The cutting wind is a cruel foe.
I dare not stand in the blast.
My hands are stone, and my voice a groan,
And the worst of death is past.
I am but a little maiden still,
My little white feet are sore.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!–Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.–Edgar Allan Poe
“You asked me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of my peculiarity.”–H. P. Lovecraft
Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.–Edgar Allan Poe
“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”–H.P. Lovecraft
An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was answered by another in the distance. Looking upward, I saw through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades! In all this there was a hint of night — the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl. Yet I saw — I saw even the stars in absence of darkness. I saw, but was apparently not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell did I exist?–Ambrose Bierce
I had faced death and weighed my chances in many a desperate venture, but never in one of this nature. I can swear I am no coward, yet this proposition of journeying back and forth across the borderland of death put the yellow fear upon me. –Jack London
A shuddery story of a ghastly charnel crypt in a weird cave in the hills of Cornwall!–Weird Tales
It was his last moment of fear. When he had recovered his breath and his control, he sat and thought about meeting death with dignity.-Jack London
But it’s the eyes of the man I’ll remember to my last days. Wide, fixed in shock, they hide some terrifying secret only the mutilated corpse may know.–JL
A shuddery weird tale of Hollywood and the film industry—a story of the gruesome thing that emerged from the burial crypt.–WT 1938
On a freezing night, with no shoes on her feet, the little match girl has a ghostly story to tell. Hopefully she won’t judge us all too monstrous…from the grave.–JL
I would not die, and leave no name behind. Three centuries have passed since I quaffed the fatal beverage: another year shall not elapse before, encountering gigantic dangers–warring with the powers of frost in their home–beset by famine, toil, and tempest–I yield this body, too tenacious a cage for a soul which thirsts for freedom, to the destructive elements of air and water–or, if I survive, my name shall be recorded as one of the most famous among the sons of men; and, my task achieved, I shall adopt more resolute means, and, by scattering and annihilating the atoms that compose my frame, set at liberty the life imprisoned within, and so cruelly prevented from soaring from this dim earth to a sphere more congenial to its immortal essence.
When Lazarus left the grave, where, for three days and three nights he had been under the enigmatical sway of death, and returned alive to his dwelling, for a long time no one noticed in him those sinister oddities, which, as time went on, made his very name a terror.
The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but where he lives now is uncertain, for he is dead.–Ambrose Bierce
Jeffrey LeBlanc 