeman brings in ghostlycrying in a story, while Blackwood speaks of his Wendigo as having "asort of windy, crying voice, as of something lonely and untamed, wildand of abominable power." Kipling introduces novel and touching soundsin his stories of ghostly children. The child-wraiths are gay, yetsometimes near to tears. He speaks of "the utterly happy chuckle of achild absorbed in some light mischief," "sudden, squeaking giggles ofchildhood," "the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet in the roombeyond," "joyous chuckles of evasion," and so forth. These essentiallychildlike and lifelike sounds are deeply pathetic as coming from theghosts of little ones that hover, homesick, near the earth they dreadto leave. The little ghost boy in Richard Middleton's story,[104]manifests himself, invisibly, through the little prancing steps, therustling of the leaves through which he runs, and the heart-breakingimitations of an automobile. Later ghostly fiction introduces few ofthe clankings of chains and lugubrious groans that made the Gothicromance mournful, and the modern specters are less wailful than theearlier, but more articulate in their expression. There are definiteghostly sounds that recur in various stories, such as the death-rapabove the bed of the dying, the oft-mentioned mocking laughter inempty places, the cry of the banshee which is the presage of death notonly of the body but of the soul, as well. On the whole, the soundsin modern supernatural stories are more
varied in their types, moreexpressive of separate and individual horror, and with an intensifiedpower 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 orGothic ghost stories, though certain folk-tales, as Hawaiian storiesof the lower world, speak of it. The devil was supposed to be in badodor, for he was usually accompanied by sulphurous scents, as we noticein Calderon's drama,[105] and some of the Gothic novels, but that seemsto be about the extent of the matter. But moderns, while not so partialto brimstone, pay considerable attention to supernatural odors. Thedevil has been dry-cleaned, but the evil odors of later fiction aremore objectionable than the fumes of the pit, are more variant, moreindividual and distinctive. Odors seem less subjective than sightsor sounds, and are not so conventionalized in ghostly fiction, hencewhen they are cleverly evoked they are unusually effective. Thesesupernatural scents have a very lasting quality too, for they linger onafter the other manifestations of the preternatural are past. In _TheHaunted Hotel_,[106] the ghost manifests itself through the nostrils.In room number thirteen there is an awful stench for which no one canaccount, and which cannot be removed by any disinfectants. Finallywhen a woman especially sympathetic to a man mysteriously dead is putin the room, the ghost appears as a decaying head, floating near theceiling and emitting an intolerable odor. _The Upper Berth_[107] tellsof a strange, foul sea odor that infests a certain stateroom and thatno amount of fumigating or airing will remove. As the Thing comes outof the sea to carry its victim away with it, the man in the lowerberth gets the full force of the unearthly smell. There are definitefoul supernatural odors associated with supernatural animals in recentghostly tales, as that "ghost of an unforgettable strange odor, of aqueer, acrid, pungent smell like the odor of lions," which announcesthe presence of the awful out-door something called by the Indians, theWendigo. In Kipling's story[108] of a man whose soul has been stolenby Indian magic through the curse of a leper priest and a beast's soulput in its place,--his companions are sickened by an intolerable stenchas of wild beasts, and when the curse is removed and he comes back tohimself, he sniffs the air and asks what causes "such a horrid doggysmell 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] wherethe spirit of the dead woman brings with it flowers in masses, with aheavenly perfume which lingers after the spirit in visible form hasdeparted. The subtlest and most delicately haunting story of this typeis O. Henry's,[110] where the loved, dead girl reveals herself to theman who is desperately hunting the big city over for her, merely as awhiff 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 hauntingcomes. Seeing a supernatural visitant is terrible, hearing him isdireful, smelling him is loathsome, but having him touch you is theclimax of horror. This element comes in much in recent stories. Theearlier ghosts seemed to be more reserved, to know their spectral placebetter, were not so ready to presume on unwelcome familiarities asthose in later fiction, but spooks have doubtless followed the fashionof mortals in this easy, relaxed age and have become a shade too freein their manners. Of course, one remembers the crushing specter inOtranto castle that flattened the hapless youth out so effectually,and there are other instances less striking. But as a general thingthe Gothic ghost was content to stand at a distance and hurl curses.Fortunately for our ancestors' nerves, he did not incline much to thelaying on of hands. Modern ghosts, however, have not been taught torestrain their impulses and they venture on liberties that Radcliffianromance would have disapproved of.
_The Damned Thing_ gives an example of muscular supernaturalism, forthe mysterious being kills a dog in a stiff fight, then later slays themaster after a terrible struggle in which the man is disfigured beyondwords to describe. O'Brien shows a terrible being of abnormal powerthat is tied only after a tremendous effort, and which fights violentlyto free itself. And the Thing in the upper berth had an awesomestrength.
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 inreports of the Psychical Society as well, as being of supernaturalchill or of burning heat. _Afterwards_[111] brings in the icy touch ofthe spirit hand. In certain cases the ghost touch leaves a burn or markthat never goes away.
