I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

I let out a laugh that sounded more like the yip of a startled poodle. "Superp-powers? I wish. My powers aren't winning me a slot on the Cartoon Network anytime soon... except as a comic relief. Ghost Whisperer Junior. Or Ghost Screamer, more like it. Tune in, every week, as Chloe Saunders runs screaming from yet another ghost looking for her help."Okay, superpower might be pushing it.

You fuck - you ate my cat!

Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of "free will" can be compatible with determinism?orb. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?Of course my answer is b).

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .

To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.

As a spirit having a human experience, you can choose to not merely exist but to be fully conscious and aware of living in a limited world. When you take a conscious part in life and its multitudes of choices, you won't let life happen to you - you will make life happen for you.

After his experience with Minos, Nico realized that most spectres held only as much power as you allowed them to have. They pried into your mind, using fear or anger or longing to influence you. Nico had learned to shield himself. Sometimes he could even turn the tables and bend ghosts to his will.

The main thing about ghosts – most of them have lost their voices. In Asphodel, millions of them wander around aimlessly, trying to remember who they were. You know why they end up like that? Because in life they never took a stand one way or another. They never spoke out, so they were never heard. Your voice is your identity. If you don’t use it,’ Nico said with a shrug, ‘you’re halfway to Asphodel already.’…He hated when his own advice applied to himself.

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

Weave the circle, tightly sewn,Let nothing evil or unknownEnter within. Stay withoutOn pain of death, we cast you out.

Darkness lingered in those blue eyes, like ghosts haunted him despite only the two of them standing in this cabin.

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already.That's right--you heard me: dead again already.I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?

They said she killed herself.Everyone was saying It. What started out as a rumor, quietly whispered among small gatherings of polite people, quickly grew into something that was openly discussed in a large gatherings of impolite people. I was so sick of hearing them talk about It. They questioned me. Over and over again, trying to find out If i knew what happened. But my answers didn't change. Yet It never failed-someone else would ask, as if one day my reply would suddenly be different. I didn't know, but i should have...and I've been haunted ever since.

We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.

Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak.

In life one of Midnight’s favourite movies had been It’s a Wonderful Life, a touching story where a man called George Bailey is shown how poor the world would have been if he’d never existed, but now the young ghost of Midnight Merlot was sat imagining himself not as the kind hero of his own narrative, but, - but as the anti-George.

It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years

Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")

I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

Some ghosts or felt presences may simply be the essence of another living person projected outward while sleeping.

Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till it's about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you've got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether they're all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of 'em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who don't know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And it's only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who don't know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants' ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmaker's dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because it's an insanitary nuisance.

I'm not afraid of anything anymore. I've found out Ghosts don't hide under my bed or in my closets either. They exist in plain sight - everyday; Conjured up by 'our song' playing on the radio. By the mailman's blue eyes that are so like yours I could get utterly lost in them. They come as raindrops, kissing my skin... the way you used to. Ghosts are everywhere.

But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Have you ever come across something you couldn't explain?""Explain in what way? I could explain a ghost by saying, 'yes, that's a ghost.' I take it, that's not what you mean.

Have you ever come across something you couldn't explain?""Explain in what way? I could explain a ghost by saying, 'yes, that's a ghost.' I take it that's not what you mean.

It’s possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.

While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.

I need someone who can be invisible, who can become a ghost. Do you think you can do that?"I'm already a ghost, she thought. I died in the hold of a slaver ship."i think so.

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

Lydia displays her right hand and instantly bathed the room with a blinding light. It lasted only a moment before it drew back into her palm. “I can fix you if you’re ever broken.

Patches don’t look it, but when attached to your soul they can get pretty heavy. They go over the holes in your soul, like when you patch a sock. When you have a hole in your soul, it’s because you’re hurting from something. I don’t know if you noticed, but that girl had a lot of holes.

The shadow self is what lies beneath the makeup. It’s those ugly parts that you haven’t accepted about yourself. You hide those parts in the shadows until you’re ready.” Her face remained a haunting calm. “When you realize the scars are who you are, that there was nothing wrong with you and that you were beautiful all along - that’s when you decide to take the makeup off.

Because I am, just as you are you. We don’t always get to pick who we are, Shelly Wynn, but we can choose to celebrate it.

There’s nothing wrong with you at all. Sometimes people say or do things that are mean because there's something the matter with them. With Lydia, it seems there’s always something wrong with her.

I’m afraid they’re not coming.” Abby said fearfully. “Our parents, our teachers – everyone! They’ve disappeared. That’s it. Lights out, Shelly. We’re on our own.

It’s no big deal. It’s kind of like a tattoo. It won’t hurt, not too much, just a few stitches and it’ll be all over. It’s really interesting how it’s done. You won’t believe where your soul hides. Go on, take a guess. Where do you think it is?

Aloha Oukou. It looked like your soul was escaping so I put you in a tree.

She could spin it between her legs, skip with it, twirl it around her neck and transfer it from one arm to the other. Shelly hooped because she enjoyed it; it calmed her whenever she would have an argument or a bad day at school, and it also allowed her to think. Today, she needed to hoop more than ever.

Somehow her hula hoop had cut into the driver’s side door like the vehicle was made of cheese.

Soon, all the children were chanting it. “No school! No school!

Shelly shook her head and made sure she had plenty of space so that she wouldn’t hit anything. As many times before, she kept the hoop close to her waist and then twirled it with small, tight bursts of speed. As the hoop gathered in momentum it started to give off a hum that soon took on a light blue illumination far brighter than the streetlamps. It was so bright, that it lit up the entire backyard.

The day when the fire that we had lit in our minds reaches our hearts, we will start turning every person that we come in contact with into ashes. We become the ghosts that we always feared.

It will seem to many persons very inconsistent with their ideas of the dignity of a spirit that they should appear and act in the manner I have described, and shall describe further; and I have heard it objected that we cannot suppose God would permit the dead to return merely to frighten the living, and that it is showing Him little reverence to imagine He would suffer them to come on such trifling errands, or demean themselves in so undignified a fashion. But God permits men of all degrees of wickedness, and of every kind of absurdity, to exist, and to harass and disturb the earth, whilst they expose themselves to its obloquy or its ridicule.

Scarcely has night arrived to undeceive, unfurling her wings of crepe (wings drained even of the glimmer just now dying in the tree-tops); scarcely has the last glint still dancing on the burnished metal heights of the tall towers ceased to fade, like a still glowing coal in a spent brazier, which whitens gradually beneath the ashes, and soon is indistinguishable from the abandoned hearth, than a fearful murmur rises amongst them, their teeth chatter with despair and rage, they hasten and scatter in their dread, finding witches everywhere, and ghosts. It is night... and Hell will gape once more.

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.

I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney")

We all have that inner fear of the dark, no matter how old we get. It's an ingrained instinct to fear the velvety blackness of the night, of things you can't quite see, but know deep down in your bones is there, waiting.

With regard to ghosts, while we have never believed in them, we have always been afraid of them.

When you start dreaming- what’s there to boast?Life may treat you like a living ghostBrokenness haunts you until you perishDeath will bring you nothing to cherish

Happy Hauntings; and, pleasant dreams!

I don't believe in ghosts but they blindly believe in me

Aye, it could', Ian added. 'It's many a time when I've walked alone on the misty moors of Scotland, the fog creeping in, the waves pounding against the shore, and then the lone, eerie call of a dead chicken. Caaa-cluck. Caaa-cluck

His rapier was at his belt, glittering as he swung. He reached down, ripped the sword clear. I jumped over a slashing frond of plasm, spun round with the water bottle in my hand. I hurled it across to Lockwood. George threw his rapier to me.Watch this now. Sword and bottle, sailing through the air, twin trajectories, arching beautifully through the mass of swirling tendrils towards Lockwood and me. Lockwood held out his hand. I held out mine.Remember I said there was that moment of sweet precision when we gelled perfectly as a team?Yeah, well. This wasn't it.The rapier shot past, missing me by miles. It skidded halfway across the floor. The bottle struck Lockwood plumb in the centre of his forehead, knocking him through the window.There was a moment's pause.'Is he dead?' the skulls voice said 'Yay! Oh. No, he's hanging onto the shutters. Shame. Still, this is defiantly the funniest thing I've ever seen. You three really are incompetence on a stick

These are all ‘ghosts’. If you are afraid, the ghosts will possess you. If there is inner fear of ‘what if they hang me?’; then one should say, ‘yes, that is correct’. The Soul can never be hung; nothing [worldly] can touch the Soul. All the doings are that of the pudgal (matter; non-Self). The noose for hanging is pudgal and the one doing hanging (the hangman), is also pudgal. The Soul has never been hung. This [fact] does not fit one’s vision and that is why he has fear. But once his vision becomes like the Gnani’s [the enlightened one], then it’s over! For that, one has to stay in touch with the Gnani [the enlightened one].

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

All the pains in this world are assumed pains. It is ‘wrong belief’! People have the illusion of pain. This illusion is being experienced. What was seen with the eyes is not being experienced. To have illusory experience means to spend the entire night ‘dying’ in the fear of ghosts. That is what it is.

