Famous Modern Ghost Stories | Page 3

crowds whenever they like.
Ghosts at present are showing an active interest not only in public affairs, but in the arts
as well. At least, we now have pictures and writing attributed to them. Perhaps annoyed
by some of the inaccuracies published concerning them--for authors have in the past
taken advantage of the belief that ghosts couldn't write back--they have recently
developed itching pens. They use all manner of utensils for expression now. There's the
magic typewriter that spooks for John Kendrick Bangs, the boardwalk that Patience
Worth executes for Mrs. Curran, and innumerable other specters that commandeer
fountain pens and pencils and brushes to give their versions of infinity. There's a passion
on the part of ghosts for being interviewed just now. At present book-reviewers, for
instance, had better be careful, lest the wraiths take their own method of answering
criticism. It isn't safe to speak or write with anything but respect of ghosts now. De
mortuis nil nisi bonum, indeed! One should never make light of a shade.
Modern ghosts have a more pronounced personality than the specters of the past. They
have more strength, of mind as well as of body, than the colorless revenants of earlier
literature, and they produce a more vivid effect on the beholder and the reader. They

know more surely what they wish to do, and they advance relentlessly and with economy
of effort to the effecting of their purpose, whether it be of pure horror, of beauty, or
pathos of humor. We have now many spirits in fiction that are pathetic without
frightfulness, many that move us with a sense of poetic beauty rather than of curdling
horror, who touch the heart as well as the spine of the reader. And the humorous ghost is
a distinctive shade of to-day, with his quips and pranks and haunting grin. Whatever a
modern ghost wishes to do or to be, he is or does, with confidence and success.
The spirit of to-day is terrifyingly visible or invisible at will. The dreadful presence of a
ghost that one cannot see is more unbearable than the specter that one can locate and
attempt to escape from. The invisible haunting is represented in this volume by
Fitz-James O'Brien's _What Was It?_ one of the very best of the type, and one that has
strongly influenced others. O'Brien's story preceded Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla by
several years, and must surely have suggested to Maupassant as to Bierce, in his The
Damned Thing, the power of evil that can be felt but not seen.
The wraith of the present carries with him more vital energy than his predecessors, is
more athletic in his struggles with the unlucky wights he visits, and can coerce mortals to
do his will by the laying on of hands as well as by the look or word. He speaks with more
emphasis and authority, as well as with more human naturalness, than the earlier ghosts.
He has not only all the force he possessed in life, but in many instances has an access of
power, which makes man a poor protagonist for him. Algernon Blackwood's spirits of
evil, for example, have a more awful potentiality than any living person could have, and
their will to harm has been increased immeasurably by the accident of death. If the facts
bear out the fear that such is the case in life as in fiction, some of our social customs will
be reversed. A man will strive by all means to keep his deadly enemy alive, lest death
may endow him with tenfold power to hurt. Dark discarnate passions, disembodied hates,
work evil where a simple ghost might be helpless and abashed. Algernon Blackwood has
command over the spirits of air and fire and wave, so that his pages thrill with beauty and
terror. He has handled almost all known aspects of the supernatural, and from his many
stories he has selected for this volume The Willows as the best example of his ghostly art.
Apparitions are more readily recognizable at present than in the past, for they carry into
eternity all the disfigurements or physical peculiarities that the living bodies possessed--a
fact discouraging to all persons not conspicuous for good looks. Freckles and warts, long
noses and missing limbs distinguish the ghosts and aid in crucial identification. The thrill
of horror in Ambrose Bierce's story, The Middle Toe of the Right Foot, is intensified by
the fact that the dead woman who comes back in revenge to haunt her murderer, has one
toe lacking as in life. And in a recent story a surgeon whose desire to experiment has
caused him needlessly to sacrifice a man's life on the operating table, is haunted to death
by the dismembered arm. Fiction shows us various ghosts with