Famous Modern Ghost Stories | Page 4

half faces, and at least one
notable spook that comes in half. Such ability, it will be granted, must necessarily
increase the haunting power, for if a ghost may send a foot or an arm or a leg to harry one
person, he can dispatch his back-bone or his liver or his heart to upset other human
beings simultaneously in a sectional haunting at once economically efficient and
terrifying.

The Beast with Five Fingers, for instance, has a loathsome horror that a complete
skeleton or conventionally equipped wraith could not achieve. Who can doubt that a
bodiless hand leaping around on its errands of evil has a menace that a complete six-foot
frame could not duplicate? Yet, in Quiller-Couch's A Pair of Hands, what pathos and
beauty in the thought of the child hands coming back to serve others in homely tasks!
Surely no housewife in these helpless days would object to being haunted in such delicate
fashion.
Ghosts of to-day have an originality that antique specters lacked. For instance, what story
of the past has the awful thrill in Andreyev's Lazarus, that story of the man who came
back from the grave, living, yet dead, with the horror of the unknown so manifest in his
face that those who looked into his deep eyes met their doom? Present-day writers
skillfully combine various elements of awe with the supernatural, as madness with the
ghostly, adding to the chill of fear which each concept gives. Wilbur Daniel Steele's The
Woman at Seven Brothers is an instance of that method.
Poe's Ligeia, one of the best stories in any language, reveals the unrelenting will of the
dead to effect its desire,--the dead wife triumphantly coming back to life through the
second wife's body. Olivia Howard Dunbar's The Shell of Sense is another instance of
jealousy reaching beyond the grave. The Messenger, one of Robert W. Chambers's early
stories and an admirable example of the supernatural, has various thrills, with its river of
blood, its death's head moth, and the ancient but very active skull of the Black Priest who
was shot as a traitor to his country, but lived on as an energetic and curseful ghost.
The Shadows on the Wall, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,--which one prominent librarian
considers the best ghost story ever written,--is original in the method of its horrific
manifestation. Isn't it more devastating to one's sanity to see the shadow of a revenge
ghost cast on the wall,--to know that a vindictive spirit is beside one but invisible--than to
see the specter himself? Under such circumstances, the sight of a skeleton or a sheeted
phantom would be downright comforting.
The Mass of Shadows, by Anatole France, is an example of the modern tendency to show
phantoms in groups, as contrasted with the solitary habits of ancient specters. Here the
spirits of those who had sinned for love could meet and celebrate mass together in one
evening of the year.
The delicate beauty of many of the modern ghostly stories is apparent in The Haunted
Orchard, by Richard Le Gallienne, for this prose poem has an appeal of tenderness rather
than of terror. And everybody who has had affection for a dog will appreciate the pathos
of the little sketch, by Myla J. Closser, At the Gate. The dog appears more frequently as a
ghost than does any other animal, perhaps because man feels that he is nearer the
human,--though the horse is as intelligent and as much beloved. There is an innate pathos
about a dog somehow, that makes his appearance in ghostly form more credible and
sympathetic, while the ghost of any other animal would tend to have a comic connotation.
Other animals in fiction have power of magic--notably the cat--but they don't appear as
spirits. But the dog is seen as a pathetic symbol of faithfulness, as a tragic sufferer, or as a
terrible revenge ghost. Dogs may come singly or in groups--Edith Wharton has five of

different sorts in _Kerfol_--or in packs, as in Eden Phillpotts's Another Little Heath
Hound.
An illuminating instance of the power of fiction over human faith is furnished by the case
of Arthur Machen's The Bowmen, included here. This story it is which started the whole
tissue of legendry concerning supernatural aid given the allied armies during the war.
This purely fictitious account of an angel army that saved the day at Mons was so vivid
that its readers accepted it as truth and obstinately clung to that idea in the face of Mr.
Machen's persistent and bewildered explanations that he had invented the whole thing.
Editors wrote leading articles about it, ministers preached sermons on it, and the general
public preferred to believe in the Mons angels rather than in Arthur Machen. Mr. Machen
has shown himself an artist in