Ghost

“ He fears the rock and the fen. He fears the ghost of night. The old tree groans to the blast; the falling branch resounds. The wind drives the withered burrs, clung together, along the grass. It is the light tread of a ghost! ”

“ And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host, Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam— Most individual and bewildering ghost!— And turn, and toss your brown delightful head Amusedly, among the ancient Dead. ”

“ Do ye hear them still?—it was long ago!—
But here in the shadows I wait, and wait!
145 Spirits there be that pass in peace;
Mine passed in a whirl of wrath and dole;
And the hour that your choking breath shall cease
I will get my grip on your naked soul—
Nor pity may stay nor prayer cajole—
I would drag ye whining from Hell's own gate:
To me, to me, ye must pay the toll!
And here in the shadows I wait, I wait!
The dead they are dead, they are out of the way?
And the ghost is a whim of an ailing mind? ”

“ It was a ghost! One night, when all was still and dark, and the ship rolling at sea before the wind, a man sprung suddenly upon deck in his shirt, his hair erect, his eyes starting from their sockets, and loudly vociferating he had seen a ghost. After his horror had a little subsided, we asked him what he had seen?—he said, the figure of a woman dressed in white, with eyes of flaming fire; that she came to his hammock, and stared him in the face. This we treated as an idle dream, and sent the frantic fellow to his bed. The story became the subject of every one ”

“ But don't interrupt me, Tom, now I am on the subject of ghosts. Among the manifest advantages of being a ghost is one which above all others is deserving of especial consideration. A ghost can see a person's thoughts. Being fond of sweet things, ghosts experience great pleasure in watching the thoughts of ladies who are meditating upon their absent lovers. When a young maiden is thinking about her lover who is far away, her thoughts wander off to him and return, looking as sweet as little bees with their legs laden with honey leaving a field of fragrant clover and coming home to the hive. ”

“ Twice has the ghost grown out of the night upon the eyes of the sentinels. With solemn march, slow and stately, three times each night, has he walked by them; they, jellied with fear, have uttered no challenge. ”

“ A broad brow, overshadowing and overweighting the face, combined, with extreme delicacy of feature, a touch of emaciation, and a pure rose in the alabaster of the cheeks, to produce the aspect of a most human ghost—a ghost which had just tasted the black blood, and recovered for an hour all the vivacity of life. ”

“ And a shade, through the toss'd ranks of mirth and crying
Hungers, and pains, and each dull passionate mood,—
Quite lost, and all but all forgot, undying,
Comes back the ecstasy of your quietude.
So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,
Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,
Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men,
Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible,
And light on waving grass, he knows not when,
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell. ”

“ There are ghosts whom I tremble to meet, and cannot think of without a shudder. One has the guilt of blood upon him. The soul which he thrust untimely forth has long since been summoned from our gloomy graveyard, and dwells among the stars of heaven, too far and too high for even the recollection of mortal anguish to ascend thither. Not so the murderer’s ghost! ”

“ For what is Death but the withdrawal from sight and touch and hearing of the evidence of Some One Else? What less had come to pass for old Maisie and Phoebe, fifty years ago? How is it with us all in that mysterious Beyond, that for the want of a better name we call a Hereafter, when ghost meets ghost, and either lacks the means of recognition? ”

“ Attired in a shroud and all the ensigns of the grave, the ghost nocturnally proceeds to the narrow house of his future residence, and there disappears. He is lighted on his way by a pale azure-coloured light, of the size of that emitted by a tallow candle, which is of a flickering unsteady nature, sometimes vivid, and sometimes faint, as the mortal inhales and respires his breath; and, in his course towards the grave, he will follow minutely the line of march destined to be followed by his earthly partner’s approaching funeral. ”

“ No other ghost has haunted the boy's room, my friends, since I have occupied it than the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief. Many a time have I pursued the phantom—never with this man's stride of mine to come up with it, never with these man's hands of mine to touch it, never more to this man's heart of mine to hold it in its purity. ”

“ MODERN GHOSTS The ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He is absolutely indestructible. He glides from the freshly-cut pages of magazines and books bearing the date of the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventeen as from the parchment rolls of ancient manuscripts. ”

“ An early riser—the one she had foreseen, a young gardener she knew—with an empty basket to hold flowers for the still sleeping household to refresh the house with in an hour, and its bed-bound sluggards in two or three, was astir and touched a respectful cap with some inner misgiving that this unwonted vision was a ghost. ”

“ And if death hath stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity—and removed the distance away into that bourne from which no traveller returns—the absence and the distance of her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore—what heart may abide the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a blessing and a farewell! ”

“ Every human being had a ghost, and when death thrust it out of its body it hung about its old locality and tried to make itself manifest, now to one sense, again to another, but most frequently to hearing. ”

“ Till sapphire windows palely burn
Amid the undefeated gray.
And yet — sometimes I seem to know
1 shall not 'scape his phantom bow;
More paramount than death or pain,
This ghost will follow where I go. ”

“ Just as the gods of primitive religions were the undulating, bright heat which made mid-day solitary and solemn as midnight; the warm damp, the sap-riser and expander of life; the sad dying away of the summer, and the leaden, suicidal sterility of winter; so the ghost, their only modern equivalent, is the damp, the darkness, the silence, the solitude ”

