Chapter III: Modern Ghosts (2)

Modern specters have a more complex power than the old. They are more awful in their import, for they haunt not merely the body, but the soul. The wicked spirits will to work dreadful harm to the soul as well as the body, and drive the victim to spiritual insanity, seeking to damn him for the life everlasting, making him, not merely their victim, but through eternity their co-worker in awful evil. The victim of the vampire, for instance, who dies as a result of the attack, has to become in his turn a loathsome vampire to prey on other souls and bodies. Blackwood's Devil-worshipers seek to kill the soul as well as the body of their victim. The deathlessness of evil is shown in Lytton's[123] and in many of Blackwood's stories, as where the psychic doctor says to a man, "You are now in touch with certain violent emotions, passions, purposes, still active in this house, that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil personality that lived here."

[123] _The Haunters and the Haunted._

Few writers have equaled F. Marion Crawford in the modern ghost story. His tales have a curdling intensity, a racking horror that set them far above the ordinary supernatural fiction. They linger in the mind long after one has tried in vain to forget them, if indeed one ever does forget their sense of evil power. There is in each of his stories an individual horror that marks it as distinct from its fellows, a power chiefly won by delineation of this immortality of evil, as in _The Dead Smile_, with its description of the hideous smile that pollutes the lips of the living and of the dead. "Nurse McDonald said that when Sir Hugh Ockram smiled, he saw the faces of two women in hell, two dead women he had betrayed." His vicious impulses last after death and from his grave he reaches out to curse his own children, seeking to drive them to awful, though unconscious sin.

Henry James has drawn for us two characters of unmitigated evil in Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who, he says, are "hovering, prowling, blighting presences." They are agents on whom is laid the dire duty of causing the air to reek with evil. He says, "I recognize that they are not ghosts at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons. The essence of the matter was the villainy of the motive in the evoked predatory creature." What he wishes to do in this story is to express a general sense of spiritual infamy, not specialized, as the hot breath of the Pit usually confines itself to some one particular psychical brutality, but as capable of everything, the worst that can be conceived. How well he has succeeded in his effort, those who know the story can testify.

Ambrose Bierce's stories are in many instances remarkable examples of this psychic horror. _The Death of Halpin Frazer_ has a touch of almost unbearable dreadfulness. Frazer is assaulted by an evil spirit in a wood at night and choked to death, the spirit inhabiting the dead body of the man's own mother who has idolized him. His dead mother's face, transfixed with diabolical hate, is thrust upon him, and the loved hands that have caressed him strangle him. This is similar to the situation of an evil spirit occupying the body of a loved dead mother in _The Mummy's Tale_, by Elliot O'Donnell. Bierce's stories beat upon the mind like bludgeons and his morbid plots are among the most dreadful in our literature. One wonders what abnormality of mind conceives such themes, evolves such situations. If it be true, as Macaulay suggests, that not only every poet but every person who appreciates poetry is slightly unbalanced mentally, surely every writer of such extreme and horrific stories must be abnormal. There is more than one writer of modern ghostly fiction of whom it might be said that "his soul is open on the Hell side."

Another temperament found distinctively in the later fiction is the humorous ghost. He is a recent development, and as might be supposed, is characteristically American. There were a few burlesque ghosts in Elizabethan drama, the Ghost of Jack,[124] for instance, and one colored ghost that would seem to connote mirth, but the really humorous specter did not come till later. It remained for the Yankee to evoke the spook with a sense of humor. Ghosts are not essentially laughable, and to make them comic without coarseness or irreverence is an achievement. Numerous writers have busied their pens with the funny spook and now we have ghostly laughter that is mirthful and not horrisonous as in other types. Specters now laugh with us instead of at us, and instead of the mocking laughter heard in lonely places we have "heart-easing mirth." Washington Irving evokes several humorous hoax ghosts, such as the headless horseman that created excitement in Sleepy Hollow and the serenading phantom in _The Specter Bridegroom_.

[124] In Peele's _Old Wives Tales_.

