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Famous Modern Ghost Stories by Various

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"You've already guessed. I see it in your quivering snout. I'm the old
dog that had to leave them about ten years ago."

"Their old dog Bully?"

"Yes, I'm Bully." They nosed each other with deeper affection, then
strolled about the glades shoulder to shoulder. Bully the more eagerly
pressed for news. "Tell me, how are they getting along?"

"Very well indeed; they've paid for the house."

"I--I suppose you occupy the kennel?"

"No. They said they couldn't stand it to see another dog in your old
place."

Bully stopped to howl gently.

"That touches me. It's generous in you to tell it. To think they missed
me!"

For a little while they went on in silence, but as evening fell, and
the light from the golden streets inside of the city gave the only glow
to the scene, Bully grew nervous and suggested that they go back.

"We can't see so well at night, and I like to be pretty close to the
path, especially toward morning."

Tam assented.

"And I will point them out. You might not know them just at first."

"Oh, we know them. Sometimes the babies have so grown up they're rather
hazy in their recollection of how we look. They think we're bigger than
we are; but you can't fool us dogs."

"It's understood," Tam cunningly arranged, "that when he or she arrives
you'll sort of make them feel at home while I wait for the boy?"

"That's the best plan," assented Bully, kindly. "And if by any chance
the little fellow should come first,--there's been a lot of them this
summer--of course you'll introduce me?"

"I shall be proud to do it."

And so with muzzles sunk between their paws, and with their eyes
straining down the pilgrims' road, they wait outside the gate.




Ligeia

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the
mystery of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will
pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not
yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only
through the weakness of his feeble will.--_Joseph Glanvill._


I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I
first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since
elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I
cannot _now_ bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the
character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast
of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low
musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and
stealthily progressive, that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I
believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old,
decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family--I have surely heard her
speak. That it is of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia!
Ligeia! Buried in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to
deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word
alone--by Ligeia--that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of
her who is no more. And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon
me that I have _never known_ the paternal name of her who was my friend
and my bethrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally
the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia?
or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no
inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own--a
wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion?
I but indistinctly recall the fact itself--what wonder that I have
utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it?
And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled _Romance_--if ever
she, the wan misty-winged _Ashtophet_ of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as
they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over
mine.

There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It
is the _person_ of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat
slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain
attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease of her demeanor, or the
incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came
and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into
my closed study, save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she
placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden
ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream--an airy and
spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which
hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her
features were not of that regular mold which we have been falsely taught
to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. "There is no exquisite
beauty," says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and
_genera_ of beauty, "without some _strangeness_ in the proportion."
Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic
regularity--although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed
"exquisite," and felt that there was much of "strangeness" pervading it,
yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my
own perception of "the strange." I examined the contour of the lofty and
pale forehead--it was faultless--how cold indeed that word when applied
to a majesty so divine!--the skin rivaling the purest ivory, the
commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above
the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and
naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric
epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the
nose--and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I
beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of
surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the
same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded
the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly--the
magnificent turn of the short upper lip--the soft, voluptuous slumber of
the under--the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke--the
teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of
the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid yet most
exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the
chin--and, here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness
and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek--the
contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the
son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia.

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been,
too, that in these eyes of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord
Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary
eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the
gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at
intervals--in moments of intense excitement--that this peculiarity
became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was
her beauty--in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps--the beauty of
beings either above or apart from the earth--the beauty of the fabulous
Houri of the Turk. The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black,
and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows,
slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint. The "strangeness,"
however, which I found in the eyes was of a nature distinct from the
formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must,
after all, be referred to the _expression_. Ah, word of no meaning!
behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so
much of the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for
long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a
midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it--that something
more profound than the well of Democritus--which lay far within the
pupils of my beloved? What _was_ it? I was possessed with a passion to
discover. Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs!
they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of
astrologers.

There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the
science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact--never, I
believe, noticed in the schools--than in our endeavors to recall to
memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves _upon the very
verge_ of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. And
thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I
felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression--felt it
approaching--yet not quite be mine--and so at length entirely depart!
And (strange, oh, strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest
objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. I
mean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligeia's beauty passed
into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived, from many
existences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt always
around, within me, by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more
could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I
recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly
growing vine--in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis,
a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean--in the falling
of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And
there are one or two stars in heaven (one especially, a star of the
sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star
in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the
feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed
instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among
innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of
Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness--who shall
say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment: "And the will
therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will,
with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by
nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto
death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

Length of years and subsequent reflection have enabled me to trace,
indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English
moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An _intensity_ in
thought, action, or speech was possibly, in her, a result, or at least
an index, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse,
failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of
all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the
ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous
vultures of stern passion. And of such passion I could form no estimate,
save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so
delighted and appalled me,--by the almost magical melody, modulation,
distinctness, and placidity of her very low voice,--and by the fierce
energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of
utterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered.