“ The ghost had vanished, and the voice of the whispering devil was also mute. My contentment, indeed, lasted but for a brief interval, till I was called on again to make up and deliver an ornament of equal value; but, by this very relief and composure of spirit, under circumstances which would have rendered any one else anxious and miserable, I recognized at once the fate that awaited me. ”

“ Now the good old orthodox idea of a ghost is, of a very long, cadaverous, ghastly personage, of either sex, appearing in white draperies, with uplifted finger, and attended or preceded by sepulchral sounds—whist! ”

“ Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment? ”

“ A short time previous to the mortal’s death, and when just on the eve of dissolution, the ghost undergoes a striking revolution in his appearance and habits. Seized with the locked jaw, and all the other disabilities common to the dead, he then becomes the awful emblem of death in all its similitudes. ”

“ The ghost now comes in a perfect human shape, and is dressed in a loose robe, with a girdle, and has on its head a four-cornered cap. It has a projecting chin and forehead, fiery, deep-set eyes, a long beard, and high cheek-bones, which look as if they were covered with parchment. A light radiates about and above his head, and in the midst of this light she sees the outlines of the spectre.
“Both she and her fellow-prisoners declare, that this apparition comes several times in a night, but always between the evening and morning bell. ”

“ How do I look? Am I human? Am I pale? Am I red? Am I speaking English? A ghost, sir! Do you understand?"
I confess there came upon me by contact a kind of supernatural shock. I shall always feel by the whole communication of it that I too have seen a ghost. My first movement--I can smile at it now --was to spring to the door, close it quickly and turn the key upon the gaping blackness from which Searle had emerged. ”

“ Only one side of it is attached to the brickwork, and when there is any wind it trembles in the breeze and rattles with an uncertain sound. It may have been that the sheen of the tin in the starlight or a windy night first suggested the idea of a ghost to some weird imagination. ”

“ Thy body lies drowned and horrible in the heart of the mountain. You are an appearance, a ghost. Go away, nothing corporeal resides in this illusion of you, else would I strike you. You are a ghost. Depart at once. I should not like to strike a ghost. ”

“ The ghost of the man who owned the bone in his life or perished by the club or the arrow, is now lurking like a lion in the path; and if the poor fellow strolls along it thinking no evil, the ghost will spring at him and strike him with disease. ”

“ If the ghost is unwary enough to accept the invitation, he has no sooner seated himself on the blade of the oar with his legs dangling over the abyss, than the deputy-deity tilts up the other end of the oar and precipitates him into the deep water, far far below. ”

“ But, if it be possible—as, after hearing you, I believe—to explain the tragedy through the ghost, then I beg you sir, to talk to us about the ghost again. Mysterious though the ghost may at first appear, he will always be more easily explained than the dismal story in which malevolent people have tried to picture two brothers killing each other who had worshiped each other all their lives. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ghost is dogged and confronted with the hideousness of his iniquities, and the young woman who slew her lover in a fit of jealous passion is seen, in an agonised expression, holding the fatal weapon. ”

“ Something so weirdly wan, so weirdly still!
O yearning lips that our warm blood can flush,
Follow it with your kisses, if you will;
O beating heart, think of its helpless hush.
Oh, bitterest of all, to feel we fear
Something that was so near, that was so dear!
No—no, he is no ghost; he could not be;
Something that hides, forlorn, in frost and brier;
Something shut outside in the dark, while we
Laugh and forget by the familiar fire;
Something whose moan we call the wind, whose tears
Sound but as rain-drops in our human ears. ”

“ In fact I never would have written my book if I had not had that interview with what now, in all the sincerity that is left to a man in these abominable days, I believe and assert was a ghost; a real ghost,—no dramatic shade made up of an off-duty carpenter with an actor to speak his part,—a ghost arranged for the nonce with a screen between us, of vapory muslin; but a solemn, a meaning, a power to move, but not a power to absolutely affright, ghost. In fact I see no reason to be frightened by them. Grant that they exist,—you never have heard of one that did harm to anybody. ”

“ And then the moon rose: and a white
Low bough of blossoms—grown almost
Where, ere you died, ’t was our delight
To tryst,—dear heart!—I thought your ghost:
{482} —The wood is haunted since that night.
AFTER DEATH
At moonset, when ghost speaks with ghost
And spirits meet where once they sinned,
Between the whispering wood and coast,
My soul met her soul on the wind,
My late-lost Evalind.
I kissed her mouth. Her face was wild. ”

“ Had his apostles and disciples disbelieved in his appearance after death, and hooted at the story told of his ghost wandering toward them, where would be the Christian church to-day, and where the theory of the resurrection? We disbelieve now, and scoff at what the Saviour did, and his apostles saw, unless he was an impostor, and they liars. Do we in our churches, when we read the biblical narrative of the innumerable appearances, sneer at the book that tells us its contents are the result of divine inspiration, and every word is true? ”

“ 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 ”

“ Perhaps, you critic, you say that the true ghost story originated in the age of shadowy candle light and pine knot with their grotesqueries on the walls and in the unpenetrated darkness, that the electric bulb and the radiator have dispelled that very thing on which, for ages, the ghost story has been built. ”

“ I was doubtless in a sublimated condition of rapport, as the mediumistic philosophers term it; a human instrument of a thousand strings, that the feeblest ghost might play upon with ever so withered a hand. But none came to inform or frighten me, and not a sound other than the low clicking of the wood insects broke the magic ring of silence that closed in with such profundity of pathos this terrible situation. ”