‘The main thing about ghosts – most of them have lost their voices. In Asphodel, millions of them wander around aimlessly, trying to remember who they were. You know why they end up like that? Because in life they never took a stand one way or another. They never spoke out, so they were never heard. Your voice is your identity. If you don’t use it,’ Nico said with a shrug, ‘you’re halfway to Asphodel already ...’
He hated when his own advice applied to himself. Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
6They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. Susan Hill, The Woman in Black
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. H Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after – lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little. Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines. Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
I have my own secret room with a moving wall and mirrors. That’s where I talk to Lee. His is the voice I hear in there. I feel his presence so very close to me. He is like my guardian angel. He’s even given me permission to record his theme song. Michael Jackson
Mary took the ghost story challenge seriously. Professor Robert Winston, Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster, BBC 2003
A few days after the ghost story challenge Mary was to have her famous dream. ibid.
‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us ... Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative ... On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story ... At first I thought but a few pages – of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develop the idea at greater length. Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. ibid.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow. ibid.
From Wynyard’s Gap the livelong day,
The livelong day,
We beat afoot the northward ways
We had travelled times before.
The sun-blaze burning on our backs,
Our shoulders sticking to our packs,
By Foss way, fields, and turnpike tracks
We skirted sad Sedge-Moor ...
O doubt not that I told him then,
I told him then,
That I had kept me from all men
Since we joined lips and swore.
Whereat he smiled, and thinned away
As the wind stirred to call up day ...
– Tis past! And here alone I stray
Haunting the Westfield Moor. Thomas Hardy, A Trampwoman’s Tragedy
Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;
Whither, O whither, will its whim now draw me? Thomas Hardy, After A Journey
They hail me as one living,
But don’t they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?
I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A pale past, screening
Ashes gone cold ... Thomas Hardy, The Dead Man Walking
I idly cut a parsley stalk,
And blew therein towards the moon;
I had not thought what ghosts would walk
With shivering footsteps to my tune. Thomas Hardy, On a Midsummer Eve
Something tapped on the pane of my room
When there was never a trace
Of wind or rain, and I saw in the gloom
My weary Beloved’s face. Thomas Hardy, Something Tapped
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
Ghosts are real ... The first time I saw one I was ten years old. It was my mother’s. Black Cholera had taken her. Crimson Peak 2015 starring Mia Wasikowska & Jessica Chastain & Tom Hiddleston & Charlie Hunnam & Jim Beaver & Burn Gorman & Doug Jones et al, director Guillermo del Toro, opening commentary
The ambiguity of the Ghost is of fundamental importance. Philip Edwards, Tragic Balance in Hamlet
The treatment of the Ghost raises rather trickier problem. There is no doubt that the Ghost ought to thrill even a blasé, sophisticated modern audience. Often it doesn’t; the key to doing so may be found in something Charles Marowitz wrote in his Introduction to his College Hamlet; ‘What is frightening about a ghost is not its unearthiness, but its earthliness: its semblance of reality divorced from existence’. Peter Davidson, The Comedy of ‘Hamlet’
To producers such as Peter Hall in 1965, the Ghost assumed super-human proportions, standing 8 to 12 feet high depending on which theatre critic one read. ibid.
The tonal ambiguity matches to perfection – or rather, realises dramatically in performance – the uncertainties attendant on the Ghost for Hamlet and us. Shakespeare keeps prompting our uncertainty by his choice of words, and his requirements for stage movement. ibid.
The play opens in murky light, on a cold battlement, and its first line is a question. Soon, a ghost appears, but he does not speak. He speaks to no one, throughout the play, but Hamlet. By revealing the ghost to eyes other than Hamlet’s – indeed to the audience – Shakespeare establishes its objective reality, validates its existence. The presence of the sceptical, rational Horatio emphasises that the ghost is not a figment hallucinated by a fevered mind. The ghost is as real as a ghost can be.
What is ambiguous is the import of the ghost, not just whether it is a ‘spirit of health or goblin damn’d’, but what its message really means. Maynard Mack and Harry Levin have pointed out that the entire play occurs in an atmosphere of ambiguity, irony, and interrogation. Marilyn French, Chaste Constancy in ‘Hamlet’
First he recounts the overall fact of the murder, and the cover story given out ... And within a few lines, the ghost is attacking not Claudius, but his queen. ibid.
In general, the world that surrounds Hamlet is as morally ambiguous as the actual world. Claudius is a good ruler; he loves his wife and is patient with her difficult son. ibid.
G Wilson Knight suggests that ‘the question of the relative morality of Hamlet and Claudius reflects the ultimate problem of the play’. But that relativity embraces others too. ibid.
9The Ghosts in revenge plays consistently resist unequivocal identifications, are always ‘questionable’ in one of the senses of the word. Dead and not living, visitants at midnight (the marginal hour) from a prison-house which is neither heaven or hell, visible to some figures on the stage but not to others, and so neither real nor unreal, they inaugurate a course of action which is both mad and sane, correct and criminal. Catherine Belsey, Revenge in ‘Hamlet’
The Ghost calls Hamlet deep into this world of disruption. Its invitation to decapitate the body politic seems a horrific charge. John Hunt, A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in ‘Hamlet’
What is frightening about a ghost is not its unearthliness, but its earthliness: its semblance of reality divorced from existence. Charles Marowitz, College Hamlet, Introduction
Do the dead haunt everyday objects? In Atlanta the pilots of a crashed airliner return from the grave. Can an aeroplane be possessed? In Britain the near-fatal attack on a boy is blamed on a painting … After an earthquake in New Zealand a man is attacked by a ghost. Weird or What? s3e4: Curses, Discovery 2012
Millions of us claim we’ve not only encountered them in our homes but almost anywhere and in anything. ibid.
45 million in US who believe in ghosts. Phenomenon s1e14: The Lost Archives, Unknown Encounter
Some say there are spirits who walk among us. Claims of strange ghostly phenomena have been reported all over the world. Bizarre sounds, mysterious photos. Paranatural s2e6: The Haunted, 2012
In the US mass sightings of a new and terrifying paranormal phenomena labelled shadow people. The Unexplained Files s2e11: Shadow People & The Sun Miracle
At Preston Castle a new and even more terrifying phenomenon has been reported: shadow people. ibid.
Huge, dark forms often human in shape. ibid.
A ghostly apparition in the dark of night: what was it and why did it come? There are stories of ghosts and of hauntings to suit every taste, from the playful to the macabre. But those who have studied ghosts claim to have discerned patterns in their behaviour. What might be set down as Rules of the Haunt. In Search of s1e18 … Ghosts, History 1977