Richard Middleton in his _Ghost Ship_ shows some very informal humorous ghosts. The girls and boys rise from their graves to flirt over their tombstones on moonlight nights, and the children play with the village specters as companions, their favorite being the man that sits on the wellcurbing with his severed head held in his hands. The cottagers rebuke the spooks overhead when they grow too noisy, and a general good-fellowship prevails. Into this setting the ghost ship sails one night, anchoring itself in the middle of a turnip patch, and the riotous captain demoralizes the men of the village, ghosts and all, with his rum and his jokes. After a stay of some time, one night in a storm the villagers look out.

Over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars,
was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord's field. Her
portholes and her windows were ablaze with lights and there was a
noise of singing and fiddling on her decks.... They do say that
since then the turnips on landlord's field have tasted of rum.

Olive Harper tells[125] of a reporter who is invited by a cordial spook--who has been a New York social leader--to a spectral banquet and ball underneath Old Trinity. She satirizes human foibles and weaknesses, showing ghosts that gossip and gormandize, simper and swear as they did in life. They learn to play poker, dance, and kill time as they used to do. Frank R. Stockton has written several delicious drolleries of supernaturalism, as _The Transferred Ghost_, where the spook of a living man, the irascible uncle of the charming Madeline, terrifies the young suitor who lacks courage to propose. The audacious and ever-present ghost swings his feet from the porch railing, invisible to the girl as inaudible by her, and breaks in on the conversation in a most disconcerting way. The young man at last cries out in desperation, "What are you waiting for? I have nothing to say to you?" whereat the girl, who has been undoubtedly waiting to hear the proposal the embarrassed youth was trying to make, thinks he is speaking to her and departs in high dudgeon. On a later occasion the specter comes to announce to him that he has got his transfer and may be somebody else's ghost instead of that of the man who was expected to die and didn't, when the lover cries out, "I wish to Heaven you were mine!" And Madeline, melting in a sigh, whispers, "I am yours!" The sequel to this is also comic.[126]

[125] In _The Sociable Ghost_.

[126] _The Spectral Mortgage._

Brander Matthews has several stories of humorous supernaturalism, _Rival Ghosts_ being the account of ancestral spooks belonging to a young bridegroom, and who resent being brought into enforced companionship by his sudden elevation to a title, since one ghost must haunt the house and one the heir. The ingenious groom, at last harassed to invention by the continual squabbling of the ghosts, brings about a wedding between them. This is the only instance I have found of a wedding between two specters, though there are various cases on record of marriage between one living and one spectral personage. John Kendrick Bangs devotes several volumes to the doings and sayings of spooks, describing parties in a house-boat on the Styx, where the shades of the departed great gather together and engage in festivities and discussions, and showing types of water-ghosts and various kinds of spooks. The humorous ghost is a more frequent person than one would suppose without giving some thought to the subject, for many writers have sharpened their wits on the comic haunt.

As may be seen from the examples mentioned, the ghost has made perceptible progress in psychology. The modern apparition is much more complex in personality than the crude early type, and shows much more variety. The up-to-date spook who has a chance to talk things over with William James, and knows the labyrinths of the human mind is much better adapted to inflict psychal terrors than the illiterate specter of the past. He can evolve mental tortures more subtle and varied than ever, or he can amuse a downcast mortal by his gambols.

* * * * *

Stories of to-day show a decided advance over the Gothic in the matter of motives for spectral appearance. There are, it is true, certain motives in common between them, but the present-day spirit is less limited, for he has gained the new without loss of the old, if he wishes to keep the old. The principal impulse that impelled classical shades to walk the earth was to request burial, since lacking that he could not enter into the abode of the dead. This appears frequently also in Gothic romance. It is shown but little in recent fiction, perhaps because the modern ghost is reconciled to cremation or is blithely indifferent to what becomes of his body since it no longer rules him. _The Queen of Hearts_ is one of the few instances of its use in modern fiction, for it is a vanishing motive for the most part. Gothic ghosts were also wont to return to show the hiding-place of treasure, but that, too, is dying out as an incentive to haunting. The prosaic explanation here may be that now persons put their treasure in safety deposits, hence there is scant occasion for mystery concerning its location after death. Gothic spooks came back on occasion to reveal parentage, for parents, like valuables, were frequently mislaid in terror romance. This is not so important now, since vital statistics usually keep such matters duly recorded, yet instances do sometimes occur.

