Hauntings

Hauntings

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Title: Hauntings
Author: Vernon Lee
Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9956] [This file was first
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HAUNTINGS
FANTASTIC STORIES
VERNON LEE
1890

To FLORA PRIESTLEY and ARTHUR LEMON
Are Dedicated
DIONEA, AMOUR DURE,
and THESE PAGES OF INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGY.

Preface
We were talking last evening--as the blue moon-mist poured in through
the old-fashioned grated window, and mingled with our yellow
lamplight at table--we were talking of a certain castle whose heir is
initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to the knowledge of a
secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life. It struck us,

discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors that may lie behind
this fact or this fable, that no doom or horror conceivable and to be
defined in words could ever adequately solve this riddle; that no reality
of dreadfulness could seem caught but paltry, bearable, and easy to face
in comparison with this vague we know not what.
And this leads me to say, that it seems to me that the supernatural, in
order to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors and terrible
but delicious to ourselves, skeptical posterity, must necessarily, and
with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped in mystery. Indeed, 'tis
the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud of moonbeams that hangs
about the haunting lady, the glint on the warrior's breastplate, the click
of his unseen spurs, while the figure itself wanders forth, scarcely
outlined, scarcely separated from the surrounding trees; or walks, and
sucked back, ever and anon, into the flickering shadows.
A number of ingenious persons of our day, desirous of a
pocket-superstition, as men of yore were greedy of a pocket-saint to
carry about in gold and enamel, a number of highly reasoning men of
semi-science have returned to the notion of our fathers, that ghosts have
an existence outside our own fancy and emotion; and have culled from
the experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years ago, being
nine years of age, saw her maiden aunt appear six months after decease,
abundant proof of this fact. One feels glad to think the maiden aunt
should have walked about after death, if it afforded her any satisfaction,
poor soul! but one is struck by the extreme uninterestingness of this
lady's appearance in the spirit, corresponding perhaps to her want of
charm while in the flesh. Altogether one quite agrees, having duly
perused the collection of evidence on the subject, with the wisdom of
these modern ghost-experts, when they affirm that you can always tell a
genuine ghost-story by the circumstance of its being about a nobody, its
having no point or picturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat,
stale, and unprofitable.
A genuine ghost-story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories,
those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of the
supernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strange

perfume of witchgarden flowers.
No, alas! neither the story of the murdered King of Denmark (murdered
people, I am told, usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor of that
weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with his shroud
wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronze Venus
closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in verse
patterned like some tapestry, or by Mérimée in terror of cynical reality,
or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller, none of
these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, only in our
minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbled and
fumbled about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among the
armchairs and rep sofas of reality.
They are things of the