The appeal of ghosts to the sight has already been discussed so need not be mentioned here. But the element of invisibility enters in as a new and very terrible form of supernatural manifestation in later fiction. In spite of the general visibility, some of the most horrible tales turn on the fact that the haunter is unseen. H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man is a human being, not a ghost; yet the story has a curdling power that few straight ghost stories possess. Maupassant’s La Horla is a nightmare story of an invisible being that is terrific in its effect. The victim knows that an unseen yet definite and determined something is shut in his room with him night after night, eating, drinking, reading, sitting on his chest, driving him mad. Ambrose Bierce’s The Damned Thing is a gruesome story of invisibility, of a something that is abroad with unearthly power of evil, whose movements can be measured by the bending of the grasses, which shuts off the light from other objects as it passes, which struggles with the dogs and with men, till it finally kills and horribly mangles the man who has been studying it, but is never seen. Another[96] has for its central figure a being that violently attacks men and is overpowered and tied only by abnormal strength, that struggles on the bed, showing its imprint on the mattress, that is imprisoned in a plaster cast to have its mold taken, that is heard breathing loudly till it dies of starvation, yet is absolutely never visible. Blackwood’s Fire Elemental may be seen moving along only by the bending of the grass beneath it and by the trail it leaves behind, for though it is audible yet it is never seen. As a brave man said of it, “I am not afraid of anything that I can see!” so these stories of supernatural invisibility have a chilling horror more intense than that of most ghostly tales. The element of invisibility of unmistakably present spirits is shown in other stories.
One tender story of an invisible ghost is told in In No Strange Land,[97] of a man killed suddenly in a wreck while on his way home to the birthday dinner his wife is preparing for him. He does not know that he has been hurt; but while his dead body lies mangled under the wreckage his spirit hurries home. He swears whimsically under his breath at some interruption and thinks with joy of the happy little group he will meet. But when he enters his home he cannot make them see or hear him. They are vaguely aware of some strange influence, are awed by it, and the little son with the poet’s heart whispers that he hears something, but that is all. The man stands by, impotently stretching out his arms to them till he hears the messenger tell them that he is dead.
Ghosts are variable with respect to sounds as well as appearance. The early ghosts were for the most part silent, yet could talk on occasion, and classical apparitions were sometimes vocal and sometimes silent. The Gothic ghost sometimes had an impediment in his speech while at other times he could converse fluently. The Gothic specter, real as well as faked, frequently lifted voice in song and brought terror to the guilty bosom by such strains. Yet when he spoke he was usually brief in utterance. Perhaps the reason for that lay in the lack of surety on the part of the writers as to the proper ghostly diction. Gothic authors were not overstrong on technique and they may have hesitated to let their specters be too fluent lest they be guilty of dialectic errors. It would seem incongruous for even an illiterate ghost to murder the king’s English, which presents a difficulty in the matter of realism, so perchance the writers dodged the issue by giving their ghosts brevity of speech, or in some cases by letting them look volumes of threats but utter no word. This may explain the reason for the non-speaking ghosts in classical and Elizabethan drama. There is a similar variation in the later fiction, for many of the ghosts are eloquently silent, while other phantoms are terrifyingly fluent. All this goes to prove the freedom of the modern ghost for he does what he takes a notion to do. The invisible ghosts are as a rule voiceless as well.
The Gothic romance was fond of mysterious music as an accompaniment of supernatural visitation, but ghostly music is less common than it used to be. Yet it does come at times, as in A Far-away Melody,[98] where two spinster sisters living alone hear heavenly music as portent of their death. Ghostly song is heard in another case,[99] where a woman’s spirit comes back to sing in a duet at her funeral, and Crawford’s ghost[100] constantly whistles a tune he had been fond of during life. In Co-operative Ghosts the wraith of the young girl who in Cromwellian times betrayed her father’s cause to save her lover’s life sings sadly,
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more!”
In Crawford’s A Doll’s Ghost, that peculiar example of preternatural fiction, not a children’s story as one might think, nor yet humorous, the mechanical voice of the doll and the click of its tiny pattering feet occur as strange sounds. Lord Strafford[101] walks with a firm, audible tread on his way to appall the king, and in Blackwood’s Empty House the ghosts move with sounds of heavy, rushing feet, followed by a noise of scuffling and smothered screams as the ancient murder is re-enacted, then the thud of a body thrown down the stairs,—after which is a terrible silence. The awful effect of a sudden silence after supernatural sounds is nowhere shown more tensely than in The Monkey’s Paw,[102] that story of superlative power of suggestion. When the ghostly visitant knocks loudly at the outer door, we feel the same thrill of chilling awe as in the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, and more, for the two who hear are sure that this is a presence come back from the dead. Then when the last magic wish has been breathed, utter silence comes, a silence more dreadful in its import than the clamor has been.
New sounds are introduced in modern ghostly tales, such as the peculiar hissing that is a manifestation of the presence of the ancient spirit[103] followed by the crackling and crashing of the enchanted flames. In Blackwood’s Keeping His Promise the heavy, stertorous breathing of the invisible Thing is heard, and the creaking of the bed weighted down by the body. Mary Wilkins Freeman brings in ghostly crying in a story, while Blackwood speaks of his Wendigo as having “a sort of windy, crying voice, as of something lonely and untamed, wild and of abominable power.” Kipling introduces novel and touching sounds in his stories of ghostly children. The child-wraiths are gay, yet sometimes near to tears. He speaks of “the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief,” “sudden, squeaking giggles of childhood,” “the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet in the room beyond,” “joyous chuckles of evasion,” and so forth. These essentially childlike and lifelike sounds are deeply pathetic as coming from the ghosts of little ones that hover, homesick, near the earth they dread to leave. The little ghost boy in Richard Middleton’s story,[104] manifests himself, invisibly, through the little prancing steps, the rustling of the leaves through which he runs, and the heart-breaking imitations of an automobile. Later ghostly fiction introduces few of the clankings of chains and lugubrious groans that made the Gothic romance mournful, and the modern specters are less wailful than the earlier, but more articulate in their expression. There are definite ghostly sounds that recur in various stories, such as the death-rap above the bed of the dying, the oft-mentioned mocking laughter in empty places, the cry of the banshee which is the presage of death not only of the body but of the soul, as well. On the whole, the sounds in modern supernatural stories are more varied in their types, more expressive of separate and individual horror, and with an intensified power of haunting suggestion than was the case with the earlier forms.
The sense of smell was not noticeably exploited in the ancient or Gothic ghost stories, though certain folk-tales, as Hawaiian stories of the lower world, speak of it. The devil was supposed to be in bad odor, for he was usually accompanied by sulphurous scents, as we notice in Calderon’s drama,[105] and some of the Gothic novels, but that seems to be about the extent of the matter. But moderns, while not so partial to brimstone, pay considerable attention to supernatural odors. The devil has been dry-cleaned, but the evil odors of later fiction are more objectionable than the fumes of the pit, are more variant, more individual and distinctive. Odors seem less subjective than sights or sounds, and are not so conventionalized in ghostly fiction, hence when they are cleverly evoked they are unusually effective. These supernatural scents have a very lasting quality too, for they linger on after the other manifestations of the preternatural are past. In The Haunted Hotel,[106] the ghost manifests itself through the nostrils. In room number thirteen there is an awful stench for which no one can account, and which cannot be removed by any disinfectants. Finally when a woman especially sympathetic to a man mysteriously dead is put in the room, the ghost appears as a decaying head, floating near the ceiling and emitting an intolerable odor. The Upper Berth[107] tells of a strange, foul sea odor that infests a certain stateroom and that no amount of fumigating or airing will remove. As the Thing comes out of the sea to carry its victim away with it, the man in the lower berth gets the full force of the unearthly smell. There are definite foul supernatural odors associated with supernatural animals in recent ghostly tales, as that “ghost of an unforgettable strange odor, of a queer, acrid, pungent smell like the odor of lions,” which announces the presence of the awful out-door something called by the Indians, the Wendigo. In Kipling’s story[108] of a man whose soul has been stolen by Indian magic through the curse of a leper priest and a beast’s soul put in its place,—his companions are sickened by an intolerable stench as of wild beasts, and when the curse is removed and he comes back to himself, he sniffs the air and asks what causes “such a horrid doggy smell in the air.”
Sometimes the ghastly presence comes as a whiff of perfume,[109] where the spirit of the dead woman brings with it flowers in masses, with a heavenly perfume which lingers after the spirit in visible form has departed. The subtlest and most delicately haunting story of this type is O. Henry’s,[110] where the loved, dead girl reveals herself to the man who is desperately hunting the big city over for her, merely as a whiff of mignonette, the flower she most loved.