Wraith

“ It was not a glimpse of wraith or goblin that people feared to encounter in the lonely by-path, but the stealthy tread and dark visage of some lurking savage, ever watchful and merciless, ever close at hand when least expected. ”

“ The heart of the stepmother was cold as ice, yet she could not move to waken her husband at her side, for her hands were as fixed as if they were crossed on her dead breast. The voice in her was silent, and her tongue stood to the roof of her mouth.
“After a time the wraith of the dead mother moved toward her—the wraith of the weaver moved her way—and round and about her body was wound the shining cloth. Wherever it touched the body of the stepmother, it was as hateful to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that her flesh crept away from it, and her senses swooned. ”

“ The wraith of a girl who was pale and frail and slender, with eyes that were blue hyacinths drenched in rain; a girl whose thoughts were like silent places, and whose touch was as cool as the sand in a cave, hovered forlornly on the dim borderlands of nowhere-at-all, whither she had been rudely expelled by the intruder. Her look was a reproachful reminder to Gareth—"I was your dream."... ”

“ And his heart-strings are drawn tight and knotted
With tiny, weak, slipping knots
Tied by feeble, damp fingers ...
Slipping ... slipping ... oh slipping!
But what does that matter?
For Time has come to the help of the gray wraith ...
Grave, gray Father Time with a handful of moments—
Dust? Ashes?...
He has set the rose-shrouded sundial in shadow.
.......
Now the broad marble seat is empty
Except where gray wraith has sunk down in the moonlight
Victorious. [Pg 21]
Ah! ... the lady had dropped her bright, apple-green scarf,
And it stirs like a sinuous, long snake. ”

“ For a glimpse of beauty, a wraith in the mist,
28 “Shall be spilt at last and return to peace,
As dust which the hands of the wind release.
“This is my solace and my reward,
Who have drained life’s dregs from a broken shard.”
Wise and grave was the water face,
A youth grown man in a little space ”

“ Frequently they found her poring over its pages, picking out new words that pleased her fancy, as they would pick out the kernels of a nut, and jotting them down for future use.
"Here it is," she cried, presently, "wraith! It means spirit or apparition. They can be the wicked wraiths—the W. W.'s. ”

“ Captain C. related one or two singular instances of undoubted occurrences. Wraiths, it has been said, may be accounted for by the wave of thought in distant manifestation. The body in one place and the spirit in another; voices as sounds seemingly distinct, sometimes heard through the wide distance between two souls inseparable. Before departure from the world, the spirit sometimes manifests itself to some loved friend. The wraith has accomplished its mission, and it is gone for ever. ”

“ And they are foolish enough to believe that the wraith of one of those dead men, more wicked perhaps than his companions, is doomed to haunt the place, ceaselessly searching, it may be, for treasure which he is never permitted to find. ”

“ In the above examples, the apparition, or wraith, has been in some way connected with the death of the person whose visionary likeness is seen; and, in most of these instances, the earnest longing to behold those beloved seems to have been the means of effecting the object. ”

“ WRAITH-SEEING Closely allied to ‘second sight’ is the doctrine of ‘wraiths’ or ‘fetches,’ sometimes designated ‘doubles’—an apparition exactly like a living person, its appearance, whether to that person or to another, being considered an omen of death. ”

“ There must be few persons who have not heard, among their friends and acquaintance, instances of what is called a wraith; that is, that in the moment of death, a person is seen in a place where bodily he is not. I believe the Scotch use this term also in the same sense as the Irish word fetch; which is a person’s double seen at some indefinite period previous to his death, of which such an appearance is generally supposed to be a prognostic. ”

“ A mere wraith of memory will she retain of tiny bleached bones gripped once again in the eternal snows—the last relics of that small and daring race of unaccountable beings. And then the wraith will be closed over by the mists, and Night shall descend once more. Thou, Timon, and I, will be what Thomas Atkins calls 'done in.' Hast still a smile? 'Tis well! 'Tis very well. Thou art a game little devil, and altogether the queerest little cus I've ever come across. ”

“ The substantial and ofttimes corpulent ghost or spirit of the real stage has been succeeded by an intangible wraith, as transparent and unsubstantial as may be demanded in the best book of fairy tales—more double exposure. ”

“ Now every ghost or wraith is a hallucination. You see your wife in the dining-room when she really is in the drawing-room; you see your late great-great-grandfather anywhere. Neither person is really present. The first appearance in popular language is a “wraith”; the second is a “ghost” in ordinary speech. Both are hallucinations.
So far Mr. Galton would go, but mark what follows! Everybody allows the existence of dreams, but comparatively few believe in dream stories of veracious dreams. So every scientific man believes in hallucinations, {68} but few believe in veracious hallucinations. ”

“ One thing must be remembered as affecting the theory that the coincidence between the wraith and the death is purely an accident. Everybody dreams and out of the innumerable dreams of mankind, a few must hit the mark by a fluke. But hallucinations are not nearly so common as dreams. Perhaps, roughly speaking, one person in ten has had what he believes to be a waking hallucination. ”

“ Thus the whole company expressed their belief in attending angels. The belief in wraiths was prevalent throughout all Scotland. It is beautifully introduced in the song of "Auld Robin Gray." When the young wife narrates her meeting with her old sweetheart, she says, "I thought it was his wraith, I could not think it he," and the belief survives in some parts of the country to the present day.
If a dying person struggled hard and long, it was believed that the spirit was kept from departing by some magic spell. ”

“ As I find so many people willing to believe in wraiths, who can not believe in ghosts—that is, they are overpowered by the numerous examples, and the weight of evidence for the first—it would be desirable if we could ascertain whether these wraiths are seen before the death occurs or after it ”

“ He appears as unapologetically at home in twentieth century fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology, medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion. He is the really permanent citizen of this earth, for mortals, at best, are but transients. Even the athlete and the Methusaleh must in the end give up the flesh, but the wraith goes on forever. In form, too, he wears well. Ghostly substance of materialization, ethereal and vaporous as it appears to be, is yet of an astonishing toughness. ”

“ With respect to the appearance of wraiths, at the moment of death, the instances to be met with are so numerous and well-authenticated, that I generally find the most skeptical people unable to deny that some such phenomenon exists, although they evade, without I think, diminishing the difficulty, by pronouncing it to be of a subjective, and not of an objective, nature; that is, that the image of the dying person is, by some unknown operation, presented to the imagination of the seer, without the existence of any real outstanding figure, from which it is reflected ”

“ Another form of this superstitious fancy is the corpse-candle, or ‘tomb-fire,’ which is invariably a death-warning. It sometimes appears ‘as a stately flambeau, stalking along unsupported, burning with a ghastly blue flame. Sometimes it is a plain tallow “dip” in the hand of a ghost; and when the ghost is seen distinctly, it is recognised as that of some person still living, who will now soon die [140] —in fact, a wraith.’ Occasionally the light issues from the person’s mouth, or nostrils. ”

“ As they flitted shadow-like in the shadowy background or glided with radiant faces into the light and then back into the gloom, they seemed not so much like sportive and pirouetting humans as like dancing gods; and the sense came over me that I was beholding not a mere ceremony of men and women, but rather a festival of wraiths, of phantoms, of cloudy, elfin creatures who might flash away into the mist or the firelight. ”

“ Kilda people used to be haunted by their own spectral doubles, forerunners of impending death, and in 1799 a traveller writes of the peasants of Kirkcudbrightshire, ‘It is common among them to fancy that they see the wraiths of persons dying, which will be visible to one and not to others present with him. ”

“ And similarly with the wraiths, or phantoms which are 148 projected from dying or lately dead persons, the evidence for them in general is much too abundant and well attested to allow of disbelief. [73] What an extraordinary story, for instance, is that given by Sir Oliver Lodge in his Survival of Man (p. 101) —of a workman who having drunk poison by mistake, appeared in the moment of death, with blue and blotched face to his employer, to whom he was greatly attached, and told him not to be deceived by the rumor that he (the workman) had committed suicide! ”

