Ghosts

“ As real ghosts, I suspect, as any one on earth ever saw; faces and scenes which have printed themselves so deeply on one’s brain, that when one passes the same place, long years after, they start up again, out of fields and roadsides, as if they were alive once more, and need sound sense to send them back again into their place as things which are past for ever, for good and ill. ”

“ Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again. ”

“ Their eyes will never look into ours again and their voices we shall never hear. Only their ghosts come to us and talk with us. We see them, dim and shadowy, through our tears. We stretch our yearning hands to them, but they are air. ”

“ It is a strange, weird, mysterious place, filled with uncanny sights and sounds, haunted by the ghosts of former dusky inhabitants, whom it swallowed without warning and extinguished in a twinkling of an eye in the most diabolical manner, and whose tortured spirits even now cry out for relief and freedom from cruel bondage on every dark and stormy night. ”

“ It is strange that now when I see all real things so clearly and easily—the ghosts of the dead that walk across the moors in the sunlight and the concourse of the gods on the hill-top above the storm—men and women with whom I once moved before I became a god are no more to me than so many black shadows. ”

“ In strange, half-waking moods, I seem to see the ghosts and the memories flitting together through the spectral moonlight, and weaving mystic dances in and out of the storied windows and the tapestried walls. ”

“ Ghosts greet me from those shelves, ghosts from the old Thursdays, from the radiant days when youth was merging into middle age—surely the best period in one's existence—days into which the breath of life never can be breathed again. ”

“ Ghosts keep their persons uncovered, feed upon flesh and blood, sleep during the day, and roam about at night.40
Often a large concourse of ghosts meet together and dance, sing and make merry uttering loud and fierce shrieks. A ghost has no back, and has its feet reversed. ”

“ In any case we hope to see some ghosts—they abound in the interior. They come to you by night, and as you watch them their bellies burst, and their entrails fall to the ground, and their eyes—unpupilled balls of white—fall out too, and they stink and shine. ”

“ Poor folks like we uns has no use for ghosts.” Her words electrified her hearers, and with one accord they turned to depart. Some with dignity as if the sound of ghosts’ footsteps were an every day occurrence with them; others looking back over their shoulders fearfully trying to penetrate the darkness, and the mystery of those fast advancing footsteps. ”

“ Often of a night would I steal from between the sheets, and climbing upon the high oak chest that stood before my bedroom window, sit peering down fearfully upon the aged gray tombstones far below, wondering whether the shadows that crept among them might not be ghosts—soiled ghosts that had lost their natural whiteness by long exposure to the city’s smoke, and had grown dingy, like the snow that sometimes lay there. ”

“ I don't believe in any such nonsense as ghosts; but by memories sir, memories of something which has happened within those four walls and which are now locked up in the hearts of those two girls, making them live like spectres. I am not a fanciful person myself, nor given to imaginings, but that house, especially on nights when the wind blows, seems to be full of something not in nature ”

“ That is the thing—the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which the prose is clean obliterated by distance—that is the place to get our ghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of modern times, on the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on its troubadours' orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and a legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present. ”

“ The ghosts who are vexing the patient are attracted by the familiar smell of the leaves which come from their old home; and yielding in a moment of weakness to the soft emotions excited by the perfume they creep out of the body of the sick man and into the leaves. ”

“ Still less do I; but in all the idle or extravagant stories I have read of ghosts—stories once my sport and ridicule, as the result of vulgar superstition or ignorance—the so-called supernatural visitor was visible to the eye, or heard by the ear; but the ghost, the fiend, the invisible Thing that is ever by the side of Carl Holberg, is only sensible to the touch—it is the unseen but tangible substance of an apparition! ”

“ That is what makes ghosts to ramble. Ghosts are those that have married the wrong ones, wandering and waiting, and seeking for their right mates. Do you hear the piping and the crying at the windows of a winter night? ”

“ About ghosts I am a little uncertain; experience leads me to conjecture that ghosts are usually your own fault: that is, they are a little like rattlesnakes; if you don’t intrude, neither will they. But that circumstance which is to me the very quintessence of terror is Night and A Man. ”

“ But from these dim sketches of a life beyond, or rather within the grave, in which memories of old days and old friendships are preserved by ghosts of an almost genial and entirely harmless disposition, we will now turn to those more elaborate pictures in which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. ”

“ When the wood was brought and thrown on, and the fire blazed up brightly, lighting and warming the whole room, and the shutters were unclosed, and the rising sun smiled in upon us all, I felt that the gladsome scene was enough to put to flight all the ghosts in Hades, and all the superstitious terrors that ignorance is heir to. ”

“ The new ghost has a more nimble and versatile tongue as well as wit. In the older fiction and drama apparitions spoke seldom, and then merely as ghosts, not as individuals. And ghosts, like kings in drama, were of a dignity and must preserve it in their speech. ”

“ This adaptation of means to end in nature may perhaps be regarded as a beautiful proof of the existence of spirits and ghosts working their purposes unseen behind the gaily coloured screen or curtain of the physical universe. ”

“ Probably the fear of ghosts, as well as the belief in them, had its beginning in dreams. It is a peculiar fear. No other fear is so intense; yet none is so vague. Feelings thus voluminous and dim are super-individual mostly,—feelings inherited,—feelings made within us by the experience of the dead. ”