From personal experience, I know for sure that the number one thing that saddens the dead more than our grief — is not being conscious of their existence around us. They do want you to talk to them as if they were still in a physical body. They do want you to play their favorite music, keep their pictures out, and continue living as if they never went away. However, time and "corruption" have blurred the lines between the living and the dead, between man and Nature, and between the physical and the etheric. There was a time when man could communicate with animals, plants, the ether, and the dead. To do so requires one to access higher levels of consciousness, and this knowledge has been hidden from us. Why? Because then the plants would tell us how to cure ourselves. The animals would show us their feelings, and the dead would tell us that good acts do matter. In all, we would come to know that we are all one. And most importantly, we would be alerted of threats and opportunities, good and evil, truth vs. fiction. We would have eyes working for humanity from every angle, and this threatens "the corrupt". Secret societies exist to hide these truths, and to make sure lies are preserved from generation to generation.

[Indians] don't think about ghosts as those stereotypical spook in white sheets that scare the knickers off everybody. We believe that we coexist with many, many spirits. They're all around us - because the soul never dies. The body withers away, but the essence of the person remains, watching over us.

Like, okay. Everyone in history thought they were the ones who finally knew everything. In their naissance, right, they were positive they knew exactly how the universe worked. Til the next set of guys came along and proved they were missing like a hundred important things. and then that set of guys were sure they had it all down, til another set came along and showed them parts they were missing." He glances at Julia, checking if she's laughing at him, which she isn't, and if she's listening, which she is, completely. "So." he says, "it's pretty unlikely, mathematically, that we are living in the one single era that has everything figured out. Which means there's a decent possibility that the reason we can't explain how ghosts and stuff could exist is because we haven't figured it out yet, not because they don't. And it is pretty arrogant of us to think it definitely has to be the other way around.

America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required period exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.

The ghost stories were fascinating, made even more so by the personal connection between the living and the long-departed. The ghosts seemed content to be there. The truly amazing part of the story, however, was how happy the owner and staff of the inn were with their spirits. It made me want to stay there… and perhaps never leave.

Descending south into St. Augustine’s Historic District along A1A, visitors are immediately confronted by an edifice which serves as a stark reminder that the city was originally founded as a military outpost, deep in hostile territory. Jutting up like a molar from the defensive teeth of the Ancient City is the forbidding fortress of Castillo de San Marcos, a coquina fortification which has served many roles it its nearly three hundred fifty year history.

We wander in our thousands over theface of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond theseas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to methat for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--those whom weobey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the mostfree, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,--even those for whomhome holds no dear face, no familiar voice,--even they have to meet thespirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in itsvalleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees--amute friend, judge, and inspirer.

We wander in our thousands over theface of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond theseas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to methat for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.

The actual things behind the stories and behind the lyrics had a lot to do with…I hate saying depression, but there was a really rough patch in my head and really difficult time and I didn’t know why…A lot of the ghosts that appeared in the record is a metaphor for that depression at that time in my head and all the things going on in it. It’s mainly about that, and there’s little things here and there about certain people.

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

Mrs Hargreaves liked her job and she liked the Hoopers. As far as she was concerned there was far too much twaddle being talked about Glade Hall, by people with too much time on their hands.“Over fertile imaginations.” She’d told the new head gardener.Some of the locals had worked for the hotel and told stories of seeing shadows around the grounds, when the light was just right. As if shadows could hurt anyone ! It was all twaddle and nonsense.

Every time I had things straight in my head abouthim, I saw him smile or crook an eyebrow, and all my sensible reasons on why I couldn’t have feelings for him seemed redundant.

Maybe because I knew Haze and Kate so well by then the passage leapt out at me, clear and sharp as di

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?” I quirked an eyebrow back at him.“Well, usually it’s best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes againlater.” He paused, smirking. “Also, ifI was going to paddle barefoot “I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I’d wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You’re clearly a Spartan lass.

Hey now, wait a second. When will I see you again? You can’t leave a poor lad dangling like that!”His look of bewilderment made me bite my lip to keep from laughing.“Why would you w-want to?” The words were out before I could stop them. A rare occurrence for me. And now I seemed pathetically needy. Very attractive.“Because I love a pair of pretty green eyes.” He grinned.

This is m-me.” I indicated the lonely track.“Really? What’s up there?” He peered over my shoulder in genuine curiosity. “Is there a house up there? You’re not a sylph or something that really does live wild, are you?

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?” I quirked an eyebrow back at him.

“Well, usually it’s best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes again later.” He paused, smirking. “Also, if
I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I’d wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You’re clearly a Spartan lass.

How did you get so scratched up then, Emlynn?” He looked at me uncertainly again.I felt wildly like laughing. Too many swooping highs and plummeting lows. What a weird fewdays. Weird being a massive understatement.“Cr-Crawling through gorse bushes.” I took a perverse delight in answering his questions in a way that told him nothing at all. I’d never paid much attention to boys before. Maybe Grace was onto something after all.“Crawling through gorse,” he repeated. “Part of your action-girl antics, no doubt?”“N-no doubt.” I smirked again.

Tangled onto the shuttle, we were being woven back and forth to create the same tapestry of despair and heartbreak and loss. It was so muchbigger than I could see before, and all I had done was stand at the centre of the web and feed it my anger and frustration and jealousy.

Dad looked more sheepish than I had ever seen him look in his life. It made him appear younger.“A scent. Your mother’s shampoo.

My inner bitch could handle this peon without even breaking a sweat.

We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities. From across an immeasurable divide, we brought the supernatural into all that is manifest. Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts. Their graves are marked in our minds, and they will never be disinterred from the cemeteries of our remembrance. Our heartbeats are numbered, our steps counted. Even as we survive and reproduce, we know ourselves to be dying in a dark corner of infinity. Wherever we go, we know not what expects our arrival but only that it is there.

Time can be strange sometimes. It can leave imprints in particular places, leaving ghosts of memories trapped.

He used to call vampires "the breathing ghosts"- for, as he put it, we existed in a kind of limbo-land between the living and the dead. We breathed, but we were not alive. We flitted through the air, but we still left foot prints on the ground. We were, and are, neither one nor the other, but something else entirely.

It waited for her. Standing resolute in the moonlight, it had stood for a hundred years. Yet it waited just for her. Shadows passed across the moon, a cool breeze ruffled the leaves around it. Yet still it waited for her. Ancient tombs glowed in shimmery moonlight, row upon row of cold silent witnesses.

Tyler shrugs. "It's a big world, Jo. Who am I to say what is and isn't possible?

We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.

He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.

Ghosts!” gasped Alice. “Real, live ghosts?”“No! Not ‘real, live ghosts!’ Spooky, dead ghosts!

Felix wasn't sure of his limits, if he had limits. After he'd been dead a while, he began to suspect he could swim to the bottom of the oceans. Beyond that. He suspected that he could swim so far down that he'd eventually go through the center of the earth and come out the other side. He could swim into the clouds, into the stars. Maybe there were ghosts on the other planets. Maybe there were ghosts laughing and splashing each other with the heat of the sun. He wasn't brave enough to find out.

Never go down to the darkest room. Stay far away from the rotting coffin. If you want to live through the night, let the devil sleep.

The one plus side to demonic infestation is that children cannot be harmed by a demon. The sanctified aura of a child somehow repels the demon and they can only oppress them if the parent makes a contract allowing them to do so. Because they can be very clever in tricking people into agreeing to additional contracts, it is important to never converse with a demon. Either call in a priest or move out as soon as possible.

Empires come and go. Chanterelles are timeless

Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

The old are often forgotten. Life moves on without a care for those who wish to remain in the past. We tend to talk too much because it’s rare that we’re listened to.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. ”—Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung in a 1919 address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.

For a more than miffed Midnight, fate was for emperors, fools and soppy lovers: - fate was the self-important egotism of those doing well, the sheer unbearable arrogance of the living and loved.

How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?

And the kids?""Quincy, nothing. All she wants to do is look for Saturn's rings and bring home every creature from the pound. Nelson, though, he's..." She looked at Nicholas. "He's like you. Gifted, but ignorant."Nicholas bristled, "I'm not ignorant.""You are about magic.""That's because I don't believe in magic.""Nicholas," She stopped, hands on hips, waiting until he turned around. "You're haunted. You see the dead. How can you not believe in magic?

It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you.

you want to knowwhether i believe in ghostsof course i do not believe in themif you had knownas many of them as i haveyou would notbelieve in them either

True love is like ghosts which many believe in, but few have seen.

MURRY: I believe in a lot of things. Santa Claus, magic, vampires, and even ghosts but I don't believe in luck. Good or bad.

Some people will tell you werewolves can only shapechange under a full moon, but people also say there's no such things as ghosts.

Decades after little Colleen’s death, my sister Kathy still loves her daughter dearly. Colleen was born with cerebral palsy. She died in Kath’s arms in a rocking chair at the age of six. They were listening to a music box that looked very much like a smiling pink bunny.The opening quote in this book, “I will love you forever, but I’ll only miss you for the rest of my life,” is from Kath’s nightly prayers to her child.Colleen couldn’t really talk or walk very well, but loved untying my mother’s tennis shoes and then laughing. When Mom died decades later we sent her off in tennis shoes so Colleen would have something to untie in Heaven.In the meantime, Dad had probably been taking really good care of her up there. He must have been aching to hug her for all of her six years on earth.Mom’s spirit comes back to play with great grandchildren she’d never met or had a chance to love while she was still – I almost said “among the living.” In my family, though, the dead don’t always stay that way. You can be among the living without technically being alive. Mom comes back to play, but Dad shows up only in emergencies. They are both watching over their loved ones.“The Mourning After” is dedicated to all those we have had the joy of loving before they’ve slipped away to the other side.It then celebrates the joy of re-unions.

Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.

