“A deep groan issues from the coffin and a voice exclaims, ‘You hurt me! Forbear or you will crush my bones to powder!’” He knocks the coffin in pieces, whereupon the vocal bones demand decent burial and his departure from the castle. Later the baron sees the ghost of his first wife, who objects to his making a third matrimonial venture, though she has apparently conceded the second. In the same story a young woman’s spook pursues one Thomas, almost stamping on his heels, and finally vanishing like a sky-rocket, leaving an odor of brimstone behind. A specter rises from a well in The History of Jack Smith, or the Castle of Saint Donats,[11] and shakes its hoary head at a group of men who fire pistols at it.
The Castle of Caithness[12] shows a murdered father indicating his wounds to his son and demanding vengeance. An armored revenge ghost appears in Count Roderick’s Castle, or Gothic Times, an anonymous Philadelphia novel, telling his son the manner of his murder, and scaring the king, who has killed him, to madness. The revenge ghosts in the Gothic do not cry “Vindicta!” as frequently as in the early drama, but they are as relentless in their hate. In Ancient Records, or The Abbey of St. Oswyth,[13] the spirit of a nun who has been wronged and buried alive by the wicked baron returns with silent, tormenting reproach. She stands beside him at midnight, with her dead infant on her breast.
Suddenly the eyes of the specter become animated. Oh!—then what flashes of appalling anger dart from their hollow orbits on the horror-stricken Vortimer! Three dreadful shrieks ring pealing through the chamber now filled with a blaze of sulphurous light. The specter suddenly becomes invisible and the baron falls senseless on his couch.
Scant wonder! In the same story Rosaline, the distressed heroine, is about to wed against her will, when a specter appears and forbids the bans. Again, Gondemar has a dagger at her throat with wicked intent, when a spook “lifts up his hollow, sunken countenance and beckons with angry gestures for his departure.” Gondemar departs!
Another revenge ghost creates excitement in The Accusing Spirit. A murdered marquis appears repeatedly to interested parties and demands punishment on his brother who has slain him. Another inconsiderate specter in the same volume wakes a man from his sleep, and beckoning him to follow, leads him to a subterranean vault, stamps his foot on a certain stone, shows a ghastly wound in his throat and vanishes. On investigation, searchers find a corpse in a winding-sheet beneath the indicated spot. Another accusing spirit appears in the same story—that of Benedicta, a recreant nun, who glides as a headless and mutilated figure through the cloisters and hovers over the convent bed where she “breathed out her guilty soul.” The young heroine who has taken temporary refuge in the convent and has to share the cell with this disturbing room-mate, is informed by an old nun that, “Those damned spirits who for mysterious purposes receive permission to wander over the earth can possess no power to injure us but that which they may derive from the weakness of our imagination.” Nevertheless, the nervous girl insists on changing her room! Another famous cloistered ghost, one of the pioneer female apparitions of note, is the Bleeding Nun in Lewis’s The Monk, that hall of Gothic horrors. He provides an understudy for her, who impersonates the nun in times of emergency, providing complicating confusion for the other characters and for the reader.
Ghosts begin to crowd upon each others’ heels in later Gothic novels. No romance is so poor as not to have a retinue of specters, or at least, a ghost-of-all-work. Emboldened by their success as individuals, spooks appear in groups and mobs. William Beckford in his Vathek presents two thousand specters in one assembly. Beckford was no niggard! In Maturin’s The Albigenses, de Montfort, passing alone through a dark forest, meets the phantoms of countless victims of his religious persecution. Men, women, young maidens, babes at the breast, all move toward him with unspeakable reproach, with “clattering bones, eyeless sockets, bare and grinning jaws.” Aside from Dante the most impressive description of unhappy spirits in a large number is given in Vathek in that immortal picture of the Hall of Eblis. Beckford shows here a concourse of doomed souls, each with his hand forever pressed above his burning heart, each carrying his own hell within him, having lost heaven’s most precious boon, the soul’s hope! In the Hall of Eblis there are the still living corpses, “the fleshless forms of the pre-adamite kings, who still possess enough life to be conscious of their deplorable condition; they regard one another with looks of the deepest dejection, each holding his right hand motionless above his heart.” The prophet Soliman is there, from whose livid lips come tragic words of his sin and punishment. Through his breast, transparent as glass, the beholder can see his heart enveloped in flames.
In James Hogg’s The Wool-Gatherer, a man of very evil life is haunted by the wraiths of those he has wronged. As he lies on his death-bed, not only he, but those around him as well, hear the pleading voices of women, the pitiful cries of babes around his bed, though nothing is visible. We have here a suggestion of the invisible supernaturalism that becomes so frequent and effective a motif in later fiction. After the man is dead, the supernatural sounds become so dreadful that “the corpse sits up in the bed, pawls wi’ its hands and stares round wi’ its dead face!” When the watchers leave the room for a few moments, the body mysteriously disappears and is never found. A somewhat similar instance occurs in one of Ambrose Bierce’s modern stories of dead bodies.
There is some attempt to exorcise restless spirits in a number of Gothic novels. On various occasions the priests come forth with bell, book, and candle to pronounce anathema against the troublesome visitants. In one story a monk crosses his legs to scare away the specter, but forgets and presently tumbles over. In another,[14] the priest peremptorily bids the ghosts depart and breaks the news firmly to them that they cannot return for a thousand years. But one bogle, whether of feeble understanding or strong will, comes in to break up the ceremonies of incantation, and scares the priest into hysterics.
The imagined ghost appears in many of the Gothic tales, whose writers lack the courage of their supernaturalism. Mrs. Radcliffe, for instance, loves to build up a tissue of ghostly horrors, yet explains them away on natural grounds after the reader fancies he sees a spirit around every corner.
The ghosts that are deliberately got up for the purposes of deception form an interesting feature of Gothic methods. The reasons behind the spectral impersonations are various, to frighten criminals into restitution after confession, to further crime, or merely to enliven the otherwise lagging story. In The Spirit of Turrettville two youths follow the sounds of plaintive music till, in a deserted, spookish apartment, they see a woman playing at an old harp. As they draw near, they see only skeleton hands on the keys and the apparition turns toward them “a grinning, mouldering skull.” She waves her hands with haughty rebuke for their intrusion and “stalks” out of the oratory. She gives further performances, however, singing a song composed for the occasion. But the reader, after such thrills, resents finding out later that she is the living wife, attempting to frighten the villain into confession.