“ I seated myself by the candle that stood on a table at one end of the room; and, pretending to read a book that I took out of my pocket, heard several dreadful stories of ghosts as pale as ashes, that stood at the feet of a bed, or walked over a church-yard by moonlight; and of others that had been conjured into the Red Sea, for disturbing people's rest, and drawing their curtains at midnight; with many other old women's fables of the like nature. As one spirit raised another, I observed that at the end of every story the whole [24] company closed their ranks, and crowded about the fire. ”

“ They have talked so much about ghosts, and they know so well all the tricks of which these malicious spirits are capable, that they fear them scarcely at all. It is especially at night that all of them—grave-diggers, hemp-dressers, and ghosts—do their work. It is also at night when the hemp-dresser tells his melancholy stories. ”

“ Even granting all this to be true, many believing in ghosts do not for an instant contend that such ghosts represent the actual person the figure symbolises. It is a mere projection; a shell; a form created by the discarnate spirit, a resemblance, a phantasm. The central consciousness which animated and still animates that person is not in the ghostly form, but elsewhere. ”

“ Indeed, if you were to investigate this subject as closely as I have done, you would find that the ghosts of living persons have as frequently put in an appearance as the so-called disembodied spirits of the dead. ”

“ From my earliest childhood I was always a firm believer in ghosts—the good old-fashioned ghost, I mean,—the unhappy lady or gentleman who appears at twelve o'clock at night with wailings and groans, and rattles chains and carries his or her head under his or her arm. ”

“ There is a vast amount of lore concerning ghosts and the circumstances under which they leave the body. Stories of ghosts that leave when the body sleeps; stories of ghosts that leave when the person is absorbed in deep contemplation, and the ghost snatches the opportunity to make a journey by itself ”

“ Now we are to consider what it is that ghosts have done—how they have acted in the theater of the universe. Strange to say, we find it well recorded, for ghosts have had more complete recognition than men in all ancient history. Ghosts, as a race, have passed through interesting stages of history. All changes are in time and require time to become discrete quantities of change that may be recognized. ”

“ In any case the ghosts of our stories hitherto have been so aimless and purposeless as to resemble what we might imagine a dead man’s dream to be.
This view of the case (that a “ghost” may be a reflection of a dead man’s dream) will become less difficult to understand if we ask ourselves what natural thing most resembles the common idea of a ghost. You are reading alone at night, let us say, the door opens and a human figure glides into the room. ”

“ Me so many cares encumber, So many ghosts, and forms of fright, Have started from their graves to-night, They have driven sleep from mine eyes away: I will go down to the chapel and pray. ”

“ We are being overpopulated with spirits. Day by day, hundreds of newly-created ghosts issue into the world—not the poor relics and incorporeal shadows of the dead, but real living ghosts, who never had any other existence except as they now appear. ”

“ Ghosts possessed not only the supernatural powers and qualities acquired by death, but also retained certain human qualities that were peculiar to them in life. Thus, when a ghost appeared he looked as he had looked in life, save for his pale and bloodless face, and, often, the expression of pain, sorrow, or remorse, dependent upon whatever way the fates were compelling him to work out his salvation in ghost-land. ”

“ Common-place writers of ghost stories tell us that ghosts are of a substance like this, which they fancy a sort of compromise between body and spirit. We who know something of the secrets of this natural magic, look for certain ghosts under this appearance, but not as clothed in it. We look out for the ghosts of ships which are out of sight; and of headlands, and woods, and churches, and piers, which are certainly not within the natural range of vision. ”

“ The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful. ”

“ For instance, there are living ghosts who walk about the streets in the clear daylight with eyes that have died long ago and yet see, ghosts who sit down next to one and talk with a human voice that has a far more distant ring than if it came from a grave. ”

“ Clasped it close, and it died at the withering touch.
There's the ghost of a Love,
Born with joy, reared with hope, died in pain and unrest,
But he towers above
All the others--this ghost: yet a ghost at the best. ”

“ Imagination founders in those fathomless depths. Tenuous, dim-forgotten ghosts rise from them. Who shall say that my dreams, however seeming mad and grotesque, are not faithful reflexes of states and conditions which were once realities ”

“ 'O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! ”

“ The picture is not devoid of pathos, and even the common people whisper together as they look upon the figures of father and son sitting in the moonlight; and no one likes to pass the door at night, for there are grewsome tales of ghosts afloat, in which decapitated statues are said to stalk about the old garden at nightfall. ”

“ Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst. ”

“ The form and shape under which ghosts appear, are the result of the imagination of the ghost seer only, whether he beholds angels or devils, men or animals. If his receptive power is highly developed, he will see them in their completeness, and discern even the minutest details; weak persons, on the other hand, perceive nothing more than a faint, luminous or whitish appearance, mere fragmentary and embryonic visions. ”

“ I maintain the word. Ghosts, if you like that better, or specters. We turn out the best quality of spook——"
"You forget the lovely ghost stories about the Rhine, and the Black Forest," interrupted Miss Van Rensselaer, with feminine inconsistency. ”

“ You know, without my telling you, how sometimes A word or name eludes you, and you seek it Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it, Lying in wait for it to spring upon it, Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, You hear it, see it flash among the branches, And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it— Well, it was so I followed down this music, Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry, Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted, Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars—; ”