An analysis of the ghost motif in some nineteenth and twentieth century short stories

At the lowest point of its descent to inartistic ugliness, the Gothic tale was a gallery crowded with witches, warlocks, lycanthropes, ghouls, ghosts, and devils. Among these horrors that were exhibited in violent, glaring contrast, one motif has survived--the ghost. The world from which it comes, that world about which so much is written from outside its realm and nothing known from within its precincts, has always lured the story-teller to its portals. The problem of the author who traffics in the supernatural is to ensnare the credulity of the reader: to make him see, hear, feel, and even smell that of which he doubts the existence. The unrestrained imagination of the artist envisions two worlds, the material and the spiritual. Man lives in parts of each of them. In each there is a segment over which the predominating influence of strange forces must be acknowledged