He who has lived and thought can't helpdespising people in his soul;him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days;for him there are no more enchantments;him does the snake of memories, him does repentance bite.

She walked with darkness dripping off her shoulders, I've seen ghosts brighter than her soul.

She smells like spring and flowers and rain, even though it’s winter. Sometimes, he thinks he loves her so much that his mind is unable to distinguish between love and obsession. Which is worse?

The butterflies swirl again in Sera’s stomach. Perhaps they have brought along fireflies too, to light up her soul.

How would Elijah ever understand a life that is dark more than light? Or a shadow of someone who follows her around, and when she least expects it, taps her on the back and asks, where are you going, Seraphina?

He reflects on all the times he thought she wasn’t sure of her feelings for him, when perhaps she might’ve been taking a leisurely stroll across Elijah’s heart, leaving footprints behind that he’d never seen.

Mortals were such fickle creatures. They called into the dark, demanded answers and attention from forces they could not comprehend, and yet when they had that attention and those answers, they complained about them.

He locked the doors and windows and sat in the middle of a room afraid of going out there in the storm and rain, in the darkest night he had ever seen. All of a sudden there were knocks everywhere and the walls turned into the glass so that he could helplessly witness his fears approach him like the ghosts. He saw them crawling on the wall and climbing the roof staring into his eyes, in no time the walls disappeared and they stood around him laughing and consuming him one by one at a time. all he saw, in the end, was the ugly and scary faces of himself.

Believe that you are someone worth saving.

There is no place so dark that light cannot lead the way.

The difference in our potential as angels or demons is the effect of time on the decisions we make.

Healing cannot occur by refusing to listen to the truth, unsettling as it may be.

Darkness can inspire light, and light can inspire darkness, its just a difference of distant of these two contrasting forces.

I turned to him and he reached for my hand. It would have been easier to walk away. But the wind still blew around us and the house still stood.

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.

Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after- lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face,but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wingsagainst the pane in the boarded-up house.

Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.

When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son

Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.

This had always been the worst time when the quiet emptiness could leave him gasping for breath. She was there, his wife, a peripheral shadow moving across a doorway, or in the reflection of a window, and he had to stop looking for her. And the whiskey helped – helped him walk past her when the fire was doused. But occasionally she followed him up the stairs and that’s why he began to take the bottle with him, because she stood in the corner of their bedroom and watched him undress, and when he was on the verge of sleep, she leant over him and asked him things like, Remember when we first met?

He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she’d fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

We are the voices in the shadows,Between the light and shade,Betwixt life and restful death,In the dark periphery of the unseen.We’re here, At the edges. We are the villainous punished,The innocent murdered or abandoned,Our lives ended by foul means, or unspeakable deeds.We are your lovers long gone; your siblings forsaken.Can you hear us?At the edgesFrom the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.

I have emotions
that are like newspapers that
read themselves.I go for days at a time
trapped in the want ads.I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:18 rooms
$37,000
I'm yours
ghosts and all.

Do you still believe that I am only a dream?"-Alastor

Did you look up 'incubus'?" Ren asked, in her ear. She heard a smile in his voice."Yes. Let's see, 'a lascivious spirit supposed to have sexual intercourse with women in their sleep,' if I remember right.""There. And you thought it wasn't possible. It's common enough they actually had to make up a word for it.""Well, if you've been doing that, then you must have been discreet, because I sure haven't noticed.""It's not my preferred method," he said. "I always wake them up first.

We’re going down to the Margarita Grill to smell the lobster, then we’re going to watch the sunrise, and in between we’ll probably have hot, unsafe animal sex.

Xypher flashed himself into Simone's bedroom, expecting to find her there.It was empty.Closing his eyes, he sensed for presences in the condo. There no Simone, but Jesse and Gloria in Jesse's room.Without thinking, he flashed in there to find the two ghosts naked on the bed. "Oh g-ds, I'm blind." He spun around to give them his back."Don't you knock?" Jesse said.

Modernity kills ghostly romance("The Undying Thing")

Whose are all these ghosts?” she said, smiling at a flustered-looking Geraldine. “Oh,” said Geraldine, “I think they might be mine...?

...she knew, with all her heart that running away from the country’s top relationship coach was as good as saying, 'there’s no hope for me, ever'!

It’s not the dead people you got to worry about… It’s the living that are scary.

Unless the she-wolf agrees, there’s always a chance of rejection.

Zorro pulled her into his arms and crushed her against his body, kissing her soundly on the mouth. “My, what a big sword you have, sir,” she said, sweeping her hand over his sheathed sword. “I’m fully armed,” he said, “with that and more.

Brett will need some clothes if someone can drop some by.” “All we need is a bear rug,” Meghan said.

She was thinking she needed to post a letter in the Lonely Hearts column in the Silver Town Gazette: She-wolf seeking male wolf who believes in ghosts. No others need apply.

I realized my sorrow, the regret of a restless, doomed spirit, rang in my voice. For the first time I wondered if my fate was to helplessly watch violence until I became as mad as the men who committed the murders.

You sure you don't want me to come over? We could make a snowman in the garden, or one in front of the hotel for the guests' arrival tomorrow. Or we could build snow forts and have a snowball fight. Surefire way to wear you out and make you sleepy. Then we could have cocoa with marshmallows on top. And I've been dying to have a piece of that seven-layer chocolate cake. I can't quit thinking about it.

She ran her hand over his cock and said, "This is the only thing I ever want to come between us." His grin couldn't have stretched any further.

He was smiling that smile I truly loved.

No one will say it to my face, but it’s so obvious they think I actually murdered Gavin. As if I would actually want to hurt the guy I was in love with. Still, I see it in their eyes, the way they avoid crossing my path as if I’ll snap and go after them next. I hear it in their accusatory whispers that fill the hallways as I pass by. The signs that I’m generally considered guilty are everywhere.

It's a damn shame that when I finally fall in love that it had to be after I died." He dropped his head and shut his eyes.Oh, mylanta. Did he just say what I think he did?He looked back up at me, taking my breath. "What are we gonna do?"I knew what I was gonna do—hyperventilate.

How could I let this happen? How could I let it get this far? I never thought Malyn would have the same feelin's for me as I did for her. I'm dead, for goodness sakes. It's not like we can live happily ever after. I can't live at all.

I wanted to hug him, tell him it was gonna be alright. Tell him I'm not as fragile as I look. But I can't hug him. I can't even hold his hand. I can't tell him it's gonna be alright, because it’s not; not as long as he's dead and I'm alive.

I let ya in—into my life...my death...my heart." He reached up like he was going to touch my face. "And now I don't know how to get ya out.

The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.

Fear no more as long as her memory surrounds you like a ghost…cry no more as long as she weeps for you like a willow.

I didn't sleep well last night because one of my ghosts came back, haunting with his presence, and when I woke up, the others weren't here, haunting with their memory.

The flame of the inn is dim tonight,Too many vacant chairs.The sun has lost too much of its light,Too many songs have taken flight,Too many ghosts on the stairs.Charon, here's to you as man against man,I wish I could pick 'em the way you can!

In the ghost house in the last days of the accident season, we were never going to die.

the flicker of a memoryis all we can cling tofor our cherished ghostsFrom "Cat Paws on a Windscreen

Whether I'm a good wife doesn't have anything to do with what he was like.

Magic is magic. It isn’t good or bad in and of itself. It’s the intent that matters. Ideally, you treat magic as a gift and you use it to influence natural forces to help and to heal. It’s a positive act.

Never invite any kind of spirit to enter either your home or your person. This is an extremely important point to remember. To do so always risks to unwittingly invite evil spirits in, instead. Good spirits never need to be invited in.

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lostmemories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreamsplay when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomachin a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in thedarkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?

History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

She leaves my side and heads deeper intothe apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what youshould name it.

How do you weigh a soul?Is it heavy with love or hate?Does it deny the things it's done?Does it even remember its own name?Does it miss those it has loved?Does it long for the life it's lost?How do you weigh a soul?After it has paid the highest cost,Does it lose the will to live?Without a physical shellDoes it sense without handsThat can touch and truly feelDoes it need sustenance to last?A cold drink or warm mealHow do you weigh a soul?Are souls even real?

At first I wasn’t all that tempted by him, but then he killed the spider. Which was a huge point in his favor.” “Absolutely. I love men who kill bugs.” “And then when I was freaking out and couldn’t breathe, he was so…gentle.” Zoe sighed and colored, remembering. “He was holding me, and talking to me in that voice…you know, sort of low and rough around the edges…” “All the Nolans sound like that,” Justine said reflectively. “Like they’ve got a mild case of bronchitis. Totally hot.

The Goddess spoke to all the dead. She was beloved for it. It seemed she passed on that gift to you. Oh, it taxed her immensely, but she tried to set as many to rest as she could. Sometimes it only takes one word of kindness, you know, to set a soul at ease.

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,One need not be a house;The brain has corridors surpassingMaterial place.Far safer, of a midnight meetingExternal ghost,Than an interior confrontingThat whiter host.Far safer through an Abbey gallop,The stones achase,Than, moonless, one's own self encounterIn lonesome place.Ourself, behind ourself concealed,Should startle most; Assassin, hid in our apartment,Be horror's least.The prudent carries a revolver,He bolts the door,O'erlooking a superior spectreMore near.

