A GHOST IN THE UNMAKING
BELIEF in ghosts is natural, general and comforting. In many minds it is cherished as a good working substitute for religion; in others it appears to take the place of morality. It is rather more convenient than either, for it may be disavowed and even reviled without exposing oneself to suspicion and reproach. As an intellectual conviction it is, in fact, not a very common phenomenon among people of thought and education; nevertheless the number of civilized and enlightened human beings who can pass through a graveyard at midnight without whistling is not notably greater than the number who are unable to whistle.
It may be noted here as a distinction with a difference that belief in ghosts is not the same thing as faith in them. Many men believe in the adversary of souls, but comparatively few, and they not among our best citizens, have any faith in him. Similarly, the belief in ghosts has reference only to their existence, not to their virtues. They are, indeed, commonly thought to harbor the most evil designs against the continuity of peaceful thoughts and the integrity of sleep. Their malevolence has in it a random and wanton quality which invests it with a peculiarly lively interest: there is no calculating upon whom it will fall: the just and the unjust alike are embraced in its baleful jurisdiction and subjected to the humiliating indignity of displaying the white feather. And this leads us directly back to the incident by which these remarks have the honor to be suggested.
A woman living near Sedalia, Missouri, who had recently been married alive to a widower, was once passing along a “lonely road” which had been thoughtfully laid out near her residence. It was late in the evening, and the lady was, naturally, somewhat apprehensive in a land known to be infested by Missourians of the deepest dye. She was, therefore, not in a suitable frame of mind for an interview with an inhabitant of the other world, and it was with no slight trepidation that she suddenly discovered in the gloom a tall figure, clad all in white, standing silent and menacing in the road before her. She endeavored to run away, but terror fastened her feet to the earth; to shriek, but her lungs refused their office—the first time that an office was ever refused in that sovereign commonwealth. In short, to use a neat and graphic locution of the vicinity, she was utterly “guv out.” The ghost was tremendously successful. Unluckily it could not hold its ghost of a tongue, and that spectral organ could accomplish feats of speech intelligible to ears still in the flesh. The apparition advanced upon its helpless victim and said in hollow accents: “I am the spirit of your husband’s first wife: beware, beware!”
Nothing could have been more imprudent. The cowering lady effected a vertical attitude, grew tall, and expanded. Her terror gave place to an intrepidity of the most military character, and she moved at once to the attack. A moment later all that was mortal of that immortal part, divested of its funeral habiliments, hair, teeth and whatever was removable—battered, lacerated, gory and unconscious—lay by the roadside awaiting identification. When the husband arrived upon the scene with a horrible misgiving and a lantern, his worst fears were not realized; the grave had bravely held its own; the object by the roadside was what was left of his deceased wife’s sister. On learning that her victim was not what she had incautiously represented herself to be, the victorious lady expressed the deepest regret.
Such incidents as this go far to account for that strong current of human testimony to the existence of ghosts, which Dr. Johnson found running through all the ages, and at the same time throw a new and significant light upon Heine’s suggestion that ghosts are as much afraid of us as we of them. It would appear that some of the less judicious of them have pretty good reason.