Famous Modern Ghost Stories - Ghosts Are The True Immortals, And The Dead Grow More Alive All The Time

Famous Modern Ghost Stories
FAMOUS MODERN GHOST STORIES

Selected, with an Introduction by

DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH, PH.D.

Lecturer in English, Columbia University

Author of The Supernatural In Modern English Fiction, Fugitive
Verses, From A Southern Porch, etc. Compiler of Humorous Ghost
Stories
The supernatural phenomenon of ghosts is explored in this book. 
It explains the various types of ghosts and goes on to mention that there is a striking similarity between all sightings and experiences. 
Schopenhauer implies that the belief in ghosts is born with man and that it can be found in all races and ages throughout the world. 
He elaborates on this theme to draw the conclusion that sometimes ghosts could be real or mere imagination of the individual.

Book Excerpts:
Ghosts are the true immortals, and the dead grow more alive all the time. Wraiths have a greater vitality to-day than ever before. They are far more numerous than at any time in the past, and people are more interested in them. There are persons that claim to be acquainted with specific spirits, to speak with them, to carry on correspondence with them, and even some who insist that they are private secretaries to the dead. 
Others of us mortals, more reserved, are content to keep such distance as we may from even the shadow of a shade. But there's no getting away from ghosts nowadays, for even if you shut your eyes to them in actual life, you stumble over them in the books you read, you see them on the stage and on the screen, and you hear them on the lecture platform. 
Even a Lodge in any vast wilderness would have the company of spirits. Man's love for the supernatural, which is one of the most natural things about him, was never more marked than at present. You may go a-ghosting in any company to-day, and all aspects of literature, novels, short stories, poetry, and drama alike, reflect the shadeless spirit. The latest census of the haunting world shows a vast increase in population, which might be explained on various grounds.

Life is so inconveniently complex nowadays, what with income taxes and
other visitations of government, that it is hard for us to have the added risk of wraiths, but there's no escaping. Many persons of to-day are in the same mental state as one Mr. Boggs, told of in a magazine story, a rural gentleman who was agitated over spectral visitants. 
He had once talked at a seance with a speaker who claimed to be the spirit
of his brother, Wesley Boggs, but who conversed only on blue suspenders,
a subject not of vital interest to Wesley in the flesh. "Still," Mr. Boggs reflected, "I'm not so darn sure!" 
In answer to a suggestion regarding subliminal consciousness and dual personality as explanation of the strange things that come bolting into life, he said, "It's crawly any way you look at it. Ghosts inside you are as bad as ghosts outside you." There are others to-day who are "not so darn sure!"