I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense--such as I have
never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply
proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the
modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon
any theme of the most admired because simply the most abstruse of the
boasted erudition of the Academy, have I _ever_ found Ligeia at fault?
How singularly--how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife
has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said
her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman--but where
breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, _all_ the wide
areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what
I now clearly perceive that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic,
were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy
to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through
the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most
busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast
a triumph--with how vivid a delight--with how much of all that is
ethereal in hope did I _feel_, as she bent over me in studies but little
sought--but less known,--that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding
before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at
length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to
be forbidden.

How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some
years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves
and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her
presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many
mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting
the radiant luster of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller
than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently
upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed
with a too--too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the
transparent waxen hue of the grave; and the blue veins upon the lofty
forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the most gentle
emotion. I saw that she must die--and I struggled desperately in spirit
with the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to
my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in
her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would
have come without its terrors; but not so. Words are impotent to convey
any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled
with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would
have soothed--I would have reasoned; but in the intensity of her wild
desire for life--for life--_but_ for life--solace and reason were alike
the uttermost of folly. Yet not until the last instance, amid the most
convulsive writhings of her fierce spirit, was shaken the external
placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle--grew more
low--yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly
uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened, entranced, to a melody
more than mortal--to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had
never before known.

That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been
easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no
ordinary passion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the
strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she
pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate
devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by
such confessions?--how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal
of my beloved in the hour of my making them? But upon this subject I
cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than
womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily
bestowed, I at length, recognized the principle of her longing, with so
wildly earnest a desire, for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly
away. It is this wild longing--it is this eager vehemence of desire for
life--_but_ for life--that I have no power to portray--no utterance
capable of expressing.

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me,
peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by
herself not many days before. I obeyed her. They were these:--

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Wo!

That motley drama!--oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot;
And much of Madness, and more of Sin
And Horror, the soul of the plot!

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out--out are the lights--out all:
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm--
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the conqueror Worm.

"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her
arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these
lines--"O God! O Divine Father!--shall these things be undeviatingly
so?--shall this conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and
parcel in Thee? Who--who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its
vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, _nor unto death utterly_,
save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to
fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed her
last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I
bent to them my ear, and distinguished, again, the concluding words of
the passage in Glanvill: "_Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor
unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will._"

She died: and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer
endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying
city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia
had brought me far more, very far more, than ordinarily falls to the lot
of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless
wandering, I purchased and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall
not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair
England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost
savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored
memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of
utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial
region of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant
decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with
a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating
my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within. For
such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste, and now they
came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even
of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and
fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild
cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted
gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my
labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these
absurdities I must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one
chamber, ever accursed, whither, in a moment of mental alienation, I led
from the altar as my bride--as the successor of the unforgotten
Ligeia--the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of
Tremaine.

There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of
that bridal chamber which is not visibly before me. Where were the souls
of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold, they
permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment _so_ bedecked, a maiden
and a daughter so beloved? I have said, that I minutely remember the
details of the chamber--yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep
moment; and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic
display to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of
the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size.
Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagonal was the sole
window--an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice--a single pane,
and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon
passing through it, fell with a ghastly luster on the objects within.
Over the upper portion of this huge window extended the trellis-work of
an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The
ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and
elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a
semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of
this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long
links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with
many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as
if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of
parti-colored fires.

Some few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were in
various stations about; and there was the couch, too--the bridal
couch--of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with
a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on
end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings
over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture.
But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of
all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height--even unproportionably so--were
hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and
massive-looking tapestry--tapestry of a material which was found alike
as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony
bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the
curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest
cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with
arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth
in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the
true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point
of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very
remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one
entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but
upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and, step by
step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself
surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to
the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the
monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial
introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the
draperies--giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.

In halls such as these--in a bridal chamber such as this--I passed, with
the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our
marriage--passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded
the fierce moodiness of my temper--that she shunned me, and loved me but
little--I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than
otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to
man. My memory flew back (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia,
the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I reveled in
recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty--her ethereal
nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit
fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In the
excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the
shackles of the drug), I would call aloud upon her name, during the
silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by
day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the
consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to
the pathways she had abandoned--ah, _could_ it be forever?--upon the
earth.

About the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the Lady
Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was
slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; and in
her perturbed state of half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and of
motions, in and about the chamber of the turret, which I concluded had
no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the
phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at length
convalescent--finally, well. Yet but a second more violent disorder
again threw her upon a bed of suffering; and from this attack her frame,
at all times feeble, never altogether recovered. Her illnesses were,
after this epoch, of alarming character, and of more alarming
recurrence, defying alike the knowledge and the great exertions of her
physicians. With the increase of the chronic disease, which had thus,
apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated
by human means, I could not fail to observe a similar increase in the
nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her excitability by
trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now more frequently and
pertinaciously, of the sounds--of the slight sounds--and of the unusual
motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly alluded.

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