[111] By Fred C. Smale.
Yet the touch of horror is not the only one introduced in fictionof 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 feltmy relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of achild. The little brushing kiss fell in the center of my palm--as gifton which the fingers were _once_ expected to close--a fragment of amute code devised very long ago." And in a similar story,[112] thewoman says, "I will swear to my dying day that two little hands stoleand rested--for a moment only--in mine!" Wilkie Collins speaks of hisstory, _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 psychicallybut physically, and when she asks for a further sign, the ghost kissesher unmistakably on the lips. Another widow[113] feels her hand claspedby the hand of her husband who has mysteriously disappeared afterhaving presumably absconded with trust funds--and knows that he is deadand seeking to give her some message. His hand gently leads her to theedge of the cliff where he has fallen over and been killed, so that shemay know the truth. The lover in Poe's _Eleonora_ feels a "spiritualkiss" from the lips of his beloved. The ghost touch is an impressivemotif of strength in recent fiction and marks an advance over theearlier forms, showing an access of imaginative power and psychologicalanalysis.
[113] In _Our Last Walk_, by Hugh Conway.
* * * * *
Another point of contrast between the modern and the older ghosts isin the greater freedom enjoyed by those of to-day. The ghosts of ourancestors were weak and helpless creatures in the main and the Gothicspecter was tyrannized over to such an extent that he hardly daredcall his shade his own. The spook of to-day has acquired a latchkeyand asserted his independence. He may have a local habitation but heisn't obliged to stay there. Now-a-days even the spectral women aresetting up to be feminists and have privileges that would have causedthe Gothic wraiths to swoon with horror. Ghosts are not so sensitive tothe barometer now as they used to be, nor do they have such an activeinfluence over the weather as did the Gothic phantoms. They do notneed a tempest for their materialization nor a su
pernatural play oflightning for their wild threats, and comparatively few storms occurin later fiction. Yet there is certainly no lessening of the ghostlythrill in consequence.
Neither are the spirits of to-day limited to any set hours as was therule in Gothicism. The tyranny of the dark, the autocratic rule oftwelve or one o'clock as the arbitrary hour for apparitions, has beenremoved. Katherine Fullerton Gerould shows an interesting collectionof ghosts that come at eleven o'clock in the morning, Georgia WoodPangborn brings one out on the seashore in mid-afternoon, and Kiplinghas various ghosts that appear in daylight and in the open air.
Ghosts in modern fiction are not dependent upon a setting of sullenscenery as in Gothicism, but may choose any surroundings they like.Since modern household arrangements do not include family vaults asa 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 ghoststory located in a graveyard, and _The Last Ghost in Harmony_[114]is set in a burying-ground, but the specter complains loudly of theunsentimental mind of the town which has lost interest in ghosts, andleaves in disgust. Likewise the domination of the Gothic castles, those"ghaist-alluring edifices," has passed away and modern spooks are notconfined to any one locality as in the past. They appear where theywill, in the most prosaic places, in cheap lodging-houses, in hallbedrooms, in bungalows, in the staterooms of steamers, on tramp ships,and so forth. Algernon Blackwood has set a number of thrilling ghoststories out in the open, in the woods, in the desert sand wastes, andsimilar places. One effect of such realistic and unspectral settingis to give a greater verisimilitude to the events described, and themodern tale bears out Leigh Hunt's suggestion that "a ghost story, tobe a good one, should unite, as much as possible, objects as they arein life, with a preternatural spirit." Yet here are ghosts that dohaunt certain rooms as relentlessly as ever Gothic specter did.
[114] By N. M. Lloyd.
The modern ghost has power over certain localities rather than merehouses or apartments. If the house he calls his own is torn down, hebides 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 vacantlot, which is a more reprehensible procedure than the ordinary habitsof spooks. One story concerns a house so persistently ghosted thatits owner took it down section by section, trying to arrive at thelocation of the curse, but to no avail. When the whole building hadbeen razed and the site plowed over, the ghost undiscouraged hauntedmerrily on. Then the owner left in disgust. Algernon Blackwood isfond 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 wanderswithin the limits of a place made horrible by devil-worshipers,long-dead, but life-like, and inhabiting a house that has been torndown years before but appears as usual, where they entrap the souls ofthe living for their fiendish sacrifice. Another[116] is the record ofa spirit of frightful evil that haunts a house built on the spot wherean older house once stood, whose diabolism lingers on to curse theliving. The spirit that haunts a locality rather than one room or househas a more malignant power than the more restricted ghost and this addsa new element of definite supernaturalism to modern fiction. But ashouses are so much less permanent now than formerly, ghosts would be ata terrible disadvantage if they had to be evicted every time a buildingwas torn down.
[115] As in _Ancient Sorceries_.