When he had eaten, Mr. Lecky lay down on his cot, though he did not expect to sleep. The four lanterns continued to shed their thin floods of light. Against the dark, this illumination set the varied, ill-matched shapes of his assembled defenses. Studying the odd wall, in spirit unquiet, Mr. Lecky was reminded of his childhood - not in any detail of actual reminiscence, but more deeply, less coherently. He seemed to recall himself, unreally small and young, in concealment under a table. A table had been fort enough, for his enemies were imaginary. He never imagined them winning.Even at that early period, furniture would only be useful against foes which he had invented to play with. Tables could not have protected him from bears or wolves. Perhaps he had been taught, by his amused elders, a conventional fear of bears. Unassisted, he had picked up a private fear of wolves. Bears were no more than vague monsters coming at night, never distinct or well defined. But of wolves his unruly imagination could produce whole lifelike packs such as those which he had somehow been led to believe pursued any sleigh venturing out, three frantic horses abreast, in perpetually snow-sunk Russia.At a brief later stage he had entertained, fruit of the new-found ability to read, some concern about ghosts. His spectres were, however, practically people, if hideous, gaunt and pale ones. It was doubtful if he ever actually believed in them, in the sense of fearing that he might meet one. His eyesight had always been good, so it played him none of the terrifying tricks necessary to confirm a belief in the supernatural. Indeed, he could not be long in discovering that people beyond a suspicion of unbalance, or not obviously coveting the moment's arrest of attention gained them by their statements, never had experience with or knowledge of the restless dead. Slowly accepting this as evidence that no such things existed, Mr. Lecky found terrors deeper, and to him more plausible, to fill that unoccupied place - the simple sense of himself alone, and, not unassociated with it, the conception of a homicidal maniac quietly pursuing him.

We are all ghosts," Morris Klapper said at last. "We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done.

But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.

I think in some ways it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows.Keep marching, boys and girls. Keep marching.

Are you in pain?' I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

knowing deep inside some ghosts are too cruel to question

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that - the ghosts you chase you never catch.

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.

Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal.

Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there

Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.

This is what the Problem means,” he went on. “This is the effect it has. Lives lost, loved ones taken before their time. And then we hide our dead behind iron walls and leave them to the thorns and ivy. We lose them twice over, Lucy. Death’s not the worst of it. We turn our faces away.

Lockwood didn’t speak until everything was quiet again. “I know you’re worrying about me, Luce,” he said. “But you really mustn’t. These things happen when you’re an agent. You’ve been snared by ghosts in the past, haven’t you? There was the one that made the bloody footprints, and the thing in the tunnels below the Aickmere Brothers store. But it’s fine, because I helped you then, and you’ve helped me now. We’re there to help each other. If we do that, we’ll get through.” Which was a lovely thing to say, and it made me feel a little warmer. I just had to hope it was true.

But ghosts aren't white and bright. Ghosts are shadows of someone or something gone wrong.

A high-pitched sound, like steam escaping from a kettle whistles through the dark room. But nobody’s making tea. We both turn toward the source of the eerie noise.A weak stream of unearthly light seeps through the window near the corner of the room and pours onto the floor. Its consistency seems to lie somewhere between a liquid and a solid, like mercury, only blue. Out of the gleaming, wobbly puddle, a phosphorescent vapor rises up. The ghost we thought was Daniel materializes and looms over us for two seconds before he lunges and wraps his hands around Wyatt’s neck.

When I look up from my book, the wind has gained its full voice. This storm is the mad child of Father Time and Mother Nature. Wailing away in no predictable rhythm, their monstrous offspring’s throwing a hackle-raising temper tantrum. Underscoring the hideous howl, I detect another, quieter sound, a pitiable, weak whimper which has been all but completely drowned out by the epic volume of the screaming wind. With slowly dawning terror, I realize this cowardly voice is my own; escaping through the narrow opening of my barely parted lips. Where’s my dad? Why is he taking so long?The weather ignores my whining questions and continues to whip itself into a raging convulsion. The windows rattle and the wind screams. But the sounds are no longer random.In the midst of the chaos, the howling begins to form an elongated word. Horrified, I recognize the stretched out syllables of my own name.“Aaaaannaaaaabelle.

Hello?” I ask. No one is there. Not a word. Not a whisper. Not a single sound resonating from the other side of the receiver. “Hello? Anyone there?” I ask again. Repeating myself. I am beginning to feel rather anxious now. Scared, would be a better word to use. Shivers have begun to creep up my spinal cord, and I can feel the urgency of goose pimples begin to line up on by frightened pale skin.

He was trying to tell me something."Derek snorted. "Aren’t they all? Must be a rule in the ghost handbook—if in danger of evaporating, make sure you’re in the middle of a dire pronouncement.

I can also speak to small woodland creatures,” he grins at me.

What are you going to fill it with?" she asks. "Holy water or something?" "Probably Dasani," Thomas replies.

Don’t tell Mom, but I think my little emergency last night was a sign. And I was thinking of you when it happened. So, I’m worried that this is a prediction about you. Do you have something big planned? Something dangerous that you’re going to do?” Mike looked away. He didn’t want to lie to her but he also couldn’t tell her his plan. “Well, whatever it is, don’t do it, okay? You’re going to get the feeling soon too. I know it,” she yawned, “It feels like it’s a long way off, but I’ve never had this strong a reaction before. And now that I’m stuck in bed, I can’t help you…or stop you. So please, whatever you’re doing, let it go, okay? Especially if it’s about the shop. Just let me handle it.” “I’ll be careful,” he said. “Huh?” she yawned again. He didn’t answer. Her eyelids grew heavy until they closed all the way. Mike lifted the sheet that was turned down from the bed and draped it over her. Then, he left the room, closing the door behind him. - Saving Hascal's Horrors

The lanterns filled the sky, pulsing with the harmonious light of fireflies, and a great host of ghosts departed from the earth to join them. The higher they rose into the zenith of the heavens, the further night was chased back, until a great and radiant being resumed its throne in the sky.

The banana flavour of his accidental conception, and the banana theme of his accidental death, now all seemed to conspire against him and rather suggest the universe, Mr Fate or whoever did have some sort of master plan after all. Despite all his earlier conjecturing, maybe the universe, Mr Fate or whoever was laughing its fat and meddling head at him. The outlandish evidence did seem to speak for itself, truly suggesting a mocking narrative devised by some mischievous author because quite simply a banana condom had brought Midnight into the world and a banana skin had seen him out. Putting those two seeming truths together, Midnight was once again forced to ask such confused and searching questions like:What is this place, where am I heading? And what’s the deal with all the ruddy bananas?

Although terrifying, the evil ghost will probably pose no real danger to you or your family. On the other hand, if you have a demonic infestation, your entire household is in very real danger. A demonic entity will not usually confront you or induce you to flee the home. Because, unlike the evil ghost, the demon does not actually want you to leave. On the contrary, it wants you to stick around so it can destroy your life and sully your soul from the inside.

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost")

It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost")

He wasn’t sure why he felt so compelled to follow the singing, or why he needed to bring the foot with him, but he knew the two phenomena were connected. And in the midst of the mystery lay his father. His father’s sanity. Nicholas was sure of this.

Yet, despite all, it is a difficult thing to admit the existence of ghosts in a coldly factual world. One's very instincts rebel at the admission of such maddening possibility. For, once the initial step is made into the supernatural, there is no turning back, no knowing where the strange road leads except that it is quite unknown and quite terrible. ("Slaughter House")

But if you wish, you can imagine that the Shadow does wait for your return and that it does remember everything that has gone before and that it doesn’t let you accept yourself as perfect until you let it. There is truth in that. That is why a child usually cries as soon as it’s born. With its first breath, the Shadow returns.

The dead pull the living down.

Monsters, ghost and everything spiritual and non-spiritual exists. Because we create it, the way to stop it..., is just to stop thinking about it. - (This is how I solve the problem)

I knew there were no ghosts in there, but on the other hand, what if there were?

This book's like black holes. It really engulfes you whole.

There's a queer streak in human natures. Men come back to places for secret reasons, for feelings they cannot resist.'More than men come back,” I said.

Never forget that time is the most valuable thing we can spend, so don't throw it away!

Humankind is but the pieces in a game, plastic soldiers waging war between boy gods.

What your mind sees when you close your eyes marks the entrance to an endless universe: your imagination.

Here, at the edges,Whispering to you,And we’re not alone; not aloneHere, in the dark.We are behind the door, in the corners,In the room where you’ve just extinguished the light.We flicker in the shadow you cast on the wall.We are the prickle on the back of your neck.Curled, in words unspoken,We are the shiver on your uneasy flesh,The creep of the unknown on your skin.Can you feel us?Here, at the edges.From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

As she walked to the stairway, he pulled her back with a light tug on her shoulder. "They're responding to you now." Turning to face him, she said, "Responding to me? What did I say?" "The hallway was full of them. When you said we were going downstairs to eat, they started filing down the stairs." "They all took the stairs?" Eddie nodded, his shining, gifted eyes watching the ghostly procession. He said, "They don't want to be far from you, Jess. And I'm not entire sure it's well intentioned." "Come to use," the voices whispered.

Buried and burned. Never find them. Never. Buried and buried.

It's this place. Whatever darkness came to the island, it's here to stay. Stick around long enough and it gets inside your skin, into your cells, like an infection.

Jessica's hand flew to her mouth. If she had any doubt, the next entry settled it. She read on, cool beads of sweat trickling down the back of her neck, hardly daring to breathe as the black heart of Ormsby Island came closer and closer into focus.

The stinging slap against her cheek whipped her head sideways. Her hand reflexively went to her burning face. "I told you no," Tobe said, barely above a whisper. Daphne had no words. He'd never so much as hinted at touching her in anger before. She now understood what stunned speechless meant.

