Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Number 5 (1927-11).djvu/6



ERTAIN basic ghost-story themes have been used again and again, until they have lost their savor. The ghosts of fietion derive their interest and fascination from their strangeness; and if ghosts do the same things, in slightly different fashion, through story after story, then they become as humdrum and uninteresting as the sight of a milk wagon to a night-owl. The ghost-stories in are different. In this issue, the ghostly abbey that limns itself against the sky in The Lord of the Tarn when Torkel Yarl's hour arrives, and the ghost of Old Morris revealing itself more and more each day in The Shadows until that terrific assault by the Jumbee—these are ghost-stories that are really out of the ordinary.

One ghostly yarn that has come to us in the mails at least a score of times is the incident of the wager: Someone bets someone else that he (or she) does not dare to spend the night in a certain haunted room (or sometimes at a haunted grave in the cemetery); and to prove that the haunted place has actually been visited, the person is to drive a stake into the grave (or nails into a certain place in the floor of the haunted room). But in the excitement and terror of the occasion, the person drives the stake (or the nails) through his coat, and when he tries to get away he finds that he is held by the fastened coat, which his excited imagination transforms into a ghost, and he dies of terror. Several times, in rejecting stories based on this incident, we have inquired of the authors how they happened to think up such a plot, and in each case the story had been told to the writer as an incident that had actually happened, so the writer worked it up into a story. But the theme was already used once in (The Ghost of Liscard Manor, November issue, 1924), and once is enough. Houdini, in for May, 1924, related the same incident as having been told him by his father: "My father, who has also investigated phenomena, and who was one of the pioneers in 1848, relates a story that in his student days one of the boys in his class had to drive a nail in a wooden cross at midnight in the local cemetery, and as he turned to flee, a hand reached out and held him fast. He shrieked and shouted for help, screaming out that he was held by a ghostly hand, but by the time assistance arrived, he was dead on the grave. It appears that in driving the nail in, he had accidentally, in his excitement, nailed down the coat: His mind bad conjectured a hand reaching out from the grave and securing him."

Another ghost-story plot that appears with great regularity in our mail is