[116] _A Psychic Invasion._
* * * * *
Ghostly psychology is a fascinating study. The development of spectralpersonality is one of the evident facts gained from a historical surveyof supernatural fiction. The modern ghost has more individuality,more distinctiveness, in the main, than his forbears. The ghosts ofmedievalism, of ancient superstition, and the drama were for the mostpart pallid, colorless beings in character as in materialization.The ancient ghosts were more mournful than the moderns, since thestate of the dead in early times was by no means enviable. The mostone could hope for then was Hades, while the spirits who hadn't beenburied couldn't find entrance even there but were forced by relentlessspectral police to keep forever moving. The Christian religionfurnishes a more cheerful outlook, so in later manifestations the gloomis considerably lightened. Yet even so the Gothic ghosts were morbid,low-minded specters not much happier than the unlucky wights they feltit their business to haunt. Their woe-begone visages, their clankingchains, and other accompaniments of woe betokened anything but cheer.
There are some unhappy spirits in recent fiction, but not such a largeproportion as in the past. And there is usually some basis for theirjoylessness; they don't have general melancholia with no grounds forit. The ghost of the dead wife in _Readjustment_[117] is miserablebecause she has never understood her husband, either in life or indeath, and she comes back seeking an explanation. Another spectralwoman[118] is wretched because she has the double crime of murder andsuicide on her soul. Poor Marley grieves because he is doomed to seethe opportunities that life has offered him to serve others and that hehas neglected, being forced to see with the clear vision of the otherworld the evil results of his own neglect, which is enough to make anyone wretched. A guilty conscience is like the burning heart that eachspirit in the Hall of Eblis bore in his breast. In _The Roll-call ofthe Reef_,[119] the troop of drowned soldiers, infantry, and horsemen,come rising out of the surf to answer to their names. Each man is askedby name, "How is it with you?" and answers with the deadly sin thathas damned him. In Wilkie Collins's gruesome tale[120] there is onespirit that is unhappy because his body lies unburied, a recurrence ofa theme frequent in classical stories and Gothic romance, but rare inlater fiction. For the most part the later ghosts are something morethan merely unhappy spirits. They are more positive, more active, moreindividualistic, 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 joyoussouls are likely to seek their paradise and forget about the earth. Yetthere are instances, such as the light-hearted spirits of children invarious stories, that with the resilience of childhood shake off gloomand are gay; Rosamond,[121] that comes back to tell her friend howhappy 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 numerousin later fiction. The spirits of evil seem to have a terriblecumulative force, being far more maleficent than the earlier ones,and more powerful in carrying out their purposes. Every aspect ofsupernaturalism seems to be keyed up to a higher pitch of terror. Evilseems to have a strangely greater power of immortality over that ofgood, judging from the proportion employed in modern fiction. Has evilso much more strength of will, so much more permanence of power thatit lives on through the years and centuries, while good deeds perishwith the body? It would appear so from fiction. The ghosts of goodactions do not linger round the abode of the living to any noticeableextent, but evil deeds are deathless. We have many stories of placesand persons haunted by the embodied evil of the past, but few by theembodied good. The revenge ghosts outnumber the grateful dead bylegions.
Modern specters have a more complex power than the old. They are moreawful in their import, for they haunt not merely the body, but thesoul. The wicked spirits will to work dreadful harm to the soul aswell as the body, and drive the victim to spiritual insanity, seekingto damn him for the life everlasting, making him, not merely theirvictim, but through eternity their co-worker in awful evil. The victimof the vampire, for instance, who dies as a result of the attack, hasto become in his turn a loathsome vampire to prey on other souls andbodies. Blackwood's Devil-wo
rshipers seek to kill the soul as wellas the body of their victim. The deathlessness of evil is shown inLytton's[123] and in many of Blackwood's stories, as where the psychicdoctor says to a man, "You are now in touch with certain violentemotions, passions, purposes, still active in this house, that wereproduced in the past by some powerful and evil personality that livedhere."
[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 farabove the ordinary supernatural fiction. They linger in the mind longafter one has tried in vain to forget them, if indeed one ever doesforget their sense of evil power. There is in each of his stories anindividual horror that marks it as distinct from its fellows, a powerchiefly won by delineation of this immortality of evil, as in _The DeadSmile_, with its description of the hideous smile that pollutes thelips of the living and of the dead. "Nurse McDonald said that when SirHugh Ockram smiled, he saw the faces of two women in hell, two deadwomen he had betrayed." His vicious impulses last after death and fromhis grave he reaches out to curse his own children, seeking to drivethem to awful, though unconscious sin.
Henry James has drawn for us two characters of unmitigated evil inPeter Quint and Miss Jessel, who, he says, are "hovering, prowling,blighting presences." They are agents on whom is laid the dire duty ofcausing the air to reek with evil. He says, "I recognize that they arenot 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 theevoked predatory creature." What he wishes to do in this story is toexpress a general sense of spiritual infamy, not specialized, as thehot breath of the Pit usually confines itself to some one particularpsychical brutality, but as capable of everything, the worst that canbe conceived. How well he has succeeded in his effort, those who knowthe story can testify.
Ambrose Bierce's stories are in many instances remarkable examplesof this psychic horror. _The Death of Halpin Frazer_ has a touch ofalmost unbearable dreadfulness. Frazer is assaulted by an evil spiritin a wood at night and choked to death, the spirit inhabiting the deadbody of the man's own mother who has idolized him. His dead mother'sface, transfixed with diabolical hate, is thrust upon him, and theloved hands that have caressed him strangle him. This is similar tothe situation of an evil spirit occupying the body of a loved deadmother in _The Mummy's Tale_, by Elliot O'Donnell. Bierce's storiesbeat upon the mind like bludgeons and his morbid plots are among themost dreadful in our literature. One wonders what abnormality ofmind conceives such themes, evolves such situations. If it be true,as Macaulay suggests, that not only every poet but every person whoappreciates poetry is slightly unbalanced mentally, surely every writerof such extreme and horrific stories must be abnormal. There is morethan 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 thehumorous ghost. He is a recent development, and as might be supposed,is characteristically American. There were a few burlesque ghostsin Elizabethan drama, the Ghost of Jack,[124] for instance, andone colored ghost that would seem to connote mirth, but the reallyhumorous specter did not come till later. It remained for the Yankeeto evoke the spook with a sense of humor. Ghosts are not essentiallylaughable, and to make them comic without coarseness or irreverenceis an achievement. Numerous writers have busied their pens with thefunny spook and now we have ghostly laughter that is mirthful and nothorrisonous as in other types. Specters now laugh with us instead of atus, and instead of the mocking laughter heard in lonely places we have"heart-easing mirth." Washington Irving evokes several humorous hoaxghosts, such as the headless horseman that created excitement in SleepyHollow 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 humorousghosts. The girls and boys rise from their graves to flirt over theirtombstones on moonlight nights, and the children play with the villagespecters as companions, their favorite being the man that sits on thewellcurbing with his severed head held in his hands. The cottagersrebuke the spooks overhead when they grow too noisy, and a generalgood-fellowship prevails. Into this setting the ghost ship sails onenight, anchoring itself in the middle of a turnip patch, and theriotous 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 astorm 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 cordialspook--who has been a New York social leader--to a spectral banquetand ball underneath Old Trinity. She satirizes human foibles andweaknesses, showing ghosts that gossip and gormandize, simper andswear as they did in life. They learn to play poker, dance, andkill time as they used to do. Frank R. Stockton has written severaldelicious drolleries of supernaturalism, as _The Transferred Ghost_,where the spook of a living man, the irascible uncle of the charmingMadeline, terrifies the young suitor who lacks courage to propose.The audacious and ever-present ghost swings his feet from the porchrailing, invisible to the girl as inaudible by her, and breaks in onthe conversation in a most disconcerting way. The young man at lastcries out in desperation, "What are you waiting for? I have nothingto say to you?" whereat the girl, who has been undoubtedly waiting tohear the proposal the embarrassed youth was trying to make, thinks heis speaking to her and departs in high dudgeon. On a later occasion thespecter comes to announce to him that he has got his transfer and maybe somebody else's ghost instead of that of the man who was expected todie and didn't, when the lover cries out, "I wish to Heaven you weremine!" And Madeline, melting in a sigh, whispers, "I am yours!" Thesequel 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 toa young bridegroom, and who resent being brought into enforcedcompanionship by his sudden elevation to a title, since one ghostmust haunt the house and one the heir. The ingenious groom, at lastharassed to invention by the continual squabbling of the ghosts, bringsabout a wedding between them. This is the only instance I have foundof a wedding between two specters, though there are various cases onrecord of marriage between one living and one spectral personage.John Kendrick Bangs devotes several volumes to the doings and sayingsof spooks, describing parties in a house-boat on the Styx, where theshades of the departed great gather together and engage in festivitiesand discussions, and showing types of water-ghosts and various kindsof spooks. The humorous ghost is a more frequent person than one wouldsuppose without giving some thought to the subject, for many writershave sharpened their wits on the comic haunt.
As may be seen from the examples mentioned, the ghost has madeperceptible progress in psychology. The modern apparition is much morecomplex in personality than the crude early type, and shows much morevariety. The up-to-date spook who has a chance to talk things overwith William James, and knows the labyrinths of the human mind is muchbetter adapted to inflict psychal terrors than the illiterate specterof the past. He can evolve mental tortures more subtle and varied thanever, or he can amuse a downcast mortal by his gambols.
* * * * *
Stories of to-day show a decided advance over the Gothic in the matterof motives for spectral appearance. There are, it is true, certainmotives in common between them, but the present-day spirit is lesslimited, for he has gained the new without loss of the old, if hewishes to keep the old. The principal impulse that impelled classicalshades to walk
the earth was to request burial, since lacking that hecould not enter into the abode of the dead. This appears frequentlyalso in Gothic romance. It is shown but little in recent fiction,perhaps because the modern ghost is reconciled to cremation or isblithely indifferent to what becomes of his body since it no longerrules him. _The Queen of Hearts_ is one of the few instances of itsuse 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 oftreasure, but that, too, is dying out as an incentive to haunting. Theprosaic explanation here may be that now persons put their treasure insafety deposits, hence there is scant occasion for mystery concerningits location after death. Gothic spooks came back on occasion to revealparentage, for parents, like valuables, were frequently mislaid interror romance. This is not so important now, since vital statisticsusually keep such matters duly recorded, yet instances do sometimesoccur.