I have a new nickname for Dottie. She's now the Crazy Whisperer.

It was one thing to talk about ghosts, quite another to have them messing around with things in the physical world.

There's so many kids," he said low enough so only Jessica could hear. "We're going to walk right into them in two more steps." If it gave Jessica pause, he didn't sense it. Instead she seemed to pull him faster. A frigid hand closed around his heart, freezing the ebb and flow of his blood. Eddie gasped, overcome with the chill of a thousand deep, dark graves.

This was a part he didn't like. It made him feel like a jailer, or a kidnapper. "Another sin, another string of Hail Marys," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. So much was riding on this. It could all blow up in their faces. If he was still a betting man, that's where he'd lay his money. Too many moving parts that weren't in line with one another. Praying wasn't an option. God didn't have time for deceivers.

She fished a gum wrapper and pen from her bag and wrote down her number. "I'd like to stay friends with you and Jason. That's my cell number. You can call me any time you want, except at two-thirty-six in the morning." Alice cocked her head. "How come I can't call you at two-thirty-six/" "I need that minute to sleep," Jessica said, smiling.

Which grave are we in?" she said. "The oldest." She felt Eddie's puzzlement. "That can't be possible. He looks like he was just buried." "There must be something at work in the chemistry of the island that's preserving his body. It's like the incorruptibles, bodies that weren't preserved in any special way that don't decay. Catholic saints like Bernadette and Padre Pio are said not to have decomposed even though they died a long, long time ago. Environmental factors can cause a kind of mummification." Jessica said, or thought, "This is bizarre. I'm getting a lesson on mummification while in the coffin of a dead man.

You told us this place was haunted. How haunted is it?"Paul cast a quick glance at the house. "I'm not sure. When they found the bodies twenty years ago, the place became off-limits. That was horror enough. There were whispers of strange stuff going on before then, but no one is alive who could verify a thing. Somehow, an urban legend grew about the whole island. "Don't go near haunted Ormsby Island. They say a reporter went out alone one night just after the mass murder had been discovered and never came back. Since anyone who had committed the murders was either dead or gone at that point, it had to be the island itself that offed the reporter. Mitch, Ormsby Island isn't even on most maps of Charleston Harbor. Locals will turn away the moment you even say its name.

Yeah, I get it. I'll be cool as a well digger's ass." He jumped when the front door slammed shut, the harsh bang echoing around the trees. Mitch shook his head. "That well digger must be working in a hot spring.

Before they knew it, Ormsby Island would become a paranormal attraction like Waverly Hills or Houghton Mansion or the Whaley House. The place would be crawling with people anxious to catch a ghost on camera or audio.

Everything is worse...if you think something is looking at you.

What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night

The dead have highways." Clive Barker

After torturing our adrenaline by watching a horror movie for a couple of hours the places we are most afraid of are the doors and windows of the room even though they are the only ways for us to escape in case of occurrence such an event.

Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.

The ghosts that exert the most power in people’s lives-at least, the people I know–tend to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.

A figure held his daughter in the rocker. In the dim light he couldn’t make out the features, but the sight of anyone he didn’t know sitting in Wendy’s rocker with their daughter was enough to scare the shit out of him. Judging by the shuddering movements of his daughter’s body it had frightened her too, had caused her to mewl. He wanted to charge forward and reclaim his daughter, but he didn’t know what would happen if he acted so quickly. What would he do if it hurt her? What would he do if it killed her? “What-what do you want? I’ll do anything just don’t take my daughter. She’s…all I have left.”The figure stopped rocking and slowly eased its way to its feet. There’s not much light in the room but as it moved closer to the bed and it settled the baby in her crib, he saw just enough of her face in the moonlight.“Wendy?” His voice is as full of horror as it is with awe. He can’t help but be horrified at the sight of her now, the way that death has changed her, making her a terrible figure indeed. Her eyes are strange; some depth, some dark and terrible nothing has swallowed up all of her light, and in this first moment he swears he can feel the awful cold of that operating room coming off of her flesh. She is so small and so hard to look at, as if his mind can’t quite focus on her form. Through the bars of the crib he can see her anger and hear the terrible, alien sound of her hiss. “What do you want?”She doesn’t answer him, staring cold and blank through those stark white bars, and then she was scrambling toward him across the floor, making him press flat against the wall to get away from her skittering shape.

Billy sipped the last of his coffee from the mug and shut down his laptop. 1,000 words wasn’t great but it also wasn’t as bad as no words at all. It hadn’t exactly been a great couple of years and the royalties from his first few books were only going to hold out so much longer. Even if he didn’t have anything else to worry about there was always Sara to consider. Sara with her big blue eyes so like her mother’s. He sat for a moment longer thinking about his daughter and all they’d been through since Wendy had passed. Then he picked up his mug with a long sigh and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it in the sink. When he came back into his little living room and the quiet of 1 AM he wasn’t surprised to find her there over to the side of the bookshelf hovering close to the floor just beyond the couch. Wendy. Her eyes were cold and intense in death, angry and spiteful in a way he’d never seen them when she was alive. What once had been beautiful was now a horror and a threat, one that he’d known far too well in the years since she’d died. He and Sara both. He stood where he was looking at her as she glared up at him. Part of her smaller vantage point was caused by kneeling next to the shelf but he knew from the many times she’d walked or run through a room that death had also reduced her, made her no higher than 4 or 4 and half feet when she’d been 6 in life. She was like a child trapped there on the cusp between youth and coming adulthood. Crushed and broken down into a husk, an entity with no more love for them than a snake. Familiar tears stung his eyes but he blinked them away letting his anger and frustration rise in place of his grief.“Fuck you! What right do you have to be here? Why won’t you let Sara and I be? We loved you! We still love you!”She doesn’t respond, she never does. It’s as if she used up all of her words before she died and now all that’s left is the pain and the anger of her death. The empty lack of true life in her eyes leaves him cold. He doesn’t say anything else to her. It’s all a waste and he knows it. She frightens him as much as she makes him angry. Spite lives in every corner of her body and he’s reached his limit on how long he can see this perversion, this nightmare of what once meant so much to him.He walks past the bookshelf and through the doorway there. He and Sara’s rooms are up above. With an effort he resists the urge to look back down the hall to see if she’s followed. He refuses to treat his wife like a boogeyman no matter how much she has come to fit that mold. He can feel her eyes burning into him from somewhere back at the edge of the living room. The sensation leaves a cold trail of fear up his back as he walks the last four feet to the stairs and then up. He can hear her feet rush across the floor behind him and the rustle of fabric as she darts up the stairs after him. His pulse and his feet speed up as she grows closer but he’s never as fast as she is. Soon she slips up the steps under his foot shoving him aside as she crawls on her hands and feet through his legs and up the last few stairs above. As she passes through his legs, her presence never more clear than when it’s shoving right against him, he smells the clean and medicinal smells of the operating room and the cloying stench of blood. For a moment he’s back in that room with her, listening to her grunt and keen as she works so hard at pushing Sara into the world and then he’s back looking up at her as she slowly considers the landing and where to go from there. His voice is a whisper, one that pleads. “Wendy?

These were the things we would never notice were missing.

The diamonds glinted under the glare of the chandelier and they looked like a thousand spider eyes

In the dark behind the glare of the television, like a mannequin behind it, I could see a silhouette and it wasn’t moving. It was maybe six foot high with its shoulders hunched and I blinked to make sure it was real. The TV fuzzed grey and white and black and I had a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow away. “Rory” I whispered. Clawing out gently beneath the duvet cover, reaching for his hand. But I couldn’t find it. And he didn’t answer.

The scratching came from the attic. At night, when Rory turned out the light I would lie awake and wait for it to skit, skit, skit lightly across the floorboards above our heads and down behind the water pipes.

Allow the power to flow through you. Don’t try to capture it. You wish only to borrow it.

The wolf turned to Rachel. She was afraid to run, afraid fleeing would make it chase her. Somewhere in the stored files of her mind, she remembered one should not look directly at a menacing dog, but she couldn’t take her eyes from it.

There was nothing physical she could do to stop Mario from carrying out whatever he wished. She shivered at the thought of what that sleazy, other world leftover might do should she launch an attack on him.

The tales of pure terror, of course, are completely naturalistic in their content, and must stand or fall by their merit alone. But what about the supernatural stories? Can we, the children of a scientific age, give any credence to these medleys of devils, ghosts, and other psychical invasions? There is only one answer: we can and do. We are dealing with stories, not with scientific dissertations. And if, as stories, they have the ring of truth, we'll believe them, as stories, implicitly.("Introduction")

WINTER'S GHOST:Autumn moonincautious in the dark riverWinter’s ghost walkswith a covered faceand silver bones wait in all animalsto be bone cloth upon her shoulderwait for her happiness in that they are silver

Life writes the poetry, but it will always call for witnesses and scribes alike to tattoo its echoes upon the ghosts of trees.

There are so many different kinds of ghosts.

Ghosts are just our minds telling us that subconsciously we feel guilty about something we should have done, would have done, but never took the time!

Don't matter if you believe in them or not. If they're there, they're there,' Mrs. Phipps said.

I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't.

