THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS Read Online Free PDF Page A

Twenty Years' Experiences as a Ghost Hunter (in which there is a most creepy chapter: "A Haunted Mine in Wales"); Animal Ghosts; Scottish Ghosts; Byways of Ghostland . Personally I am inclined to rate his Some Haunted Houses of England and Wales (1908); Haunted Houses of London ; and More Haunted Houses of London as among the best of his work. This latter has a horrible tale, The Door that would never keep Shut; and the first relates some fully authenticated narratives of the West Country.
    The Ghost of Broughton Hall in Miss Violet Tweedale's Ghosts I Have Seen , second edition, 1920, is well within the good old-fashioned, but none the less matter-of-fact, tradition; whilst the account of the hideous satyr, Prince Valori's familiar, is so incontestably attested, that it should "furiously give to think" those, if any there be, who cling to what Stead justly termed the out-worn superstition of a denial of supernatural agencies.
    Very many more collections might be cited; many admirable, some few a little weak, perhaps; but it is high time we passed from fact to fiction. It must not be thought that this review "gat-tothed," insufficient and scanty to the last degree as it is, of books relating to the actuality of the supernatural, is in any way impertinent, since it is these veridical narratives which supply the background to romance and fiction self-confessed.
    Even although we are to be entirely concerned with prose fiction, the extraordinary popularity of the "Drama of Blood and Horror" evoking whole crowded cemeteries of ghosts upon the Elizabethan stage must not be passed over without a word. The earlier Elizabethan ghosts were copied from the formal phantoms of Seneca and his Italian imitators. The Umbra Tantali and the fury Megæra commence the Thyestes with a declamatory duologue of one hundred and twenty lines. Nor did these spectres lose one whit of their loquaciousness when they crossed to English shores. They are, one and all, extremely voluble. Thus Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy , acted in 1611, opens with a monologue of over seventy lines delivered by Sylla's ghost. It must be acknowledged that this is a magnificent speech, but not all spectres in tragedy had such splendid periods. In fact, many of the phantoms were unmercifully parodied, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy in particular (which, it is interesting to note, was attracting audiences as late as 1668) became a very nayword for mockery and burlesque. In that curious yet striking drama, A Warning for Faire Women , 4to, 1599, at the very outset are introduced Tragedy and Comedy, and the latter jeers her august sister in this wise:
     A Chorus too comes howling in,
    And tels us of the worrying of a cat,
    Then of a filthie whining ghost,
    Lapt in some fowle sheete, or a leather perch,
    Comes shreaming like a pigge halfe sticks,
    And cries Vindicta, revenge, revenge:
    With that a little Rosenflasheth forth,
    Like smoke out of a Tabacco pipe, or a boyes squib.
    It may be remarked that the ghost upon the Elizabethan stage was plainly visible to the audience. He presented himself very materially, all blotched with blood, with chalked face and linen shroud. When Kemble at Drury Lane in 1794 let Macbeth gaze upon an empty seat in the scene of royal revelry and apostrophise the vacant air, all this was absolutely alien to Shakespeare's intention and practice. The spectre of Banquo must be to vision clear, "with twenty trenched gashes on his head."
     Thus in Webster's great play The White Devil we see "Brachiano's Ghost in his leather cassock and breeches, boots; a cowl; a pot of lily-flowers, with a skull in't." The minute details of the stage direction, if nothing else, are proof that the ghost was no shadow seen in the mind's eye alone. Moreover, when Flaminio addresses it, "the Ghost throws earth upon him, and shows him the skull."
    It has been observed that "tragedy was the main channel of romanticism" in England during the seventeenth century and the earlier part of