Ghosts in the terror romance came to make requests, apart from thepetition for burial, which tendency is still observed on the part oflater spooks, though not to the same extent as formerly. The requestsare psychologically interesting, as they usually relate to simpleties of affection, illustrated by the mother-spirit[127] who asks herfriend to take her children. Gothic spirits came back often to makerevelations concerning the manner of their death, which is not oftenthe case now, though it does sometimes happen. And Dickens shows us oneghost returning to influence the jury that is trying a man for murder.Specters used to appear to forewarn the living against impendingdanger, which impulse is rather lacking in later fiction though itstill occurs. The curious element of futurity enters into severalof these ghostly warnings, as in Dickens's _The Signal Man_ wherethe apparition presages the man's death, as in Algernon Blackwood'sstory[128] is related the incident of a man who saw the two Indiansscalp a white man and drag his body away, at last crying out, "I sawthe body, and _the face was my own_." Warning spirits of futurity areseen in _On the Stairs_, where each man beholds his own destiny,--oneseeing the spectral snake that afterwards kills him in a huntingexpedition, one the ghost of a Zulu, the savage that almost destroyshim some time afterwards, and the last the ghost of a young woman in ablue 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 doesnot tell us. One curious incident in the story is the instantaneousappearance on the stairs of the woman herself and her ghostly double,one in a white dress, one in the fatal blue. This sort of spectralwarning, this wireless service for the conveyance of bad news and hintof threatening danger, serves to link the ghost story of the presentwith those of the past. The records of the Psychical Society showhundreds of such instances, and much use is made in fiction of plotshinging on such motif. Scott's White Lady of Avenel appears as a deathportent, 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 wasthe most important figure in Elizabethan as in classical drama, andShakespeare's ghosts are principally of that class. A terrible exampleof the type is in Robert Lovell Beddoes' _Death's Jest-Book_, thatextraordinary example of dramatic supernaturalism, where the ghost ofthe murdered man comes back embodied from the grave and is an activecharacter to the end of the play. He is summoned to life through ahideous mistake, the murderer having asked the magician to call upthe spirit of his dead wife, but the body of his victim having beensecretly buried beside her so that the murderer may have no resteven in the grave, the awful accusing spirit rises to confront him,instead of his wife's phantom. The revenge ghost is both objectiveand subjective in his manifestation and his impelling motive adds atouch of frozen horror to his appearance. He appears in various forms,as dismembered parts of the body--illustrated in the stories abovereferred to,--in a horrific invisibility, in a shape of fear visibleonly to the guilty, or in a body so objectified as to seem absolutelyreal and living to others beside the one haunted. The apparentlycasual, idle figure that strolls about the docks and streets in _TheDetective_, seen by different persons and taken for a man interestedonly in his own pursuits, is a revenge ghost so relentless that hehounds his victim from country to country, at last killing him by sheerforce of terror as he sits on his bed at night, leaving the imprintof his body on the mattress beside the dead man whose face is rigidwith mad horror. He has come back in physical embodiment to avengethe betrayal of his daughter. Ambrose Bierce shows us many spiritsanimated by cold and awful revenge, sometimes visible and sometimesunseen, as where a soldier killed for striking an officer answers,"Here!" to the roll-call, just at which moment a mysterious bullet fromnowhere strikes the officer through the heart.[129] Crawford sendsa drowned sailor back in wet oil-skins to slay his twin brother whohas impersonated him to win the girl they both loved. When the twobodies wash ashore one is a newly dead corpse, the other a skeletonin oil skins; while the dreadful rattle of the accusing lump of leadin the wife's skull in another story is a turn of the screw of herhorrid revenge. The revenge ghost in modern fiction is more varied informs of manifestation, at times more subtle in suggestion and ghostlypsychology, than the conventionalized type of the drama and remains oneof 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 inemploying the motives that earlier forms had used as well as fargreater range of motivation. The earlier ghosts were limited in theirimpulses, and their psychology was comparatively simple. Not so withthe apparitions of to-day. They have a far wider range of motives,are moved by more complex impulses and mixed motivation in many casesdifficult to analyze.
The Gothic ghost had some conscience about whom he haunted. He hadtoo much reserve to force himself needlessly upon those that had noconnection with his past. If he knew someone that deserved punishmentfor 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 casesby sheer evil that wreaks itself upon anyone in range. Death givesa terrible immortality and access of power to those whose lives havebeen particularly evil, and the results are dangerous to society.Dark discarnate hate manifests itself to those within reach. AlgernonBlackwood would have us believe that all around us are reservoirs ofunspeakable horror and that any moment of weakness on our part maybring down the hosts of damnation upon us. This is illustrated insuch stories as _With Intent to Steal_, where the spirit of a man whohas hanged himself comes back with hypnotic power forcing others totake their lives in the same way, or in another,[130] showing powerexerted viciously against human beings in a certain building, or stillanother[131] where the witchcraft holds the village in thrall, andelsewhere. Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, F. Marion Crawford, and ArthurMachen have written a number of stories bringing out this side ofghostly psychology, showing the bands of outlawed spirits that prey onsociety. There are spectral bandits and bravos that answer the call ofany force hostile to man, or act of their own accord from an impulse ofmalicious mischief.