Doesn´t matter who you are or what you believe. Everybody has a ghost story

A place for the newly weds and nearly deads I'm counting the stones I hope you know I love you.Got a lot of friends 6 feet under us.Counting down the days till we join the party.Thoughts of your nightmare projected through mine...Breathing in these lies is no surpriseThese evil things are all we knowLets take these lives where we want to go.The future is our prize, when the stars align.Ghouls and ghosts will haunt my soul but they will never take me.Before I go, I want to show that we can make a difference. We've got some dumb perceptions.But I've got the death connection...All the hate that you have...Just throw it away Life is meant for more,But we're too distracted..Too caught up in the anger and judgment.. Caught up in the web of lies I've heard these things keep our blood boiling, Keeps us alive, and moving forward... If that's the case I was born a dead man. And I'm forever a ghost.Hatred is something that we're brought up to see.Now everybody's looking at meI hope they know... They won't get their satisfaction.

Even from high above, I could feel Amanda's hate. Or perhaps it was another dimension of my Shadow, my own hate for her closing in on me. Despite all I had learned and seen, I wished to God someone would choke her to death so I could get ahold of her and choke her some more.

And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched him as he watched, gazing where he should not.

Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.

I was haunting you, for so long, that I forgot that I became a ghost too.

No, honey. Maybe you can put the things from the Overlook away in lockboxes, but not memories. Never those. They’re the real ghosts.

Memories come back, pressing in on you, like ghost faces in the darkness pushing up the glass, trying to get into the lit room.

Memories are reality's ghosts

I don't believe in the white spectre-type of ghosts you get in stories, but what if ghosts are something else? Like memories somehow caught and trapped in time, released by being in certain places where things first happened.

Am I afraid of ghosts? My life experience has taught me to be much more afraid of what a human is capable of in broad daylight than what a ghost is capable of at night.

How many ghosts might return to the promenade, haunted by the echoes of those promises, perhaps eager to catch a glimpse of what could have been? Would they laugh at the survivors shuffling about in this briny detritus? Or would they cry?"Reid, A. J. (2012-11-08). A Smaller Hell (Kindle Locations 885-886). . Kindle Edition.

Ghosts are not what I remember of my childhood; but somehow they infuse memories of myself as a child, the little girl in a storybook, with ghosts hovering around her.

And the bummer thing is, ghosts never leave. They might leave you alone sometimes, but they're always there deep down, whispering lies in your ear. They echo the lies others told you: That you're not smart enough; that you're not pretty; that you'll never amount to anything.

If you believe the Bible is true, you ought to know that demons are real. The Bible is filled with references of evil and demons, and Christ repeatedly cast out demons, so I believe the universe is much more complex and mysterious than it may appear to our senses.

He stared at her, knowing with certainty thathe was falling in love. He looked the other way, Her face triggered through his heart, forcing him to look back, and admire that beauty!!Soon He pulled her close andkissed her beneath a blanket of stars,wondering how on earth he'd been luckyenough to find her... Wait it was morning, the dream was actually over !!

Ghosts... they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hanging in the air - something like when you forgot one thing and so you pantomime the motion.

Don't tell me how to grieve. Don't tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don't, heartbreak like these doesn't.

By and large, the mission of any ghost is to offer humility. They point out what's important by mocking what is not.(Joshua Malina, Sports Night)

Because every story is a ghost story, even mine.

But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

And no, I think i'm better than you because I am better than you.

I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind.

If your spirit is persistently harmless or if it has shown itself to you, in a non-threatening way, then you most definitely have a ghost. The ghost can be frightening, by its very nature. But the ghost will never intentionally frighten you. They will be there for three reasons: 1. They used to live there and are attached to the location 2. They are trying to communicate something to the living or 3. They are protective of somebody who lives in the house and so they are “standing guard” so to speak, over the loved one.

The fact that ghosts are real doesn't surprise me-I've always been a believer in that area. It's the realization that there may be something out there, something most can't see, that is able to kill.

It seems I can go from elated, embarrassed, angry, and back to embarrassed in four comments flat.

So you know you're a ghost?" I looked at my hands; they were transparent and glowed faintly. "Can you think of another explanation?

Hey, ghosts are nothing to laugh at! Whether or not you believe in them, they’re out there. I’ve seen them. I’ve even heard them.

At least that left hope for him. Except "Beauty and the Geek" wasn’t exactly the proper translation of the popular fairy tale.

Maybe pulling her emotions out and inserting in his logic would change this morbid course. But damn if he’d joke about it like she did.

This was sharing office space with wacko and bordering on ludicrous.

I wish my talent was something that could be celebrated. You see, I can talk to the dead.

But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12).I imagine, that during the period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off.

Live from a place of love. It conquers all that is evil.

The spirits of the dead are not among us to entertain us... Assuming the revenants you encounter have simply signed up to play haunted house for the amusement of the living is just plain ignorant.

There are reasons why it is often difficult to reach our dead. When we do, our lives and everything we believe to be true can be turned entirely upside down.

I mean,” her mother paused to choose her words, “maybe you’ll get involved in some school related activities, or join a team, or maybe meet a nice boy.”“Ugh,” Keely groaned, “I don’t have time for that stuff mom. We’ve talked about this.”“Because of the little ghost...searching…thingy you and Tad do?” “It’s called paranormal investigation mom.”“It’s called being antisocial.

Like most people, my views about ghosts and haunted places were traditional while growing up. I believed ghosts were human spirits. Not that I talked to many people about the subject or my experiences. I assumed people would think I was weird.

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.

The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil, or spirit, might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin.

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead man who had answers.

98% of reported hauntings have a natural and mundane explanation … it is the other 2% that have interested me for over 40 years.

She had yet to actually call him by his real name. The psychologist in him had all kinds of theories as to why. The man in him wanted to hear her say it. Just once.

Hauntingly active as they share space with the living, the dead refuse to give up their undead residency.

It took a pair of ghosts to open my eyes.

Calm down. Ghosts don’t ring the doorbell.

Every town has ‘THAT house’: the one that once held dark secrets. You know the house… the one no one will purchase? The one whose walls have seen blood? The one that even birds avoid, and the darkened windows resemble empty eye sockets? There are furtive, yet insistent, whispers about ‘that’ house, murmurs that perhaps the house is best left alone, lest the dark stain left upon that abode’s history seep into our own present-day.

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble ‘came’ from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American.

Michael had learned the hard way that nothing good came from interfering in the affairs of the afterlife.

..., imagine a loamy earth that starts with genocide, then adds a mix of further disease, wars, hurricanes, murder, great fires, dueling, insurrection and slavery, just to name a few of the many instances of tragedy. What dark seed would take root in such a disturbed and twisted soil?

They’d never scared him, really.  When he was younger, he hadn’t known that there was anything different about them.  By the time he was old enough to figure out that no one else could see them, he was also old enough to realize that being dead didn’t turn people into monsters.  It just meant that most of them were lonely.

When a thundering horde of drunken Vikings rush a person, it's only natural to flinch.

Sometimes we just have to accept the fact we can't explain everything. Life happens, whether we want it to or not and we don't always have a reason why. Our job is to try and make some good come out of it.

And I want to kiss you every day, but not just because I'm saying goodbye.

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high in weeds and young trees. The trees have entirely encased a speed limit sign, strange sight, nothing so pointless as a speed limit sign in the midst of dense woods, pointless and beautifully so.

I lost my temper," I finish. "I lost my temper. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.""Well, no one means to lose their temper, my boy," the Captain smiles. "If they did, it wouldn't be lost.

The only way, I thought to myself, that this could get any weirder would be if it turns out he has that dead body's head on ice where in the basement, some ready for transplantation onto Cindy Crawford's body as soon as it becomes available.

The whispers you hear in your ear that you fear in the air everywhere,they are ghosts.The moans and the groans in the lowest of tones no one owns or condones, they are ghosts.You might deem them gremlins or water or wind,while others say shadows or rodents or sin.But oh! I say no! ‘Tis not so, child, for lo!The chills that you feel in a thrill that proves goose bumps are frightfully real,they are ghosts!

Well, well, well. Tickle my Elmo ass silly. I was sitting across from a person who enjoyed talking to dead people, and if they wouldn’t talk, then by God, he’d just wake their corpses up instead. Next to him was a moody, chain-smoking vampire who just might be bipolar and smoked like a corncob pipe.

Areila walked like she had somewhere to go. I stood by the fountain and watched her pass, but I didn't speak. It was the lady's prerogative to pretend she didn't see me. She got to the edge of the park; I swear, her foot hovered right over the line, when she turned with military precision and marched back. She stopped in front of me and said, "Hello.

Because I seeA rainstorm in JuneJust before the sunThe black of nightJust before the starsAnd, girl, I see your ghostJust before our dawn

I'd say we're all just ghosts on a wire seeking the prick of an electric thought.

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs. Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places. Sometimes ghosts fool you. Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you. But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it.

A city obsessed by its ghosts seems to be weighted down by a conflicted view of the past. Something close to melancholy: a weight it can't quite let go of, a lingering sadness. And though we don't often think of the United States in these terms, this melancholy is as much a part of our history as our triumphs.

The fires of nightthrough distance danceghosts who still know how to sing

Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by each other’s knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender, it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow. I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story. We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there.

Anxiety kicked in. I lacked people skills all my life. Any normal human interaction was foreign to me. I don’t know what to say, to not look like a major dork or something. I am weird like that. Always were.The dead – that’s a whole other world we’re talking about. They can’t interfere with my everyday life, other than to annoy me. I can be myself around the dead. The dead are good. The living? Not so much.

