“Come home, my lost child!
Embrace the rivers and the wild
Dance with dwarves, hand in hand,
Forget the human world of weeping,
A painful land you will never understand.”
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Lost Child)
“A sudden terror seized me. I turned to beseech the old man to let me go, but he was not there!.”
—Herman Sisk (The Purple Heart)
“Haunted houses are nothing but superstition. They exist only in the imagination.”
—Farnsworth Wright (The Closing Hand)
The earth lay far below him. He flew gracefully on through the silvery darkness.”
— Jack Snow (Night Wings)
“Ah! little ken’d thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twa pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grac’d a dance of witches!”
— Robert Burns (Tam O’ Shanter)
“Into a patch of moonlight passed the figure of a young girl, looked at them as though about to stop yet thinking better of it, smiled softly, and moved on out of sight into the surrounding darkness. The moon just caught her eyes and teeth, so that they shone; the rest of her body stood in shadow; the effect was striking — almost as though head and shoulders hung alone in mid air, watching them with this shining smile, then fading away.”—Algernon Blackwood (The Singular Death of Morton)
“Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee:
I died: let earth my bones resign;
Fill up—thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.”–Lord Byron (Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull)
“All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.”
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Haunted Houses)
“Black loom the crags of the uplands behind me;
Dark are the sands of the far-stretching shore.
Dim are the pathways and rocks that remind me
Sadly of years in the lost nevermore.
Soft laps the ocean on wave-polish’d boulder;
Sweet is the sound and familiar to me.
Here, with her head gently bent to my shoulder,
Walk’d I with Unda, the Bride of the Sea.”— H.P. Lovecraft (Unda, or The Bride of the Sea)
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Old Masson, the caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats.–Henry Kuttner (The Graveyard Rats)
“Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.”— Edgar Allan Poe (Spirits of the Dead)
“He spake in wonder, not in fear:
“How walks a man who died?
“Friend of old times, what do ye here,
“Long fallen at my side?”
“Rise up, rise up,” Sir Richard said,
“The hounds of doom are free;
“The slayers come to take your head
“To hang on the ju-ju tree.”— Robert E. Howard (The Return of Sir Richard Grenville)
“For many years there lived near the town of Gallipolis, Ohio, an old man named Herman Deluse. Very little was known of his history, for he would neither speak of it himself nor suffer others. It was a common belief among his neighbors that he had been a pirate— if upon any better evidence than his collection of boarding pikes, cutlasses, and ancient flintlock pistols, no one knew.”— Ambrose Bierce (The Isle of Pines)
Then she began to experience what she often
thought of as her “married feeling”—the peculiar
awareness which usually denoted her husband’s unseen
entrance into a room she occupied.”— Robert Bloch (The Hungry House)
“The entity which rested on that stone bench was like something that had crawled up out of hell. Piercing, malignant red eyes proclaimed that it had a terrible life, and yet that life sustained itself in a black, shrunken, half-mummified body which resembled a disinterred corpse. A few mouldy rags clung to the cadaver-like frame. Wisps of white hair sprouted out of its ghastly grey-white skull. A red smear or blotch of some sort covered the wizened slit which served it as a mouth.”—Joseph Payne Brennan (The Horror At Chilton Castle)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 