GREAT GHOST STORIES
SELECTED BY
JOSEPH LEWIS FRENCH
WITH A FOREWORD BY
JAMES H. HYSLOP, LL.D.
Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1918
Copyright, 1918, by
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
FOREWORD
Ghost stories lend themselves well to fiction. They leave theimagination entirely free. In ordinary fiction, especially of therealistic type, we expect some concessions to be made to facts but whenit comes to a ghost story we assign no limits to the imagination. Thisis because the supernatural world offers us no standards for curbing ourfancy. Icarus is given impunity in that atmosphere and there is no sunto melt his wings. Whatever our wishes, we do not expect ghosts to bereal, and we are fancy free to invent or distort as we may. But in thetwilight of human knowledge it was not thus. The boundaries of the realand the unreal were undefined and the belief in the supernatural, whileit allowed the imagination free reins, revealed little differencebetween its creations and the ideas men held of the actual world. Inthis overlapping of the real and the imaginary, the ghost story aroseand has never lost its interest for men, though the cold judgment ofscience deprived the real thing of its terrors.
As knowledge increased and extended its domain ghosts were reduced tohallucinations, much to the disappointment of lovers of the marvellous,and cultivated minds could only toy with them as objects either ofliterary fancy or of amusement against their less fortunate neighbourswho desired to believe in them. Intellectuals who came into contactwith stories like those in the Phantasms of the Living, indulgentlyspoke of them with a mixture of humour and tolerance which preventedthem from either believing or denying them. But writers of fiction hadno responsibilities and were not judged by the standards of eitherbelief or unbelief, while the general public followed its tastes andimagination, chafed under the restraints of scepticism, and chose theeasy road to satisfaction.
In the present age, which is saturated with psychic research, whateverthe motive or outcome of that movement, ghost stories have been revivedpartly because you can invoke interest under the cloak of science andpartly because of an interest in the unknown and the desire to pleaseour fancies, and fiction, which is art and not science, can escape theduty of preaching. The psychologist, however, may detect a concealedrealism in the most audacious feats of the imagination or an interest inthe supernatural when the mind struggles to conceal or to ridicule it.Hence a collection of ghost stories, whatever their nature, may havetheir value for every class of readers. Some will want to invoke age andgeneral human interest in behalf of certain prejudices, and others willwant to quote them as illustrations of superstition. But all will like agood story well told and appealing to the imagination which alwaysaffords mankind more satisfaction than facts.
Besides a collection of them may reveal disguises which science mayuncover, however deeply concealed by the respectability that will notoffend science, or by the ignorance which suspects that there is morein them than is dreamt of in our philosophy. At any rate, we may readthem without demanding that they shall conform to our sense of realityand without expecting science to restrain the imagination. In otherwords, literature and its artistic interests will excuse us for aninterest in them while science w