The Haunters & The Haunted / Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural

PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY DANIEL O'CONNOR, 90 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, W.C.1. 1921
For permission to use copyright stories in this volume, the editor and publishers wish to make special acknowledgments to Messrs Allen & Unwin, Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr E.H. Blakeney, Sir George Douglas, Bart., Dr Greville MacDonald, Mr Arthur Machen, and Mr Thomas Hardy.


In this Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales, has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real, describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good. Perhaps the very difficulty of it has rendered it more tempting to the writers who have dealt with the subject. His collection, notably varied and artfully chosen as it is, yet by no means exhausts the literature, which fills a place apart with its own recognised classics, magic masters, and dealers in the occult. Their testimony serves to show that the forms by which men and women are haunted are far more diverse and subtle than we knew. So much so, that one begins to wonder at last if every person is not liable to be possessed. For, lurking under the seeming identity of these visitations, the dramatic differences of their entrances and appearances, night and day, are so marked as to suggest that the experience is, given the fit temperament and occasion, inevitable.
One would even be disposed, accepting this idea, to bring into the account, as valid, stories and pieces of literature not usually accounted part of the ghostly canon. There are the novels and tales whose argument is the tragedy of a haunted mind. Such are Dickens' Haunted Man , in which the ghost is memory; Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter , in which the ghost is cruel conscience; and Balzac's Quest of the Absolute , in which the old Flemish house of Balthasar Claes, in the Rue de Paris at Douai, is haunted by a dæmon more potent than that of Canidia. One might add some of Balzac's shorter stories, among them The Elixir ; and some of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales , including Edward Randolph's Portrait. On the French side we might note too that terrible graveyard tale of Guy de Maupassant, La Morte , in which the lover who has lost his beloved keeps vigil at her grave by night in his despair, and sees—dreadful resurrection— que toutes les tombes étaient ouvertes, et tous les cadavres en étaient sortis. And why? That they might efface the lying legends inscribed on their tombs, and replace them with the actual truth. Villiers de l'Isle Adam has in his Contes Cruels given us the strange story of Véra, which may be read as a companion study to La Morte , with another recall from the dead to end a lover's obsession. Nature and supernature cross in de l'Isle Adam's mystical drama Axël a play which will never hold the stage, masterly attempt as it is to dramatise the inexplainable mystery.