[130] _The Empty House._
[131] _Secret Worship._
The jealous ghost is somewhat common of late, showing that humanemotions are carried over into the life beyond. In various stories wefind the dead wife interfering to prevent a second marriage, or tomake life wretched for the interloper even after the ceremony. But themost extreme case of jealousy--even exceeding the instance of the manwhose wife and physician conspired to give him an overdose to put himout of the way and who is frantic to prevent their marriage--is foundin Arnold Bennett's novel, _The Ghost_. Here the spirit of a man whohas madly loved an opera-singer haunts every suitor of hers and eitherdrives him to abandon his courtship or kills him, till finally thesinger 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 toa few ghosts in modern fiction, s
uch as the woman[132] who comes todrive away a writer's sense of humor,--than which there could be nogreater spiritual brutality,--and set him to writing vile, debasedtragedies. Perhaps she has transferred her attentions to other authorsthan the one in the story! Other instances are the little Gray Ghostin Cornelia A. P. Comer's story by that name, who impels a stranger totake her child from an orphan asylum and adopt it, much against hiswill; the immortal lovers that haunt a woman who has made a marriageof convenience--which has turned out to be a marriage of inconveniencefor her husband[133]; the talkative spook in Andrew Lang's _In CastlePerilous_, that discourses learnedly on its own materialization,speaking in technical terms, pokes fun at Shakespeare for the glow-wormon a winter night, and the cockcrow in his _Hamlet_, and--but these areperhaps enough. If one may judge from ghostly fiction, death subtractsnothing from human emotion but rather adds to it, so that the spectralimpulses are more poignant and intense. The darker passions areretained with cumulative power, and there is a terrible immortality ofhate, 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 Cainand his little son, Enos. The child says to his father, "I saw a man inunclean garments and he uttered a sweet voice, full of lamentations."Cain asks the unhappy spirit, "But didst thou not find favor in thesight of the Lord thy God?" to which the shape answers, "The Lord isGod 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 thestudy of the intricate personality of specters. With respect to dualpersonality the late supernatural stories are curiously reminiscent ofthe animistic belief that a ghost is a double of the mortal, a vaporyprojection of his actual body, to be detached at will during lifeand permanently at death. I do not know of any instances of doublesin 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 psychologyand psychiatry to evoke the ghosts of the living persons, the strangecases of dual personality and of separate personalities supernaturallymerged 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 ofadvance over the earlier types.
The double, a frequent figure in English fiction, bears a resemblanceto the Doppelgaenger of German folk-tales. Numerous examples of dualpersonality, of one being appearing in two forms, are seen, withdifferent twists to the idea, yet much alike. It has been suggestedthat these stories have their germinal origin in Calderon's play,[134]where a man is haunted by himself. Poe's _William Wilson_ is a tenseand tragic story of a man pursued by his double, till in desperationhe kills him, only to realize that he has slain his better self, hisconscience. His duplicate cries out, "Henceforward thou art also dead,dead to the world, to Heaven and to hope! In me thou didst exist andin my death, see by this thine image, which is thine own, how utterlythou hast murdered thyself!" Stevenson's _Markheim_ shows in the personof the stranger the incarnate conscience, an embodiment of a man'snobler self that leads him through the labyrinth of self-examinationto the knowledge of the soul's truth. The stranger tests the murdererby 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 weakand involved, decides to surrender it rather than to sin further.Step by step the nameless visitor leads him, Markheim shudderingback from the evil that is suggested, thinking the stranger is ademonic tempter, till at last the transfigured face shows him tobe the nobler angel. Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ is, ofcourse, the best-known instance of this sort of dual personality, thiswalking forth in physical form of the evil in one's own nature, witha separate existence of its own. No writer could hope to express thisidea more powerfully than has been done in this chemical allegory,this biological dissection of the soul. The thrill of suspense, theseemingly inexplicable mystery, the dramatic tenseness of the closingscenes make this sermon in story form unforgettable. Kipling has givena striking story of a man haunted by his own phantom body, in _At theEnd of the Passage_. His own figure slipped silently before him as hewent through his lonely house. "When he came in to dinner he foundhimself seated at the table. The vision rose and walked out hastily.Except that it cast no shadow it was in all respects real." The horrorof this haunting specter of himself, this double of his own body andsoul, drives the man to suicide, after which a peculiar twist ofhorror is given by the detail at the close, of the discovery by hiscomrade, of the man's own photograph imprinted on the dead retina andreproduced by the camera hours after his death. In Julian Hawthorne'sallegory,[135] the dead man's spirit meets the devil, who is his ownevil self incarnate.