“ Turning from ‘sendings,’ or ‘telepathy’ voluntarily brought to bear on one living person by another, we might examine ‘death-bed wraiths,’ or the telepathic impact—‘if that hypothesis of theirs be sound’—produced by a dying on a living human being. ”

“ Finally, I have met with three instances of persons who are so much the subjects of this phenomenon, that they see the wraiths of most people that die belonging to them, and frequently of those who are merely acquaintance. ”

“ She found him not, and, impressed with the terror which a wraith or apparition seldom fails to inspire, she uttered a shriek so loud and so piercing as to be heard at Johnstone Bank, on the other side of the vale of Corrie.”
An old woman now rose suddenly from her seat p. ”

“ The old, savage, natural theory of ghosts and wraiths is that they are spirits, yet not so immaterial but that they can fill space, be seen, heard, touched, and affect material objects. Mediæval and other theologians preferred to regard them as angelic or diabolic manifestations, made out of compressed air, or by aid of bodies of the dead, or begotten by the action of angel or devil on the substance of the brain. ”

“ He moved out from the overhang to a narrow vertical slit, a long scar in the rockface. He climbed slowly and determinedly, sure of each step and never making a sound. He reached and sweated and pulled, till he was nearly halfway up.
Then suddenly the wraiths were aware of him and streaked down from the high walls with a shrieking wail that was horrible to hear. They reached him, swirled about him and gnashed their sharp teeth from mouths that were like bats' mouths and screamed their terrible scream. He reached with one arm to ward them off, nearly fell. ”

“ Corpses by day, spirits of evil by night, roaming abroad in their own forms or in the forms of bats or unclean beasts, killing body and soul of their victims—for whoever dies of the repeated “kiss” of the vampire, which leaves its mark on the throat and draws the blood from the body, becomes a vampire also—of such beings I had read.
And, horror of horrors! In that last cursed day at the office, I remembered reading of these vampires— these undead—that in their nocturnal flights they had one limitation—they could not cross running water. ”

“ With one blow he knocked him down, and now a terrible fight begun, for the ghost was very strong, too; but my father’s blood was up, and he’d have faced the Devil himself then. They rolled over each other several times, the broken bottles cutting them to pieces, and the chairs and tables crashing under them. At last the ghost took the bottle that lay on the hearth, and levelled my father to the ground with one blow. Down he fell, and the bottle and the whiskey were both dashed into the fire. ”

“ Ghost then asks for revenge by touching his dagger, and pointing towards the sky. He acts the murder in the garden, showing the serpent who stung him by gliding about the stage on his chest, like the boneless man. He shows his murderer to be of his own blood by walking up and down as himself, and then in the same way, but with a slight limp, as if he were his brother. ”

“ There he sees two evil men dragging a corpse from its coffin, and pays his all that it may be buried. He is joined by the ghost of the dead man, who accompanies him. They get three rods from an old woman, who is healed by the comrade's salve, and they come to a city, where they get a sword from a showman, whose puppets are made alive by the salve. They come to a mountain, where the companion cuts off the wings of a great white swan and carries them along. They come at length to the city of the beautiful princess, who is a witch. ”

“ In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of the witch is kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at the coroner's inquest suffered a fresh hæmorrhage or cruentation at the presence of the assassin?—the blood being, as in a furious fit of anger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived against the murderer, at the instant of the soul's compulsive exile from the body. ”

“ Iron, or preferably steel, in any form is a protection, though it is not obvious how or why, against the fairies,—an iron ring on the point of a staff is as good as a sword, but evil spirits are subdued by it only when made into a lethal weapon.
In the struggle the ghost is in the hands of its opponent, soft as a bag of wool or impalpable as air. At every tussle, therefore, the unfortunate man is thrown down and injured.
In the presence of an evil spirit, a dog defends its master, or crouches in terror about his feet, but a bitch jumps at his throat, and if it can will tear him. ”