The Gothic ghost frequently walked forth as a skeleton, clad in nothing but his bones and a lurid scowl. Skeletons still perambulate among us, as in The Messenger, where the stripped-off mask shows a hideous skull.
The skeleton burst from out the rotting robes and collapsed on the ground before us. From between the staring ribs and the grinning teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering the shrinking grasses, and then the thing shuddered and fell over into the black ooze of the bog.
The ghost of Zuleika[88] is described as “a skeleton woman robed in the ragged remains of a black mantle. Near this crumbling earth body there lay the spirit of Zuleika attached to it by a fine thread of magnetic ether. Like the earthly body it was wrapped in a robe of black of which it seemed the counterpart.” Elliott O’Donnell has a story of a mummy that in a soldier’s tent at night sobs, breathes, moves, sits up, and with ghastly fingers unfolds its cere-cloth wrappings, appearing to him as the counterpart of his long-dead mother, looking at him with the eyes he had worshiped in his boyhood.
I fell on my knees before her and kissed—what? Not the feet of my mother but those of the long-buried dead! Sick with repulsion and fear I looked up and there bending over me and peering into my eyes was the face, the fleshless, mouldering face of the foul corpse!
But on the whole, though skeletons do appear in later fiction, the rattle of bones is not heard as often as in Gothic times.
Ghostly apparitions are more varied in form than in early times. The modern ghost does not require a whole skeleton for his purposes, but he can take a single bone and put the hardiest to flight with it. It is a dreadful thing to realize that a ghost can come in sections, which indefinitely multiplies its powers of haunting. F. Marion Crawford has a story of a diabolical skull, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts on record. A man has murdered his wife by pouring melted lead into her ear while she slept, in accordance with a suggestion from a casually told story of a guest. The dead woman’s skull—the husband cut the head off for fear people would hear the lead rattle, and buried it in the garden—comes back to haunt the husband, with that deadly rattle of the lump of lead inside. The teeth bite him, the skull rolls up a hill to follow him, and finally kills him, then sets in to haunt the visitor who told the suggestive story.[89] Elsewhere as well Crawford shows us skulls that have uncanny powers of motion and emotion. In Wilkie Collins’s Haunted Hotel the specter is seen as a bodiless head floating near the ceiling of the room where the man was murdered and his body concealed. Thackeray[90] describes a ghost with its head on its lap, and of course every one will remember the headless horseman with his head carried on the pommel of his saddle that frightened poor Ichabod Crane out of his wits.
We get a rabble of headless apparitions in Brissot’s Ghost, one of the Anti-Jacobin parodies (ridiculing Richard Glover’s ballad of Hosier’s Ghost):
Sudden up the staircase sounding
Hideous yells and shrieks were heard;
Then, each guest with fear confounding,
A grim train of ghosts appeared;
Each a head in anguish gasping
(Himself a trunk deformed with gore)
In his hand, terrific clasping,
Stalked across the wine-stained floor.
In Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunters and the Haunted a woman’s hand without a body rises up to clutch the ancient letters, then withdraws, while in his Strange Story the supernatural manifestation comes as a vast Eye seen in the distance, moving nearer and nearer, “seeming to move from the ground at a height of some lofty giant.” Then other Eyes appear. “Those Eyes! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on legions! And that tramp of numberless feet! they are not seen, but the hollows of the earth echo to their tread!” The supernatural phenomena in Ambrose Bierce’s stories have an individual horror. In A Vine on the House he shows a hideous revenge ghost manifested in a peculiar form. A couple of men take refuge in a deserted house and note a strange vine covering the porch that shakes unaccountably and violently. In mystification they dig it up, to find the roots in the form of a woman’s body, lacking one foot, as had been the case with the woman who had lived there and whose husband had killed her secretly and buried her beside the porch.