The Project eBook, Famous Modern Ghost Stories, by Various, Edited by Emily Dorothy Scarborough
Title: Famous Modern Ghost Stories
Author: Various
Release Date: February 22, 2005 [eBook #15143] Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT EBOOK FAMOUS MODERN GHOST STORIES***
E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Karina Aleksandrova, and the Project Online Distributed Proofreading Team
FAMOUS MODERN GHOST STORIES SELECTED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH, Ph.D.
LECTURER IN ENGLISH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
AUTHOR OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION, FUGITIVE VERSES, FROM A SOUTHERN PORCH, ETC.
COMPILER OF HUMOROUS GHOST STORIES
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press
1921
Printed in the United States of America
To
ASHLEY HORACE THORNDIKE, Litt. D. Professor of English, Columbia University
who guided my earlier studies in the supernatural
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Imperishable Ghost
The Willows
By Algernon Blackwood
The Shadows on the Wall
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By Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
The Messenger
By Robert W. Chambers
Lazarus
By Leonid Andreyev
The Beast with Five Fingers
By W. F. Harvey
The Mass of Shadows By Anatole France What Was It?
By Fitz-James O'Brien
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot
By Ambrose Bierce
The Shell of Sense
By Olivia Howard Dunbar
The Woman at Seven Brothers
By Wilbur Daniel Steele
At the Gate
By Myla Jo Closser
Ligeia
By Edgar Allan Poe The Haunted Orchard By Richard Le Gallienne The Bowmen
By Arthur Machen
A Ghost
By Guy de Maupassant
The Imperishable Ghost
INTRODUCTION
Ghosts are the true immortals, and the dead grow more alive all the time. Wraiths have a greater vitality to-day than ever before. They are far more numerous than at any time in the past, and people are more interested in them. There are persons that claim to be acquainted with specific spirits, to speak with them, to carry on correspondence with them, and even some who insist that they are private secretaries to the dead. Others of us mortals, more reserved, are content to keep such distance as we may from even
the shadow of a shade. But there's no getting away from ghosts nowadays, for even if you shut your eyes to them in actual life, you stumble over them in the books you read, you see them on the stage and on the screen, and you hear them on the lecture platform. Even a Lodge in any vast wilderness would have the company of spirits. Man's love for the supernatural, which is one of the most natural things about him, was never more marked than at present. You may go a-ghosting in any company to-day, and all aspects of literature, novels, short stories, poetry, and drama alike, reflect the shadeless spirit. The latest census of the haunting world shows a vast increase in population, which might be explained on various grounds.
Life is so inconveniently complex nowadays, what with income taxes and other visitations of government, that it is hard for us to have the added risk of wraiths, but there's no escaping. Many persons of to-day are in the same mental state as one Mr. Boggs, told of in a magazine story, a rural gentleman who was agitated over spectral visitants. He had once talked at a seance with a speaker who claimed to be the spirit of his brother, Wesley Boggs, but who conversed only on blue suspenders, a subject not of vital interest to Wesley in the flesh. "Still," Mr. Boggs reflected, "I'm not so darn sure!" In answer to a suggestion regarding subliminal consciousness and dual personality as explanation of the strange things that come bolting into life, he said, "It's crawly any way you look at it. Ghosts inside you are as bad as ghosts outside you." There are others to-day who are "not so darn sure!"
One may conjecture divers reasons for this multitude of ghosts in late literature. Perhaps spooks are like small boys that rush to
fires, unwilling to miss anything, and craving new sensations. And we mortals read about them to get vicarious thrills through the
safe medium of fiction. The war made sensationalists of us all, and the drab everydayness of mortal life bores us. Man's imagination, always bigger than his environment, overleaps the barriers of time and space and claims all worlds as eminent domain, so that literature, which he has the power to create, as he cannot create his material surroundings, possesses a dramatic intensity, an epic sweep, unknown in actuality. In the last analysis, man is as great as his daydreams--or his nightmares!
Ghosts have always haunted literature, and doubtless always will. Specters seem never to wear out or to die, but renew their tissue
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both of person and of raiment, in marvelous fashion, so that their number increases with a Malthusian relentlessness. We of to-day have the ghosts that haunted our ancestors, as well as our own modern revenants, and there's no earthly use trying to banish or exorcise them by such a simple thing as disbelief in them. Schopenhauer asserts that a belief in ghosts is born with man, that it is found in all ages and in all lands, and that no one is free from it. Since accounts vary, and our earliest antecedents were poor diarists, it is difficult to establish the apostolic succession of spooks in actual life, but in literature, the line reaches back as far as the primeval picture writing. A study of animism in primitive culture shows many interesting links between the past and the present in this matter. And anyhow, since man knows that whether or not he has seen a ghost, presently he'll be one, he's fascinated with the subject. And he creates ghosts, not merely in his own image, but according to his dreams of power.
The more man knows of natural laws, the keener he is about the supernatural. He may claim to have laid aside superstition, but
he isn't to be believed in that. Though he has discarded witchcraft and alchemy, it is only that he may have more time for psychical research; true, he no longer dabbles with ancient magic, but that is because the modern types, as the ouija board, entertain him more. He dearly loves to traffic
