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Famous Modern Ghost Stories

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Title: Famous Modern Ghost Stories

Compiler: Dorothy Scarborough

Contributor: Leonid Andreyev
 Ambrose Bierce
 Algernon Blackwood
 Robert W. Chambers
 Myla Jo Closser
 Olivia Howard Dunbar
 Anatole France
 Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
 William Fryer Harvey
 Richard Le Gallienne
 Arthur Machen
 Guy de Maupassant
 Fitz James O'Brien
 Edgar Allan Poe
 Wilbur Daniel Steele

 
Release date: February 22, 2005 [eBook #15143]
 Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15143

Credits: E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Karina Aleksandrova, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAMOUS MODERN GHOST STORIES ***

E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Karina Aleksandrova, and the
Project Gutenberg 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

To

ASHLEY HORACE THORNDIKE, LITT. D.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

WHO GUIDED MY EARLIER STUDIES IN THE SUPERNATURAL

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 séance 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 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 with that other world of which he knows so little and concerning
which he is so curious.

Perhaps the war, or possibly an increase in class consciousness, or
unionization of spirits, or whatever, has greatly energized the ghost in
our day and given him both ambition and strength to do more things than
ever. Maybe "pep tablets" have been discovered on the other side as
well! No longer is the ghost content to be seen and not heard, to slink
around in shadowy corners as apologetically as poor relations. Wraiths
now have a rambunctious vitality and self-assurance that are
astonishing. Even the

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