Halloween Countdown 2018, Day 25

[eldritchhobbit]

Here’s another recommendation for great Halloween reading: A Suggestion of Ghosts: Supernatural Fiction by Women 1854-1900, edited by J.A. Mains (Black Shuck Books, 2017, paperback 2018).

You can hear my extended review of the anthology here on the StarShipSofa podcast.

(Art by Blackbirdmotel.)

Here is an atmospheric excerpt from a story in the collection, “A Legend of All-Hallow Eve” by Mrs. Georgiana S. Hull (first published in Harper’s Monthly, November 1879):

Glancing listlessly over a newspaper, I discovered that it was All-Saints Day! My terrible night was the eve of All-Saints, the night on which the dead come out of their graves to haunt their old homes. All the year silent and low they lie, and then, with a longing for the old home, they creep out this one night to enter the old haunts. While we sleep, the house-place swarms with the poor ghosts. This is their penance and expiation for deeds done in the flesh, until the soul in the fullness of perfection shall enter into possession of the divine. The false witness, the profligate, the murderer, the unforgiving, the miser, the sensualist, the uncharitable – it may be their hell to thus come back one night in the year, stung by an avenging Nemesis, until, their penance done, they are wafted over the Styx. The good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no waking.

And so I thought with a dazed brain, until the dark recesses of the great gloomy room seemed peopled with phantoms, waiting in misery for their Prospero to shake off their shackles of bondage…