Ghosts in the terror romance came to make requests, apart from the petition for burial, which tendency is still observed on the part of later spooks, though not to the same extent as formerly. The requests are psychologically interesting, as they usually relate to simple ties of affection, illustrated by the mother-spirit[127] who asks her friend to take her children. Gothic spirits came back often to make revelations concerning the manner of their death, which is not often the case now, though it does sometimes happen. And Dickens shows us one ghost returning to influence the jury that is trying a man for murder. Specters used to appear to forewarn the living against impending danger, which impulse is rather lacking in later fiction though it still occurs. The curious element of futurity enters into several of these ghostly warnings, as in Dickens's _The Signal Man_ where the apparition presages the man's death, as in Algernon Blackwood's story[128] is related the incident of a man who saw the two Indians scalp a white man and drag his body away, at last crying out, "I saw the body, and _the face was my own_." Warning spirits of futurity are seen in _On the Stairs_, where each man beholds his own destiny,--one seeing the spectral snake that afterwards kills him in a hunting expedition, one the ghost of a Zulu, the savage that almost destroys him some time afterwards, and the last the ghost of a young woman in a blue dress, the woman whom he marries and who hounds him to his death. She presently sees her own fate, too, but what it is the author does not tell us. One curious incident in the story is the instantaneous appearance on the stairs of the woman herself and her ghostly double, one in a white dress, one in the fatal blue. This sort of spectral warning, this wireless service for the conveyance of bad news and hint of threatening danger, serves to link the ghost story of the present with those of the past. The records of the Psychical Society show hundreds of such instances, and much use is made in fiction of plots hinging on such motif. Scott's White Lady of Avenel appears as a death portent, as also the "Bahr-geist" in another novel.

[127] In _The Substitute_.

[128] In _A Haunted Island_.

The revenge ghost looms large in fiction as in the drama. He was the most important figure in Elizabethan as in classical drama, and Shakespeare's ghosts are principally of that class. A terrible example of the type is in Robert Lovell Beddoes' _Death's Jest-Book_, that extraordinary example of dramatic supernaturalism, where the ghost of the murdered man comes back embodied from the grave and is an active character to the end of the play. He is summoned to life through a hideous mistake, the murderer having asked the magician to call up the spirit of his dead wife, but the body of his victim having been secretly buried beside her so that the murderer may have no rest even in the grave, the awful accusing spirit rises to confront him, instead of his wife's phantom. The revenge ghost is both objective and subjective in his manifestation and his impelling motive adds a touch of frozen horror to his appearance. He appears in various forms, as dismembered parts of the body--illustrated in the stories above referred to,--in a horrific invisibility, in a shape of fear visible only to the guilty, or in a body so objectified as to seem absolutely real and living to others beside the one haunted. The apparently casual, idle figure that strolls about the docks and streets in _The Detective_, seen by different persons and taken for a man interested only in his own pursuits, is a revenge ghost so relentless that he hounds his victim from country to country, at last killing him by sheer force of terror as he sits on his bed at night, leaving the imprint of his body on the mattress beside the dead man whose face is rigid with mad horror. He has come back in physical embodiment to avenge the betrayal of his daughter. Ambrose Bierce shows us many spirits animated by cold and awful revenge, sometimes visible and sometimes unseen, as where a soldier killed for striking an officer answers, "Here!" to the roll-call, just at which moment a mysterious bullet from nowhere strikes the officer through the heart.[129] Crawford sends a drowned sailor back in wet oil-skins to slay his twin brother who has impersonated him to win the girl they both loved. When the two bodies wash ashore one is a newly dead corpse, the other a skeleton in oil skins; while the dreadful rattle of the accusing lump of lead in the wife's skull in another story is a turn of the screw of her horrid revenge. The revenge ghost in modern fiction is more varied in forms of manifestation, at times more subtle in suggestion and ghostly psychology, than the conventionalized type of the drama and remains one of the most dreadful of the forms of fear.