His kiss was like no other! His kiss was enchanted and fairy-tale like. He applied pressure, but just enough to feel his tenderness and warmth. I could feel his heart beating wildly as he pressed his chest against my chest all the while his loving lips brushed up against mine with a care-filled affection. His tongue lightly licked the outer edges of my mouth, and then searched for my tongue. The pursuit allowed a marriage of both tongues to meet - inspiring a mingling tango of hot and heavy French kissing to manifest profusely. We kissed like two hot and horny teenagers, our mouths moving and craving each others lips, in animalistic desires!

Being in love changes a person…a modest touch changes one’s mind, a lone thought one’s reasoning, but a kiss my friend, well that changes one’s existences.

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.""I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly."Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.

Now that's a ghastly moon, not ghostly.

Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's.

Galton was a world renowned anthropologist back in the nineteenth century, though he was a big overshadowed by his cousin, Charles Darwin.

She cursed under her breath. Eddie watched the EBs react, the younger ones recoiling with silent gasps. "Better watch your language. There are children present. I think you're freaking them out." "Sure, I'm the one freaking them out.

Eddie made a half-turn in his seat to face her. "So, what did you think of our hosts?" She chuckled. "I think they could be not-too-distant cousins of the Addams Family." "With Paul as a fuzzy Uncle Fester," Eddie laughed.

The air in the room was so cold, the exposed flesh of his face felt like ice. "I'll be the first person to get frostbite in a house sleeping several feet from a roaring fire.

Is it ghosts that truly haunt us, or the memory of our own mistakes that we wish we could undo?

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.

Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.

I'm supposed to feel like it’s such a great apartment, but I don’t. It’s the right price, there are no bugs and it’s got a great view, but it’s the lair of Satan...

Enough regret can crush any man, living or dead.

So many men and women I have wronged, reduced to ghosts and shades. They surround me, but I can never let them know I regret what I have cost them, both the living and the dead.

And maybe that's all a ghost is, in the end. Regret, grown legs, gone walking.

Inching into the room, it’s clear something is wrong here. There’s a tingling sensation up my legs and back before I can even really focus on the parlor’s details. There are silhouettes of people, but I can see through them. It’s like shadows were cast and left behind to do as they please. Lost in the surreal sight of them for a moment, I inch further into the room without noticing that some were now moving behind me.There is no warning. I’m suddenly in the air, and moving backward rapidly toward the wall. It’s almost a full second before my body registers the actual pain of the blow my stomach just took. Being hit by a car doesn't even compare to this, and I didn't even see it coming.“For a shadow, you hit like a sledgehammer!” The words barely escape before something else slams into the base of my skull embedding most of my upper body in the wall and all but removing my head. These things are like Lucy; the disembodied dead who haven’t moved on. I've never met others that can actually touch things physically, they must be fairly potent.I pull my face out of the hole it had been planted in, letting plaster dust fall, coating my chest and legs like snow. Looking around quickly I try to gauge my surroundings. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there. Is one easy night, without a huge dry-cleaning bill, too much to ask for these days?I only have time to dwell on it a moment before my head is bouncing off the hardwood floor; once, twice, and then a third time in quick succession. Now ‘pick splinters out of my forehead’ can be added to my Saturday night to-do list. Damn it, this is not going as planned.

There is no such thing as perfect. But even if there was, I would pick you over perfection any day.

Between one stride and the next, the herd of reindeer faded away. She felt a last few ghosts go with her, shoulder on shoulder, and then they too were gone and she was back, alone, in the world of humans and ravens.

Laura smiled a little wanly in the twilight. "Far more afraid of flesh and blood than ghosts," she murmured.

If a tattoo is supposed to make a statement, that kid’s body is just plain babbling.

Vomit began to spill out of me like pea soup, splattering the road with champagne and caviar, long island iced teas, of bacon appetizers and croissants, and a perfectly grilled filet mignonette. It had gone down easy, among the kiss ups of the lawyer world, but spewed out nastily and hard, in the company of a cheater.

She had golden blazing sun kissed hair, which hung down in loose, lazy spirals, a heart shaped pouted mouth, which was pink tinged with violet blushing, wide, spangled blue eyes that glimmered sparks to flicker and ember in the vivid intelligence of the moon’s love, and a yielding body, that seem to tangle in loose rhythm as I walked near to her.

It doesn't seem right to throw dirt at you when you're dead...

I’m fading, Bethany, I know it. I think that’s what happened to my dad, that’s why I can’t see him. One day I’ll be so see-through that you’ll forget I was ever here, just like everyone else has.

The sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the streets of Rome.

I have no fear of ghosts, and I have never heard it said that so much harm had been done by the dead during 6,000 years as it brought by the living in a single day.

If dat ghost have money, I tells him never to haunt you less'n he wants to lose it!

As we strolled into the hospital, I couldn’t help thinking about Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe” because I was having a difficult time staying calm. I had been kidnapped and beaten senseless by an agent of Lucifer, and yet the white coats the doctors wore scared me just as badly. The men who had taken me from my mother wore those same damned lab coats. Every time I saw one, it awakened a dormant fear inside me—fear that I’d be dragged away from someone I loved again, fear that I’d be placed into the waiting hands of another horrible person. It would never truly go away.Michael’s shoulder bumped mine, which shook me out of my thoughts. I glanced at him. “What?”“You’re frowning.”“Am I supposed to be smiling right now?”He faced forward, looking at our reflection in the elevator doors. “No, but you look like you’re about to bolt at any second.”I watched the digital numbers change one by one as we rose up to the right floor, fiddling with the rosary in the pocket of my leather jacket. Somehow, the beads had a calming effect on me. “I’m fine.”“Hard ass.”A tiny smirk touched my lips. “Stop thinking about my butt. You’re an archangel.”He grinned, but didn’t reply.

Look, Jordan, you’re not alone any more. It’s my job to protect you while I’m here and I can’t do that if you keep pushing me away.”“That’s the problem, Michael,” I shot back. “You have more responsibilities to your boss than you do to me. You taught me how to defend myself, how to heal myself, and that should be good enough. You can’t keep babysitting one little human when you have an entire cosmos to worry about.” He faced me again, those green eyes boring into mine as if he could see straight through me. “Are you saying you want me to leave?”My chest tightened. I hadn’t expected him to say that. I bit my bottom lip, glancing away. “That’s not what I mean.”“Then what do you mean?” “Since when have I ever known what the hell I mean?” He touched my right cheek, making me face him. “You do when it counts.”Staring up at him, shirtless, vulnerable, and wounded, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. He had a knack for picking my walls apart brick by brick. It bothered me. He took a step closer, casting a shadow over me. “Stop,” I mumbled, fixing my eyes on the floor. He brushed a lock of hair behind my ear, sliding his warm hand to lift my chin so I’d have to look at him. “Stop what?” he murmured. “Looking at me.”“Why?”“That’s how Terrell used to look at me before we kissed.”His lips parted to say something but I pushed past him, gathering up my duster from where it lay on the bed next to the dress. “Get dressed. We have more ghosts to help.

A writer's journey may be tough, but never give up and enjoy every moment.

A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.

Mama wasn't dead...exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well that day, and Elma reckoned dead just meant pretendin' you couldn't move or breathe until nightfall when you got up and walked around like you was free.

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalised ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many … can be recalled by name. But they are not the living-dead. There is a difference.

There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas — something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.

Fucking nightmares.My heart starts to slow down. Glancing down at the floor, I see Tybalt, who is glaring at me with a puffed-up tail. I wonder if he had been sleeping on my chest and I catapulted him off when I woke up. I don't remember, but I wish that I did, because it would've been hilarious.

Being dead does have its advantages.”-Alastor

I smile, comforted by the knowledge that I am not alone. That I haven't been left behind. That when everyone else moves on, when they find new lives and loves and joys, it just might be alright to stay where you are, as long as there's someone standing next to you, holding your hand, telling you it will be okay.

Sometimes people graduate but they don't leave. They hang around for years, for no reason. I would think of ghosts like that, I decided.

But more importantly, know I love you more than I can say with simple words. Poets have attempted for centuries to find the perfect combination, and I don’t imagine I shall have more luck than they.

Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.

It wasn’t one event, but a series of events followed by years of research adjudicated by panels of experts and committees of laypeople until a decision was finally made: we’ve been going about handling dead people all wrong.

Quinns always come at half price, about half the time, and half-naked, even during the colder half of winter. A Quinn is like a queen, but draggier, and cheaper to buy and use for personal gain, unless you’re suspicious that you’re poor and illiterate like Jarod Kintz, in which case Quinns could be the spirits of your dead relatives, come to haunt you until you gather a massive fortune through selling books on the internet, to send some back in time through a portal you bought from the NSA, so they would have lived better lives without having to move a finger for their fortune. Oh, yah, and since they aren’t - they’re blue, like smurfs, yet they turn purple whenever tickled on the belly, which is something they seem to rather dislike, since they start biting and scratching when it happens, for no good reason, I might add.

I see ghosts like you see a normal person. Looking regular, tangible as ever and even more alive than most of the people you’ll see walking around the streets.

Can you really talk to the dead?" She gave me the look that I was familiar with by now: equal parts derision, skepticism, and curiosity. “How much would it be? I mean, how much do you charge?

The dead don't stay dead in this town! Haunted Richmond II-Pamela K. Kinney

Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .

Well, if you’d let me explain before you went bolting outta the room, then you’d know, wouldn’t you? It seems to me that you’re quite dead. So I’ve come to collect you.” –Sam

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

…but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy.

About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page."Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired.He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff.""It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write."Books are boring," James said as he wrote."They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books.