[134] _El Embozado._
[135] _Lovers in Heaven._
Edith Wharton's _Triumph of Night_ reveals a ghost of a living manstanding behind his double's chair, visible to the person oppositeand showing on the ghostly face the evil impulses that the livingcountenance cleverly masks. John Kendrick Bangs has his hero say,[136]"I came face to face with myself, with that other self in which Irecognized, developed to the fullest extent, every bit of my capacityfor an evil life," and Blackwood[137] relates the meeting of amusician and his ghostly double in an opera hall. Mr. Titbottom,[138]through the power of his magic spectacles reflecting his image in amirror, sees himself as he really is, as he looks to God, and fleeshorror-stricken from the sight. This symbolic representation is akin tothe _Prophetic Pictures_ of Hawthorne, where a woman's griefs and marksof age are shown in her pictured face before they are revealed in heractual experience, a pictured futurity. The most impressive instanceof this relation between a human being and his portrait is in OscarWilde's _Picture of Dorian Gray_, that strange study of a man's realnature expressing itself on his painted likeness, while the living facebears no mark of sin or shame or age, until the tragic revelation atthe end. Edith Wharton[139] also represents a supernatural dualism, thewoman's statue showing on its marble face the changing horror of herown stricken countenance. _The White Sleep of Auber Hurn_ is a curiousstory of a spiritual double, a psychological study of a man who was intwo 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 hewas 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 Doppelgaenger_, 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 _Ersc
heinung_. Brentano treats it comically in _Die Mehreren Wehmueller_."
Distinct from the expression of one personality in two bodies, thesupernatural merging of two separate personalities into one appearsin recent ghostly fiction. It forms a subtle psychologic study and isuncannily effective. H. G. Wells's _Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham_is a peculiar narrative of a transfer of personality as the result ofa mysterious drink, by which an old man takes possession of a youngman's body, leaving the youth to inhabit the worn-out shell of thedotard. Algernon Blackwood in _The Terror of the Twins_ describes asupernatural merging of two natures into one by the power of a deadfather's insane curse. The younger son loses his vitality, his mind,his personality, all of which is supermortally given to his olderbrother, while the deprived son dies a drivelling idiot of sheerinertia and utter absence of vital power. Mary Heaton Vorse[141]describes a neurotic woman who comes back from the grave to obsess andpossess the interloper in her home, through the immortal force of herjealousy, making the living woman actually become the reincarnationof the dead wife. This story naturally suggests Poe's _Ligeia_ whichis the climax of ghostly horror of this motif, with its thesis that"man doth not yield himself to the angels nor unto death utterly savethrough the weakness of his own feeble will" expressed in a terriblecrescendo of ghastly horror. Poe's _Morella_ is a similar study of thesupernatural merging of an exterior personality into a living body,where the dead mother and her child are literally one flesh and onespirit. Blackwood's _The Return_ is an example of the compact-ghost,that comes back at the hour of death to reveal himself to his friendas he long ago promised he would. The dead artist manifests himselfthrough a sudden and wonderful realization of the beauty of the worldto which the materialistic friend has heretofore been blinded andindifferent. Feeling this sudden rapturous sweep of beauty through hissoul, the living man knows that his artist friend is dead and thathis spirit has become a part of his own being. In the same manner thelittle lonely soul in Granville Barker's wonderful piece of symbolism,_Souls on Fifth_, enters into the being of the man who has theunderstanding 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 itsexplanation on the basis of subliminal memories. It seems that allaround us are reservoirs of ancestral memories, records of the vitalthoughts and actions of the long dead, psychical incarnations oftheir supreme moments, their striking hours, into which the livingat times stumble and are submerged. Some slight spiritual accidentmay bring down upon mortals the poignant suffering and bliss of thedead in whose personality they are curiously duplicated. These ghostsof dead selves from the past are different from the doubles that areprojections of the living, or prophetic specters of the future, andare 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, thatthe old pioneer possessed. At a crisis in his military affairs, theold frontiersman comes visibly forward to give him the courage that isneeded, after which he manifests himself no more. The scene of thissubliminal haunting is a Texas prairie, during a border fight, ratheran unghostly setting yet one which makes the supernatural seem moreactual. Arthur Johnson[142] presents the case of a man who sees theghosts of ancestral memory in a vivid form. He sees and hears his owndouble wildly accuse his wife--who is the double of his own--betrothed,after having killed her lover. His hand is wounded and the fingersleave bloodstains as they snatch at the gray chiffon round his wife'sthroat. After a fit of unconsciousness into which he falls is over, themodern man awakes to find his hand strangely wounded, and on the floorof the upper room he picks up a scrap of bloodstained gray chiffon!Blackwood's _Old Clothes_ shows a little girl obsessed by subliminalmemories. She is haunted by terrible experiences in which she says thatshe and some of those around her have been concerned. She goes intoconvulsions if anything is fastened around her waist, and she criesout that some cruel man has shut her up in the wall to die and has cutoff Philip's hands so that he cannot save her. Investigations bringto light the facts that a long-dead ancestress, living in the samehouse, had been walled up alive by her husband after he had cut off herlover's hands before her face. The skeleton is found chained by thewaist inside the ancient wall. Blackwood's _Ancient Sorceries_ depictsthe ghosts of buried life, of a whole village enchanted by the pastand living over again the witchcraft of the long ago. As John Silence,the psychic doctor, tells of the Englishman who drops casually into thevillage 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 twoOxford women, can be explained on no other basis than some such theoryas this. The book claims to be a truthful account of a happeningat Versailles, where two English women, teachers and daughters ofclergymen, saw in broad daylight the ghosts of the past, the figures ofMarie Antoinette and her court. The writers offer the explanation thatthey stumbled into a sort of pocket of the unhappy queen's memoriesand saw the past relived before their eyes because she had felt it sokeenly and vividly long ago. Other instances might be given, but theseare sufficient to illustrate the type. Such stories have a curioushaunting power and are among the most effective narratives. The idea ismodern and illustrates the complexity of later thought as compared withthe simplicity of earlier times.