[129] In _His Two Military Executions_.

In general, the modern stories show a greater intensity of power in employing the motives that earlier forms had used as well as far greater range of motivation. The earlier ghosts were limited in their impulses, and their psychology was comparatively simple. Not so with the apparitions of to-day. They have a far wider range of motives, are moved by more complex impulses and mixed motivation in many cases difficult to analyze.

The Gothic ghost had some conscience about whom he haunted. He had too much reserve to force himself needlessly upon those that had no connection with his past. If he knew someone that deserved punishment for wrong done him or his, he tried to haunt him and let others alone. The modern ghost is not so considerate. He is actuated in many cases by sheer evil that wreaks itself upon anyone in range. Death gives a terrible immortality and access of power to those whose lives have been particularly evil, and the results are dangerous to society. Dark discarnate hate manifests itself to those within reach. Algernon Blackwood would have us believe that all around us are reservoirs of unspeakable horror and that any moment of weakness on our part may bring down the hosts of damnation upon us. This is illustrated in such stories as _With Intent to Steal_, where the spirit of a man who has hanged himself comes back with hypnotic power forcing others to take their lives in the same way, or in another,[130] showing power exerted viciously against human beings in a certain building, or still another[131] where the witchcraft holds the village in thrall, and elsewhere. Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, F. Marion Crawford, and Arthur Machen have written a number of stories bringing out this side of ghostly psychology, showing the bands of outlawed spirits that prey on society. There are spectral bandits and bravos that answer the call of any force hostile to man, or act of their own accord from an impulse of malicious mischief.

[130] _The Empty House._

[131] _Secret Worship._

The jealous ghost is somewhat common of late, showing that human emotions are carried over into the life beyond. In various stories we find the dead wife interfering to prevent a second marriage, or to make life wretched for the interloper even after the ceremony. But the most extreme case of jealousy--even exceeding the instance of the man whose wife and physician conspired to give him an overdose to put him out of the way and who is frantic to prevent their marriage--is found in Arnold Bennett's novel, _The Ghost_. Here the spirit of a man who has madly loved an opera-singer haunts every suitor of hers and either drives him to abandon his courtship or kills him, till finally the singer begs the ghost to spare the man she loves, which he sadly does, and departs. This is reminiscent of one of Marie de France's _lais_.

The varying motives for appearance may be illustrated by reference to a few ghosts in modern fiction, such as the woman[132] who comes to drive away a writer's sense of humor,--than which there could be no greater spiritual brutality,--and set him to writing vile, debased tragedies. Perhaps she has transferred her attentions to other authors than the one in the story! Other instances are the little Gray Ghost in Cornelia A. P. Comer's story by that name, who impels a stranger to take her child from an orphan asylum and adopt it, much against his will; the immortal lovers that haunt a woman who has made a marriage of convenience--which has turned out to be a marriage of inconvenience for her husband[133]; the talkative spook in Andrew Lang's _In Castle Perilous_, that discourses learnedly on its own materialization, speaking in technical terms, pokes fun at Shakespeare for the glow-worm on a winter night, and the cockcrow in his _Hamlet_, and--but these are perhaps enough. If one may judge from ghostly fiction, death subtracts nothing from human emotion but rather adds to it, so that the spectral impulses are more poignant and intense. The darker passions are retained with cumulative power, and there is a terrible immortality of hate, of jealousy and revenge.

[132] In _A Psychic Invasion_.

[133] In _The Long Chamber_.

There is no more impressive revenant than one Coleridge gives in his _Wanderings of Cain_, the mournful phantom of Abel appearing to Cain and his little son, Enos. The child says to his father, "I saw a man in unclean garments and he uttered a sweet voice, full of lamentations." Cain asks the unhappy spirit, "But didst thou not find favor in the sight of the Lord thy God?" to which the shape answers, "The Lord is God of the living only. The dead have another God!"

"Cain ran after the shape and the shape fled shrieking over the
sands, and the sands rose like white mists behind the steps of Cain
but the feet of him that was like Abel disturbed not the sands."

