Produced by Suzanne Shell, Michael Lockey, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
1890
To FLORA PRIESTLEY and ARTHUR LEMON
Are Dedicated
and THESE PAGES OF INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGY.
Preface
We were talking last evening—as the blue moon-mist poured in throughthe old-fashioned grated window, and mingled with our yellowlamplight at table—we were talking of a certain castle whoseheir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to theknowledge of a secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life.It struck us, discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors thatmay lie behind this fact or this fable, that no doom or horrorconceivable and to be defined in words could ever adequately solve thisriddle; that no reality of dreadfulness could seem caught but paltry,bearable, and easy to face in comparison with this vague we know notwhat.
And this leads me to say, that it seems to me that the supernatural, inorder to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors andterrible but delicious to ourselves, skeptical posterity, mustnecessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped inmystery. Indeed, 'tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud ofmoonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on thewarrior's breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figureitself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from thesurrounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into theflickering shadows.
A number of ingenious persons of our day, desirous of apocket-superstition, as men of yore were greedy of a pocket-saint tocarry about in gold and enamel, a number of highly reasoning men ofsemi-science have returned to the notion of our fathers, that ghostshave an existence outside our own fancy and emotion; and have culledfrom the experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years ago, beingnine years of age, saw her maiden aunt appear six months after decease,abundant proof of this fact. One feels glad to think the maiden auntshould have walked about after death, if it afforded her anysatisfaction, poor soul! but one is struck by the extremeuninterestingness 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 ofevidence on the subject, with the wisdom of these modern ghost-experts,when they affirm that you can always tell a genuine ghost-story by thecircumstance of its being about a nobody, its having no point orpicturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat, stale, andunprofitable.
A genuine ghost-story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories,those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of thesupernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strangeperfume of witchgarden flowers.
No, alas! neither the story of the murdered King of Denmark (murderedpeople, I am told, usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor ofthat weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with hisshroud wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronzeVenus closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in versepatterned like some tapestry, or by Mérimée in terror of cynicalreality, or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller,none of these are genuine g