Great Ghost Stories

Ghost stories lend themselves well to fiction. They leave the imagination entirely free. In ordinary fiction, especially of the realistic type, we expect some concessions to be made to facts but when it comes to a ghost story we assign no limits to the imagination. This is because the supernatural world offers us no standards for curbing our fancy. Icarus is given impunity in that atmosphere and there is no sun to melt his wings. Whatever our wishes, we do not expect ghosts to be real, and we are fancy free to invent or distort as we may. But in the twilight of human knowledge it was not thus. The boundaries of the real and the unreal were undefined and the belief in the supernatural, while it allowed the imagination free reins, revealed little difference between its creations and the ideas men held of the actual world. In this overlapping of the real and the imaginary, the ghost story arose and has never lost its interest for men, though the cold judgment of science deprived the real thing of its terrors.
As knowledge increased and extended its domain ghosts were reduced to hallucinations, much to the disappointment of lovers of the marvellous, and cultivated minds could only toy with them as objects either of literary fancy or of amusement against their less fortunate neighbours who desired to believe in them. Intellectuals who came into contact with stories like those in the Phantasms of the Living , indulgently spoke of them with a mixture of humour and tolerance which prevented them from either believing or denying them. But writers of fiction had no responsibilities and were not judged by the standards of either belief or unbelief, while the general public followed its tastes and imagination, chafed under the restraints of scepticism, and chose the easy road to satisfaction.
In the present age, which is saturated with psychic research, whatever the motive or outcome of that movement, ghost stories have been revived partly because you can invoke interest under the cloak of science and partly because of an interest in the unknown and the desire to please our fancies, and fiction, which is art and not science, can escape the duty of preaching. The psychologist, however, may detect a concealed realism in the most audacious feats of the imagination or an interest in the supernatural when the mind struggles to conceal or to ridicule it. Hence a collection of ghost stories, whatever their nature, may have their value for every class of readers. Some will want to invoke age and general human interest in behalf of certain prejudices, and others will want to quote them as illustrations of superstition. But all will like a good story well told and appealing to the imagination which always affords mankind more satisfaction than facts.