One of the most interesting phases of comparative ghost-lore is the study of the intricate personality of specters. With respect to dual personality the late supernatural stories are curiously reminiscent of the animistic belief that a ghost is a double of the mortal, a vapory projection of his actual body, to be detached at will during life and permanently at death. I do not know of any instances of doubles in classical literature, nor is the idea used in Gothic romance. Likewise Shakespeare's ghosts are all spirits of persons safely dead. It remained for the modern writer with his expertness in psychology and psychiatry to evoke the ghosts of the living persons, the strange cases of dual personality and of separate personalities supernaturally merged into one, and those inexplicable ghosts of subliminal memories. All these forms appear in elusive analysis, in complex suggestiveness, in modern uncanny stories, and constitute one of the distinct marks of advance over the earlier types.

The double, a frequent figure in English fiction, bears a resemblance to the Doppelgänger of German folk-tales. Numerous examples of dual personality, of one being appearing in two forms, are seen, with different twists to the idea, yet much alike. It has been suggested that these stories have their germinal origin in Calderon's play,[134] where a man is haunted by himself. Poe's _William Wilson_ is a tense and tragic story of a man pursued by his double, till in desperation he kills him, only to realize that he has slain his better self, his conscience. His duplicate cries out, "Henceforward thou art also dead, dead to the world, to Heaven and to hope! In me thou didst exist and in my death, see by this thine image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!" Stevenson's _Markheim_ shows in the person of the stranger the incarnate conscience, an embodiment of a man's nobler self that leads him through the labyrinth of self-examination to the knowledge of the soul's truth. The stranger tests the murderer by offering him a way of escape, by suggesting further crime to him, by showing him relentlessly what the consequence of each act will be, till in despair Markheim, realizing that his life is hopelessly weak and involved, decides to surrender it rather than to sin further. Step by step the nameless visitor leads him, Markheim shuddering back from the evil that is suggested, thinking the stranger is a demonic tempter, till at last the transfigured face shows him to be the nobler angel. Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ is, of course, the best-known instance of this sort of dual personality, this walking forth in physical form of the evil in one's own nature, with a separate existence of its own. No writer could hope to express this idea more powerfully than has been done in this chemical allegory, this biological dissection of the soul. The thrill of suspense, the seemingly inexplicable mystery, the dramatic tenseness of the closing scenes make this sermon in story form unforgettable. Kipling has given a striking story of a man haunted by his own phantom body, in _At the End of the Passage_. His own figure slipped silently before him as he went through his lonely house. "When he came in to dinner he found himself seated at the table. The vision rose and walked out hastily. Except that it cast no shadow it was in all respects real." The horror of this haunting specter of himself, this double of his own body and soul, drives the man to suicide, after which a peculiar twist of horror is given by the detail at the close, of the discovery by his comrade, of the man's own photograph imprinted on the dead retina and reproduced by the camera hours after his death. In Julian Hawthorne's allegory,[135] the dead man's spirit meets the devil, who is his own evil self incarnate.

[134] _El Embozado._

[135] _Lovers in Heaven._

Edith Wharton's _Triumph of Night_ reveals a ghost of a living man standing behind his double's chair, visible to the person opposite and showing on the ghostly face the evil impulses that the living countenance cleverly masks. John Kendrick Bangs has his hero say,[136] "I came face to face with myself, with that other self in which I recognized, developed to the fullest extent, every bit of my capacity for an evil life," and Blackwood[137] relates the meeting of a musician and his ghostly double in an opera hall. Mr. Titbottom,[138] through the power of his magic spectacles reflecting his image in a mirror, sees himself as he really is, as he looks to God, and flees horror-stricken from the sight. This symbolic representation is akin to the _Prophetic Pictures_ of Hawthorne, where a woman's griefs and marks of age are shown in her pictured face before they are revealed in her actual experience, a pictured futurity. The most impressive instance of this relation between a human being and his portrait is in Oscar Wilde's _Picture of Dorian Gray_, that strange study of a man's real nature expressing itself on his painted likeness, while the living face bears no mark of sin or shame or age, until the tragic revelation at the end. Edith Wharton[139] also represents a supernatural dualism, the woman's statue showing on its marble face the changing horror of her own stricken countenance. _The White Sleep of Auber Hurn_ is a curious story of a spiritual double, a psychological study of a man who was in two places at once, seen by various persons who knew him in each case, being killed in a train wreck many miles away from his room where he was lying asleep in his bed,--a sleep that knows no waking.[140]

[136] In _Thurlow's Christmas Story_.