A comparative study of ghost stories leads one to the conclusionthat the ghost is the most modern of ancients and the most ancientof moderns. In some respects the present specter is like and in someunlike the previous forms. Ghosts, whether regarded as conjective orpurely subjective, are closely related to the percipients' thoughts.Primitive times produced a primitive supernaturalism and the gradualadvance in intellectual development has brought about a heightening andcomplexity of the weird story. 'Tis in ourselves that ghosts are thusand so!
The spook of to-day is of a higher nervous organization than hisforbears. In many instances the latter-day ghost is so distracted bycircumstances that he hardly knows where he's at, as for instance,the ghost in such case as _The Tryst_, by Alice Brown, where aman is thought to be drowned and his ghost comes out to comforthis sweetheart, only to have the drowned man brought back to lifepresently; and in _The Woman from Yonder_, by Stephen French Whitman,where a scientist with impertinent zeal brings life back to the bodyof a woman who had bled to death while Hannibal was crossing the Alpsand 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 personwasn't really dead? But if a woman isn't dead after she has been in anice-pack for two thousand years or thereabouts what surety is there forthe standing of any ghost?
The apparitions of to-day have more lines of interest than the ancientghosts. The Gothic specter was a one-idea creature, with a single-trackbrain. 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 somepurpose or other, so he just went and did it. The specters of to-dayare more versatile,--they can turn their hand to any kind of hauntingthat is desired and show an admirable power of adaptability, thoughthere are highly developed specialists as well. The psychology of theprimitive ghost and of the Gothic specter was simple. They knew onlythe elemental passions of love and hate. Gothic spooks haunted thevillain or villainess to foil them in their wicked designs or punishthem for past misdeeds, or hovered over the hero or heroine to advise,comfort, and chaperon them. But the modern ghosts are not satisfiedwith such sit
-by-the-fire jobs as these. They like to keep in thevan of activity and do what mortals do. They run the whole scale ofhuman motions and emotions and one needs as much handy psychology tointerpret their hauntings as to read George Meredith. They are actuatedby subtle motivations of jealousy, ardent love, tempered friendship,curiosity, mischief, vindictiveness, revenge, hate, gratitude, and allother conceivable impulses. The Billy Sunday sort of ghost who wants toconvert the world, the philanthropic spirit who wants to help humanity,the socialist specter that reads the magazine, the friendly visitorthat sends its hands back to wash the dishes, the little shepherd ladthat returns to tend the sheep, are among the new concepts in fictionof the supernatural. The ghost of awful malice, to be explained only onthe basis of compound interest of evil stored up for many years, is anew force.
Though the ghostly narrative has shifted its center of gravity fromthe novel to the short story since Gothic times, and many more of themodern instances are in that form, the supernatural novel has recentlytaken on a new lease of life. Honors are almost even between theEnglish and the American ghost story, as most of the representativewriters on each side turn their pen at some time to write terrortales. The ghost has never lost his power over the human mind. Judgingfrom the past, one may say that the popularity of the ghost storywill continue undiminished and will perhaps increase. Certainly therehas been a new influx of stories within later times. What mines ofhorror yet remain untouched for writers of the future, it would behard to say, yet we do not fear for the exhaustion of the type. On thecontrary, ghosts in fiction are becoming so numerous that one wondersif the Malthusian theory will not in time affect them. We are too fondof being fooled by phantoms to surrender them, for "the slow touch of afrozen 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 toadventure on another plane through spectral substitutes. We may give upthe mortal but we'll not willingly give up the ghost. We love him. Webelieve in him. Our attitude towards specters is much like that of thelittle black boy that Ellis Parker Butler tells about in _Dey Ain't NoGhosts_, 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 tobring 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 terrifiedyoungster is loath to go up to the loft to bed alone that night anddemurs 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.