Aura," he whispered, "I wish I could wipe away just one of your tears. Then I'dfeel like a person again. Like I'm something more than a bunch of light.

Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners.

Imagination must be allowed to run free in our subconscious mind and when ready, it reveals its ideals to us in our conscious state.

I tell you, my idea of a ghost is something quite different. Dead men rise up never – read even your poets. Ghosts breed in the living.

I can speak four dialects, but none of them is fairy language.

I thought: if I die, I hope I get reincarnated into a mosquito so I can bite that fucker kau-kau.

Other dragons are bastards. I moved out of my mother's cave after my mother tried to rip my guts out.Granted, I had tried to steal her Tiara of Clairvoyance.

The tabloids wanted to know whether the dragon was receiving benefits. The gossip magazines claimed to have found a woman who was bearing the dragon's baby. The fashion magazines did spreads on draconian style. This apparently consisted of gaunt models with sunken eyes, swathed in clouds of chiffon and arranged in awkwardly erotic positions on piles of gold coins.

I brought seaweed snacks from home,' chimed in another kid. "Seaweed got iron, right?"'I don't think the teachers meant that kind of iron,' said Hui Ann.

The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue.

But a woman should not marry where there is no respect. Respect is the most important thing.

He would gaze at her with intrigued longan seed eyes.

Not one of us, even after last night, can say the word "ghost" without a littleinvoluntary smile. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks wheremodern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor ofsuperstition and have no substitute defense.

So,” Lauren said. “You help ghosts with unfulfilled wishes cross over to the astral plane for judgment.”“Yes.”“And you hunt demons.”“Yes.”“And you’re married to an angel.”“Yes.”She paused. “…so basically, you’re Dean Winchester.”I made an exasperated sound. “I am NOT.”She smirked. “Yeah, sure.

Funny isn't it, that such a large percentage of people believe in the possibility of ghosts yet scoff at stories about then; whereas less than a fifth of one percent think there actually may be vampires, yet glamorize and romanticize them into millions of dollar of sales. Perhaps the real irony is that the thought of ghosts is just a little too close to people’s comfort level.

I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of a keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all likelihood see it familiarly, as I might say, again. I was on the lookout for it as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light and ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There's no doubt that I was much uplifted. I couldn't get over the distinction conferred on me, the exception - in the way of mystic enlargement of vision - made in my favour.("Sir Edmund Orme")

Engaging spirits isn’t an elitist ability or industry, it’s being active in the connection with All Things. It’s innate to us all.

Recognizing the connection to All Things, even in creepy moments, keeps me true to my animistic perspective. Finding growth from them is my choice.

That, my dear detective, was the other San Francisco. You've probably seen it before, just out of the corner of your eye. You've probably dismissed it all your life. Maybe you always told yourself you'd just had too much to drink." She paused, her gaze heavy on his face. MacMillian squirmed. "But I'm guessing you always knew better."His head was throbbing. He shook it once, twice, but it didn't clear. "I don't get it, Miss...""Alan," she supplied.He nodded. "Ms. Alan. Why are you here?"Her eyes darkened. "Because there are things that go bump in the night, Mr. MacMillian. It's my job to bump back.

Are you here about the infestation?"MacMillian stiffened. "I don't... We aren't-"Lena cleared her throat. "I'm afraid bugs aren't really our specialty.""Not bugs." The woman shook her head vigorously. "Ghosts. Whole place is crawling with 'em.

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’s lament had been transformed into a thing of such beauty I was tempted to go and hide within it.

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.

She stood in the snow, effervescent, all pale skin and blonde hair, clad in white and bathed in moonlight. She should have looked angelic, instead she looked like a corpse, freshly raised from the grave, frosted in ice and darkness, swaying precariously in a graveyard.

The world,’ he said, ‘grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief of apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon the minds of men so long and so firmly? Show me any fact in physics, in history, in archaeology, which is supported by testimony so wide and so various. Attested by all races of men, in all ages, and in all climates, by the soberest sages of antiquity, by the rudest savage of today, by the Christian, the Pagan, the Pantheist, the Materialist, this phenomenon is treated as a nursery tale by the philosophers of our century. Circumstantial evidence weighs with them as a feather in the balance. The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces is condemned as a trifler. He who believes, is a dreamer or a fool.

I first witnessed the paranormal at the tender age of eight. This experience unlocked a doorway to a world full of unexplained mysteries, miraculous insights, and terrifying ghostly visits that have spanned a lifetime. Join me as I explore these stories…one book at a time.” ~L. Sydney Fisher

Would it surprise you to know that a presence was on your back a few seconds ago?

It was once said that to hide something from prying eyes you must place it where people can see it.

I was reaching for one of the handles when I heard Heidler’s voice from behind me. ‘It would not be wise to enter. It is a bad time to disturb the dead.

They tell us, love, that eternity awaits.

In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.

Oh, very good,' interrupted Snape, his lip curling. 'Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. 'Ghosts are transparent.

Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?

Did you know sometimes it frightens me--when you say my name and I can't see you?will you ever learn to materialize before you speak?impetuous boy, if that's what you really are.how many centuries since you've climbed a balconyor do you do this every night with someone else?you tell me that you'll never leaveand I am almost afraid to believe it.why is it me you've chosen to follow?did you like the way I look when I am sleeping?was my hair more fun to tangle?are my dreams more entertaining?do you laugh when I'm complaining that I'm all alone?where were you when I searched the seafor a friend to talk to me?in a year where will you be?is it enough for you to steal into my mindfilling up my page with music written in my handyou know I'll take the credit for I must have made you come to me somehow.but please try to close the curtains when you leave at night,or I'll have to find someone to stay and warm me.will you always attend my midnight tea parties--as long as I set it at your place?if one day your sugar sits untouchedwill you have gone forever?would you miss me in a thousand years--when you will dry another's tears?but you say you'll never leave meand I wonder if you'll have the decencyto pass through my wall to the next roomwhile I dress for dinnerbut when I'm stuck in conversationwith stuffed shirts whose adorationhurts my ears, where are you then?can't you cut in when I dance with other men?it's too late not to interfere with my lifeyou've already made me a most unsuitable wifefor any man who wants to be the first his bride has slept withand you can't just fly into people's bedroomsthen expect them to calmly wave goodbyeyou've changed the course of historyand didn't even trywhere are you now--standing behind me,taking my hand?come and remind mewho you arehave you traveled farare you made of stardust tooare the angels after youtell me what I am to dobut until then I'll save your side of the bedjust come and sing me to sleep

It's easier to dismiss ghosts in the daylight.

I assure you; while I look like a ghost, I'm no spirit or demon. I'm nothing but a girl struggling to make her way in an intolerant world. I bleed, I love, and someday, I'll die.

Percy glanced over. He saw the fallen giant and seemed to understand what was happening. He yelled something that was lost in the wind, probably: Go!Then he slammed Riptide into the ice at his feet. The entire glacier shuddered. Ghosts fell to their knees. Behind Percy, a wave surged up from the bay-a wall of gray water even taller than the glacier. Water shot from the chasms and crevices in the ice. As the wave hit, the back half of the camp crumbled. The entire edge of the glacier peeled away, cascading into the void-carrying buildings, ghosts, and Percy Jackson over the edge.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.

The ghosts of things that never happened are worse than the ghosts of things that did.

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions.' Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts.' ("Village Ghosts")

Boo: "Go talk to her."Callum: "About what?"Boo: "Anything."Callum: "You want me to walk up to her and say, 'Are you a ghost?'"Boo: "I do that."Callum: "I love it when you get it wrong.

Maybe all the people who say ghosts don't exist are just afraid to admit that they do.

A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.

Um ,sorry. I cant read the last line.""Fish. Have you stolen any fish from the holy lakes?""I lived in Kansas..So ..no

It's a big spooky place when you're in it alone. It's like you can hear all the whispers of all the voices of all the actors who ever played here. Kind of creepy. Like a church can be creepy when it's empty. You ever been in a church after hours?

Lockwood gave a sudden exclamation; when I looked at him, his eyes were shining. 'On second thoughts, we can scrap my last suggestion,' he said. 'Stuff the mingling. Who wants to do that? Boring. George - this library. Where is it?

She needs you, Dad," Julia says. "She has unfinished business in this world.""What is the matter with you?" Charlie asks his daughter. "Any sane person would have told me to go to the doctor. I'm seeing a headless apparition every day. Maybe my medications are conflicting. You should see the list of side effects on this stuff.

One IGHS member said that, yup, she could hear it, too. Then again, during a dinner conversation earlier in the trip, this same woman heard “Siegfried and Roy” as “Sigmund Freud.” The resulting image-Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men’s makeup-haunts me to this day.

It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them.

Every city is a ghost.New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park.

So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.

So many horrid Ghosts.

It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.

GhostsTake shape under moonlight,materialize in dreams.Shadows. Silhouettesof what is no more. Butghosts don'tbother me. The day bringsbigger things to worry aboutthan flimsy remains ofyesterday. No, spooks don'tscare me.Gauzy apparitions mightprank your psyche oragitate your nightmares,but lackingflesh and bloodthey are powerlessto hurt you-cannot hopeto inflict the kind of damagethat real, livepeople do.

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

So let’s raise our glass to the accident season,To the river beneath us where we sink our souls,To the bruises and secrets, to the ghosts in the ceiling,One more drink for the watery road.

He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

Herr Schiller? Are there really any such things as ghosts?' The old man did not even show surprise at the question. He heaved a sigh. 'Yes Pia, there are. But never the ones you expect.

Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it.