[137] In _The Man from the Gods_.

[138] In George William Curtis's _Prue and I_.

[139] In her _Duchess at Prayer_.

[140] Other stories of double personality are _The Ivory Gate_,
by Walter Besant; _The Man with a Shadow_, by George M. Fenn;
_The Jolly Corner_, by Henry James; _The Transferred Ghost_,
by Frank R. Stockton; _On the Stairs_, by Katherine Fullerton
Gerould; _Elixiere des Teufels_, by E. T. A. Hoffmann; _Howe's
Masquerade_, by Hawthorne; _The Recent Carnival of Crime in
Connecticut_, by Mark Twain; _The Queen of Sheba_, by Thomas
Bailey Aldrich; _The Doppelgänger_, by Elizabeth Bisland
Wetmore.

Georg Brandes, in his article, "Romantic Reduplication
and Psychology," in _Main Currents of Nineteenth Century
Literature_, points out the prevalence of this motif in German
fiction. He says: "It finds its first expression in Jean
Paul's _Leibgeber Schappe_, and is to be found in almost all
of Hoffmann's tales, reaching its climax in _Die Elixiere des
Teufels_. It crops up in the writings of all the Romanticists,
in Kleist's _Amphitryon_, in Achim von Arnim's _Die Beiden
Waldemar_, in Chamisso's _Erscheinung_. Brentano treats it
comically in _Die Mehreren Wehmüller_."

Distinct from the expression of one personality in two bodies, the supernatural merging of two separate personalities into one appears in recent ghostly fiction. It forms a subtle psychologic study and is uncannily effective. H. G. Wells's _Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham_ is a peculiar narrative of a transfer of personality as the result of a mysterious drink, by which an old man takes possession of a young man's body, leaving the youth to inhabit the worn-out shell of the dotard. Algernon Blackwood in _The Terror of the Twins_ describes a supernatural merging of two natures into one by the power of a dead father's insane curse. The younger son loses his vitality, his mind, his personality, all of which is supermortally given to his older brother, while the deprived son dies a drivelling idiot of sheer inertia and utter absence of vital power. Mary Heaton Vorse[141] describes a neurotic woman who comes back from the grave to obsess and possess the interloper in her home, through the immortal force of her jealousy, making the living woman actually become the reincarnation of the dead wife. This story naturally suggests Poe's _Ligeia_ which is the climax of ghostly horror of this motif, with its thesis that "man doth not yield himself to the angels nor unto death utterly save through the weakness of his own feeble will" expressed in a terrible crescendo of ghastly horror. Poe's _Morella_ is a similar study of the supernatural merging of an exterior personality into a living body, where the dead mother and her child are literally one flesh and one spirit. Blackwood's _The Return_ is an example of the compact-ghost, that comes back at the hour of death to reveal himself to his friend as he long ago promised he would. The dead artist manifests himself through a sudden and wonderful realization of the beauty of the world to which the materialistic friend has heretofore been blinded and indifferent. Feeling this sudden rapturous sweep of beauty through his soul, the living man knows that his artist friend is dead and that his spirit has become a part of his own being. In the same manner the little lonely soul in Granville Barker's wonderful piece of symbolism, _Souls on Fifth_, enters into the being of the man who has the understanding heart and continues her existence as a part of him.

[141] In _The Second Wife_.

