Halloween Countdown 2019, Day 21

[eldritchhobbit]

(Photos by AHS. All photos from Salem Cemetery in Madison County, Kentucky.)

From The Sociable Ghost by Olive Harper (1903), published in An Obscurity of Ghosts: Further Tales of the Supernatural by Women, 1876-1903, edited by J.A. Mains:

“Young gentleman, you are having the most remarkable experience of your life. You want to see all can, for probably never before did man come down and see the dead as they really are – before they get their passports. Certainly some live persons do come down here occasionally, but they do not count, for they are only those who are buried alive, and they do not get out, as they do not as a rule live long.”

Also from The Sociable Ghost:

“Will you excuse me if I ask you a question? I have always been led to think that those who are dead dislike to hear the word dead. They are supposed to prefer to hear, ‘passed into spirit life’ and ‘gone to Summer-land’ instead. All the mediums use that word, in palliation and instead of the harsher one. Dead, gives one a shock to hear,” asked the young man in a laudable desire to learn all he could.

“Poppycock and moonshine!” was the unexpected response. “There is no such thing as a medium…. You are soon to enter the very doors of ghostdom, but not through the efforts of any medium. No, sir; they trade upon your sense of loss and sorrow when any one of yours dies, and they foster and encourage your desire to penetrate the mystery of future life. They get your money by fraud, working upon your best sentiments. They ought to be keelhauled, and should be if I had my way. I’d string them to the yard arm and whack them with a rope’s end. If the tie that bound you to any one you loved is broken by death there is no third party that can come and for a certain sum in cash become the medium of communication between you, and I say, lick the man that tells you different. You are getting this straight from a real ghost. In my warmth I had almost forgotten that you asked if we who are dead dislike to hear anyone say the word dead. Quite the contrary, for we are dead and it would be very silly to try to disguise the fact, and we do not try to down here. Fact is truth and truth governs down here. Dead we are and dead we stay, and after all I am not sure that we are not quite as well, and sometimes better off, than when alive. If we miss some things we escape others.”