Henry James has drawn for us two characters of unmitigated evil in Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who, he says, are “hovering, prowling, blighting presences.” They are agents on whom is laid the dire duty of causing the air to reek with evil. He says, “I recognize that they are not ghosts at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons. The essence of the matter was the villainy of the motive in the evoked predatory creature.” What he wishes to do in this story is to express a general sense of spiritual infamy, not specialized, as the hot breath of the Pit usually confines itself to some one particular psychical brutality, but as capable of everything, the worst that can be conceived. How well he has succeeded in his effort, those who know the story can testify.
Ambrose Bierce’s stories are in many instances remarkable examples of this psychic horror. The Death of Halpin Frazer has a touch of almost unbearable dreadfulness. Frazer is assaulted by an evil spirit in a wood at night and choked to death, the spirit inhabiting the dead body of the man’s own mother who has idolized him. His dead mother’s face, transfixed with diabolical hate, is thrust upon him, and the loved hands that have caressed him strangle him. This is similar to the situation of an evil spirit occupying the body of a loved dead mother in The Mummy’s Tale, by Elliot O’Donnell. Bierce’s stories beat upon the mind like bludgeons and his morbid plots are among the most dreadful in our literature. One wonders what abnormality of mind conceives such themes, evolves such situations. If it be true, as Macaulay suggests, that not only every poet but every person who appreciates poetry is slightly unbalanced mentally, surely every writer of such extreme and horrific stories must be abnormal. There is more than one writer of modern ghostly fiction of whom it might be said that “his soul is open on the Hell side.”
Another temperament found distinctively in the later fiction is the humorous ghost. He is a recent development, and as might be supposed, is characteristically American. There were a few burlesque ghosts in Elizabethan drama, the Ghost of Jack,[124] for instance, and one colored ghost that would seem to connote mirth, but the really humorous specter did not come till later. It remained for the Yankee to evoke the spook with a sense of humor. Ghosts are not essentially laughable, and to make them comic without coarseness or irreverence is an achievement. Numerous writers have busied their pens with the funny spook and now we have ghostly laughter that is mirthful and not horrisonous as in other types. Specters now laugh with us instead of at us, and instead of the mocking laughter heard in lonely places we have “heart-easing mirth.” Washington Irving evokes several humorous hoax ghosts, such as the headless horseman that created excitement in Sleepy Hollow and the serenading phantom in The Specter Bridegroom.
Richard Middleton in his Ghost Ship shows some very informal humorous ghosts. The girls and boys rise from their graves to flirt over their tombstones on moonlight nights, and the children play with the village specters as companions, their favorite being the man that sits on the wellcurbing with his severed head held in his hands. The cottagers rebuke the spooks overhead when they grow too noisy, and a general good-fellowship prevails. Into this setting the ghost ship sails one night, anchoring itself in the middle of a turnip patch, and the riotous captain demoralizes the men of the village, ghosts and all, with his rum and his jokes. After a stay of some time, one night in a storm the villagers look out.
Over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord’s field. Her portholes and her windows were ablaze with lights and there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks.... They do say that since then the turnips on landlord’s field have tasted of rum.
Olive Harper tells[125] of a reporter who is invited by a cordial spook—who has been a New York social leader—to a spectral banquet and ball underneath Old Trinity. She satirizes human foibles and weaknesses, showing ghosts that gossip and gormandize, simper and swear as they did in life. They learn to play poker, dance, and kill time as they used to do. Frank R. Stockton has written several delicious drolleries of supernaturalism, as The Transferred Ghost, where the spook of a living man, the irascible uncle of the charming Madeline, terrifies the young suitor who lacks courage to propose. The audacious and ever-present ghost swings his feet from the porch railing, invisible to the girl as inaudible by her, and breaks in on the conversation in a most disconcerting way. The young man at last cries out in desperation, “What are you waiting for? I have nothing to say to you?” whereat the girl, who has been undoubtedly waiting to hear the proposal the embarrassed youth was trying to make, thinks he is speaking to her and departs in high dudgeon. On a later occasion the specter comes to announce to him that he has got his transfer and may be somebody else’s ghost instead of that of the man who was expected to die and didn’t, when the lover cries out, “I wish to Heaven you were mine!” And Madeline, melting in a sigh, whispers, “I am yours!” The sequel to this is also comic.[126]
Brander Matthews has several stories of humorous supernaturalism, Rival Ghosts being the account of ancestral spooks belonging to a young bridegroom, and who resent being brought into enforced companionship by his sudden elevation to a title, since one ghost must haunt the house and one the heir. The ingenious groom, at last harassed to invention by the continual squabbling of the ghosts, brings about a wedding between them. This is the only instance I have found of a wedding between two specters, though there are various cases on record of marriage between one living and one spectral personage. John Kendrick Bangs devotes several volumes to the doings and sayings of spooks, describing parties in a house-boat on the Styx, where the shades of the departed great gather together and engage in festivities and discussions, and showing types of water-ghosts and various kinds of spooks. The humorous ghost is a more frequent person than one would suppose without giving some thought to the subject, for many writers have sharpened their wits on the comic haunt.
As may be seen from the examples mentioned, the ghost has made perceptible progress in psychology. The modern apparition is much more complex in personality than the crude early type, and shows much more variety. The up-to-date spook who has a chance to talk things over with William James, and knows the labyrinths of the human mind is much better adapted to inflict psychal terrors than the illiterate specter of the past. He can evolve mental tortures more subtle and varied than ever, or he can amuse a downcast mortal by his gambols.
Stories of to-day show a decided advance over the Gothic in the matter of motives for spectral appearance. There are, it is true, certain motives in common between them, but the present-day spirit is less limited, for he has gained the new without loss of the old, if he wishes to keep the old. The principal impulse that impelled classical shades to walk the earth was to request burial, since lacking that he could not enter into the abode of the dead. This appears frequently also in Gothic romance. It is shown but little in recent fiction, perhaps because the modern ghost is reconciled to cremation or is blithely indifferent to what becomes of his body since it no longer rules him. The Queen of Hearts is one of the few instances of its use in modern fiction, for it is a vanishing motive for the most part. Gothic ghosts were also wont to return to show the hiding-place of treasure, but that, too, is dying out as an incentive to haunting. The prosaic explanation here may be that now persons put their treasure in safety deposits, hence there is scant occasion for mystery concerning its location after death. Gothic spooks came back on occasion to reveal parentage, for parents, like valuables, were frequently mislaid in terror romance. This is not so important now, since vital statistics usually keep such matters duly recorded, yet instances do sometimes occur.