An essentially modern type of ghost story is that which has its explanation on the basis of subliminal memories. It seems that all around us are reservoirs of ancestral memories, records of the vital thoughts and actions of the long dead, psychical incarnations of their supreme moments, their striking hours, into which the living at times stumble and are submerged. Some slight spiritual accident may bring down upon mortals the poignant suffering and bliss of the dead in whose personality they are curiously duplicated. These ghosts of dead selves from the past are different from the doubles that are projections of the living, or prophetic specters of the future, and are clearly distinguished. _The Borderland_, by Francis Parsons, tells of a young army officer who is obsessed by subliminal self, the ghost of his grandfather. He feels that he _is_ his grandfather, living another existence, yet he lacks the pluck, the manhood, that the old pioneer possessed. At a crisis in his military affairs, the old frontiersman comes visibly forward to give him the courage that is needed, after which he manifests himself no more. The scene of this subliminal haunting is a Texas prairie, during a border fight, rather an unghostly setting yet one which makes the supernatural seem more actual. Arthur Johnson[142] presents the case of a man who sees the ghosts of ancestral memory in a vivid form. He sees and hears his own double wildly accuse his wife--who is the double of his own--betrothed, after having killed her lover. His hand is wounded and the fingers leave bloodstains as they snatch at the gray chiffon round his wife's throat. After a fit of unconsciousness into which he falls is over, the modern man awakes to find his hand strangely wounded, and on the floor of the upper room he picks up a scrap of bloodstained gray chiffon! Blackwood's _Old Clothes_ shows a little girl obsessed by subliminal memories. She is haunted by terrible experiences in which she says that she and some of those around her have been concerned. She goes into convulsions if anything is fastened around her waist, and she cries out that some cruel man has shut her up in the wall to die and has cut off Philip's hands so that he cannot save her. Investigations bring to light the facts that a long-dead ancestress, living in the same house, had been walled up alive by her husband after he had cut off her lover's hands before her face. The skeleton is found chained by the waist inside the ancient wall. Blackwood's _Ancient Sorceries_ depicts the ghosts of buried life, of a whole village enchanted by the past and living over again the witchcraft of the long ago. As John Silence, the psychic doctor, tells of the Englishman who drops casually into the village and is drawn into the magic:

Vesin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the
intense activities of a past life and lived over again a scene in
which he had often played a part centuries ago. For strong actions
set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves that they
may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not
complete enough to render the illusion perfect, so the little man
was confused between the present and the past.

[142] In _Mr. Eberdeen's House_.

That story of unusual psychical experience, _An Adventure_, by two Oxford women, can be explained on no other basis than some such theory as this. The book claims to be a truthful account of a happening at Versailles, where two English women, teachers and daughters of clergymen, saw in broad daylight the ghosts of the past, the figures of Marie Antoinette and her court. The writers offer the explanation that they stumbled into a sort of pocket of the unhappy queen's memories and saw the past relived before their eyes because she had felt it so keenly and vividly long ago. Other instances might be given, but these are sufficient to illustrate the type. Such stories have a curious haunting power and are among the most effective narratives. The idea is modern and illustrates the complexity of later thought as compared with the simplicity of earlier times.

A comparative study of ghost stories leads one to the conclusion that the ghost is the most modern of ancients and the most ancient of moderns. In some respects the present specter is like and in some unlike the previous forms. Ghosts, whether regarded as conjective or purely subjective, are closely related to the percipients' thoughts. Primitive times produced a primitive supernaturalism and the gradual advance in intellectual development has brought about a heightening and complexity of the weird story. 'Tis in ourselves that ghosts are thus and so!

The spook of to-day is of a higher nervous organization than his forbears. In many instances the latter-day ghost is so distracted by circumstances that he hardly knows where he's at, as for instance, the ghost in such case as _The Tryst_, by Alice Brown, where a man is thought to be drowned and his ghost comes out to comfort his sweetheart, only to have the drowned man brought back to life presently; and in _The Woman from Yonder_, by Stephen French Whitman, where a scientist with impertinent zeal brings life back to the body of a woman who had bled to death while Hannibal was crossing the Alps and been buried in a glacier till the glacier spat her out. Now, what was the status of those ghosts? Was there a ghost if the person wasn't really dead? But if a woman isn't dead after she has been in an ice-pack for two thousand years or thereabouts what surety is there for the standing of any ghost?

