Of all the things ghosts might be, the thing they always are is the horror some people insist isn’t real, even when others can see the truth.
One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted.
One need not be a House.
The Brain has Corridors surpassing
Material Place.
Every love story is a haunting.
If the governess [in The Turn of the Screw] is mad, she has unwittingly killed a bright and beautiful little boy; this is a tragedy, but a local one. If the ghosts are genuine, however, there are jagged cracks in the firmament above us all, and nobody is safe.
I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and she had had her revenge.They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.
Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.
… a darkness fell upon his eyes, and the room shifted character. Suddenly, he saw a person sitting at a corner of the room … Later that night, the same man appeared in his dreams.
All this,said my father,is strictly referable to natural causes. These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbors.But that very circumstance frightens one horribly,said Carmilla.How so?inquired my father.I am so afraid of fancying I see such things; I think it would be as bad as reality.
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?
But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul…