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Halloween Countdown 2017, Day 13
Oct. 13th, 2017 09:17 amIt's Friday the 13th, people! You can't get more Halloween-friendly than that. May your day be spooktacular (in a good way, of course).
It seems only fitting to share with you a chilling passage from U.S. businessman/author Thomas W. Lawson's popular 1907 work Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel, which some credit with contributing to the contemporary sense of doom that hangs over the day. In Lawson's novel, a corrupt broker takes advantage of the already-existing "Friday the 13th" superstition to create a Wall Street panic on that date. As you might imagine, the results are tragic.
This is the frontispiece to the novel by Sigismond de Ivanowski.
Here, let your spine be tingled by this excerpt:
Then, horror of horrors! I saw that there was something missing from her great blue eyes. I looked; gasped. Could it possibly be? With a bound I was at her side. I gazed again into those eyes which that morning had been all that was intelligent, all that was godlike, all that was human. Their soul, their life was gone. Beulah Sands was a dead woman; not dead in body, but in soul; the magic spark had fled. She was but an empty shell--a woman of living flesh and blood; but the citadel of life was empty, the mind was gone. What had been a woman was but a child. I passed my hand across my now damp forehead. I closed my eyes and opened them again. Bob's figure, with clasped, uplifted hands, and bursting eyes, was still there. There still resounded through the room the awful guttural groans. Beulah Sands smiled, the smile of an infant in the cradle. She took one beautiful hand from the paper and passed it over Bob's bronzed cheek, just as the infant touches its mother's face with its chubby fingers. In my horror I almost expected to hear the purling of a babe. My eyes in their perplexity must have wandered from her face, for I suddenly became aware of a great black head-line spread across the top of the paper that she had been reading:
"FRIDAY, THE 13TH."
And beneath in one of the columns:
"TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN VIRGINIA"
"THE MOST PROMINENT CITIZEN OF THE STATE, EX-UNITED STATES SENATOR AND EX-GOVERNOR, JUDGE LEE SANDS OF SANDS LANDING, WHILE TEMPORARILY INSANE FROM THE LOSS OF HIS FORTUNE AND MILLIONS OF THE FUNDS FOR WHICH HE WAS TRUSTEE, CUT THE THROAT OF HIS INVALID WIFE, HIS DAUGHTER'S, AND THEN HIS OWN. ALL THREE DIED INSTANTLY."
In another column:
"ROBERT BROWNLEY CREATES THE MOST DISASTROUS PANIC IN THE HISTORY OF WALL STREET AND SPREADS WRECK AND RUIN THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY."
A hideous picture seared its every light and shade on my mind, through my heart, into all my soul. A frenzied-finance harvest scene with its gory crop; in the centre one living-dead, part of the picture, yet the ghost left to haunt the painters, one of whom was already cowering before the black and bloody canvas.
You can read the complete novel for free here at Project Gutenberg.
It seems only fitting to share with you a chilling passage from U.S. businessman/author Thomas W. Lawson's popular 1907 work Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel, which some credit with contributing to the contemporary sense of doom that hangs over the day. In Lawson's novel, a corrupt broker takes advantage of the already-existing "Friday the 13th" superstition to create a Wall Street panic on that date. As you might imagine, the results are tragic.
This is the frontispiece to the novel by Sigismond de Ivanowski.
Here, let your spine be tingled by this excerpt:
Then, horror of horrors! I saw that there was something missing from her great blue eyes. I looked; gasped. Could it possibly be? With a bound I was at her side. I gazed again into those eyes which that morning had been all that was intelligent, all that was godlike, all that was human. Their soul, their life was gone. Beulah Sands was a dead woman; not dead in body, but in soul; the magic spark had fled. She was but an empty shell--a woman of living flesh and blood; but the citadel of life was empty, the mind was gone. What had been a woman was but a child. I passed my hand across my now damp forehead. I closed my eyes and opened them again. Bob's figure, with clasped, uplifted hands, and bursting eyes, was still there. There still resounded through the room the awful guttural groans. Beulah Sands smiled, the smile of an infant in the cradle. She took one beautiful hand from the paper and passed it over Bob's bronzed cheek, just as the infant touches its mother's face with its chubby fingers. In my horror I almost expected to hear the purling of a babe. My eyes in their perplexity must have wandered from her face, for I suddenly became aware of a great black head-line spread across the top of the paper that she had been reading:
"FRIDAY, THE 13TH."
And beneath in one of the columns:
"TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN VIRGINIA"
"THE MOST PROMINENT CITIZEN OF THE STATE, EX-UNITED STATES SENATOR AND EX-GOVERNOR, JUDGE LEE SANDS OF SANDS LANDING, WHILE TEMPORARILY INSANE FROM THE LOSS OF HIS FORTUNE AND MILLIONS OF THE FUNDS FOR WHICH HE WAS TRUSTEE, CUT THE THROAT OF HIS INVALID WIFE, HIS DAUGHTER'S, AND THEN HIS OWN. ALL THREE DIED INSTANTLY."
In another column:
"ROBERT BROWNLEY CREATES THE MOST DISASTROUS PANIC IN THE HISTORY OF WALL STREET AND SPREADS WRECK AND RUIN THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY."
A hideous picture seared its every light and shade on my mind, through my heart, into all my soul. A frenzied-finance harvest scene with its gory crop; in the centre one living-dead, part of the picture, yet the ghost left to haunt the painters, one of whom was already cowering before the black and bloody canvas.
You can read the complete novel for free here at Project Gutenberg.