The apparitions of to-day have more lines of interest than the ancient ghosts. The Gothic specter was a one-idea creature, with a single-track brain. He was not a ghost-of-all-work as are some of the later spooks. He was a simple-souled being who felt a call to haunt somebody for some purpose or other, so he just went and did it. The specters of to-day are more versatile,--they can turn their hand to any kind of haunting that is desired and show an admirable power of adaptability, though there are highly developed specialists as well. The psychology of the primitive ghost and of the Gothic specter was simple. They knew only the elemental passions of love and hate. Gothic spooks haunted the villain or villainess to foil them in their wicked designs or punish them for past misdeeds, or hovered over the hero or heroine to advise, comfort, and chaperon them. But the modern ghosts are not satisfied with such sit-by-the-fire jobs as these. They like to keep in the van of activity and do what mortals do. They run the whole scale of human motions and emotions and one needs as much handy psychology to interpret their hauntings as to read George Meredith. They are actuated by subtle motivations of jealousy, ardent love, tempered friendship, curiosity, mischief, vindictiveness, revenge, hate, gratitude, and all other conceivable impulses. The Billy Sunday sort of ghost who wants to convert the world, the philanthropic spirit who wants to help humanity, the socialist specter that reads the magazine, the friendly visitor that sends its hands back to wash the dishes, the little shepherd lad that returns to tend the sheep, are among the new concepts in fiction of the supernatural. The ghost of awful malice, to be explained only on the basis of compound interest of evil stored up for many years, is a new force.

Though the ghostly narrative has shifted its center of gravity from the novel to the short story since Gothic times, and many more of the modern instances are in that form, the supernatural novel has recently taken on a new lease of life. Honors are almost even between the English and the American ghost story, as most of the representative writers on each side turn their pen at some time to write terror tales. The ghost has never lost his power over the human mind. Judging from the past, one may say that the popularity of the ghost story will continue undiminished and will perhaps increase. Certainly there has been a new influx of stories within later times. What mines of horror yet remain untouched for writers of the future, it would be hard to say, yet we do not fear for the exhaustion of the type. On the contrary, ghosts in fiction are becoming so numerous that one wonders if the Malthusian theory will not in time affect them. We are too fond of being fooled by phantoms to surrender them, for "the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out the spine" is an awesome joy. For ourselves, we are content for the present to function on one plane, but we love to adventure on another plane through spectral substitutes. We may give up the mortal but we'll not willingly give up the ghost. We love him. We believe in him. Our attitude towards specters is much like that of the little black boy that Ellis Parker Butler tells about in _Dey Ain't No Ghosts_, who sees a terrifying array of "all de sperits in de world, an' all de ha'nt in de world, an' all de hobgoblins in de world, an' all spicters in de world, an' all de ghostes in de world," come out to bring a fearsome message to a frightened pickaninny.

De king ob de ghostes, whut name old Skull-an'-Bones, he place he
hand on de head ob li'l black Mose, an' de hand feel like a wet
rag, an' he say:

"Dey ain'no ghosts!"

An' one ob de hairs on de head ob li'l black Mose turn' white.

An' de monstrous big ha'nt what he name Bloody Bones he lay he hand
on de head ob li'l black Mose, an' he hand feel like a toad-stool
in de cool ob de day, an' he say:

"Dey ain' no ghosts!"

An' anudder one ob de hairs whut on de head ob li'l black Mose
turn' white.

An' a heejus sperit whut he name Moldy Pa'm place he hand on de
head ob li'l black Mose, an' he hand feel like de yunner side ob a
lizard, an' he say:

"Dey ain' no ghosts!"

And so on through the assembly. Small wonder that the terrified youngster is loath to go up to the loft to bed alone that night and demurs to the demand.

So he ma she say, "Git erlong wid you! Whut you skeered ob when dey
ain' no ghosts?"

An' li'l black Mose he scrooge an' he twist an' he pucker up he
mouf an' he rub he eyes an' prisintly he say right low:

"I ain' skeered ob de ghosts whut am, ca'se dey ain' no ghosts."

"Den whut _am_ you skeered ob?" ask he ma.

"Nuffin," say de li'l black boy whut he name am Mose, "but I jes'
feel kinder oneasy 'bout de ghosts whut ain't!"

Jes' lack white folks. Jes' lack white folks.