ghost-story

It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature__ tough bracken, all picture-postcard like.

Even if I had convict ancestry, I wouldn__ be ashamed of it. As far as I__ concerned, the real criminals back in those days weren__ twelve-year-old boys nicking a loaf of bread or a pair of socks to ward off hunger and blisters. No, it was those who exploited them; keeping the battler in the gutter while they sat around in their manors, sipping tea and admiring portraits of their toffee-nosed great grandfathers.

I am who I am and always shall be.

Tugging her purse strap up on her arm, she headed for thedoor. __ou have my cell number. I__l text you. If something goeswrong and he pulls an axe, you__l be the first person I call.__ichelle groaned. __ee, this is why I worry. The first personyou call is the police. Then you call me and tell me the authorities areon their way and you__e hiding in a closet.___eah, ancient wooden closet door versus axe? And you callme the illogical one?

It looks like a funeral parlour in here. Am I dead?

She sensed her own power to enslave him. He would come willingly enough. No filthy atheistic beliefs she held were strong enough to douse what was crackling in the brief space between them. It would satisfy her on a hundred levels, to bring him to his knees.

beneath the stars that drift; she sighed and said "Every tale of a love can only be a tale of ghosts that linger in these spaces wecan never hold,"__s the wind gave echo

This is a work of fiction, and the people in it are fictitious. The ghosts are real.

Don't starve an instinct with a lie on, Never hit or deceive a wounded lion. He heals faster than you can imagine And hurts even more when in famine.

(Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

Oh," the girl said, shaking her head. "Don't be so simple. People adore monsters. They fill their songs and stories with them. They define themselves in relation to them. You know what a monster is, young shade? Power. Power and choice. Monsters make choices. Monsters shape the world. Monsters force us to become stronger, smarter, better. They sift the weak from the strong and provide a forge for the steeling of souls. Even as we curse monsters, we admire them. Seek to become them, in some ways." Her eyes became distant. "There are far, far worse things to be than a monster.

After breakfast the host takes the young man into a corner, and explains to him that what he saw was the ghost of a lady who had been murdered in that very bed, or who had murdered somebody else there - it does not really matter which: you can be a ghost by murdering somebody else or by being murdered yourself, whichever you prefer. The murdered ghost is, perhaps, the more popular; but, on the other hand, you can frighten people better if you are the murdered one, because then you can show your wounds and do groans.("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)

Do you like a good ghost story?_-Jonah

He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible disaster, about which nobody in their senses would want to know sooner than they could possible help, and the prior knowledge of which can serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn or balancing himself on somebody's bedrail.("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)

I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.

Like the feeling of a carbonated beverage slipping down the throat, the bubbles rushing and popping as they make their descent, the air around a departed spirit fizzles, dissipating from a thick electric presence to an ephemeral blink of light and color, like the aftereffect of too many flash cameras going off at once.

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment.Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.

It seemed for a moment as if something was there, loitering between the knurled and towering cherry trees, a flash of a presence as stark as the sight of the snow against their bare branches and cracked, piceous bark. Unblinking, I watched the edge of the lake, waiting for it to reappear, but whatever it had been was gone, vanished under cover of a willow tree, lofty and dense, rearing over the lake, its branches dripping all the way to the ground. The tree__ lament had been transformed into a thing of such beauty I was tempted to go and hide within it.