Andrew Wyeth, "Perpetual Care," 1961.
... [T]he pale, strained face of a girl dressed in white once seemed to Wyeth to be looking out of the high rear window of the Baptist Church across the St. George River. Wyeth, through binoculars, had been studying this church—an echo of Cushing with its frame structure and cemetery monuments mottle orange by lichen. He investigated and found nobody there. But the powerful impression remained.
Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth, 1968, pg. 104.
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The Sibyl's Leaves, a set of 46 fortune-telling cards published by William Stoddard of New York, 1833, with a lithographic witch illustration by Edward Williams Clay. Via American Antiquarian.
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Vernacular owl-shaped birdhouse, ca. 1900. Via David Schorsch.
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Edgar Allen Poe, from "The Bells," in The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allen Poe, with illustrations by Edmund Dulac, 1912.
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A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women especially, for they were riding saddles of burning nails, and were being lifted in the air by invisible forces and dropped down again onto the points. Walchelin recognised the procession: it was the familia Herlequini, or Hellequin’s rabble, the grim and unquiet crowd mustered by the lord of the dead, about which he had heard many stories.
The account is dated 1 January 1091 and is the earliest extant literary telling of this phantom army, taken down by Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk, from the report of his colleague, the eyewitness. Walchelin related how he thought he wouldn’t be believed if he didn’t bring back proof, so he left his hiding place and tried to catch and mount one of the riderless black horses going by: the stirrup burned his foot and the reins froze his hand. Fifteen years after his experience, the scars remained, the authenticating brand from the other world: Walchelin showed them to the chronicler.
Marina Warner, "Suffering Souls." London Review of Books, June 18, 1998.
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Human and puppet limbs are entwined, and there is a sense, both comforting and disconcerting, of a group-individual, like the shadowy figures who merge with the dark in Goya’s Black Paintings. Each puppet is both itself and a small society, and even the puppets’ materiality is uncanny—they are floating, airy creatures weighted by earthly human spirits. The puppeteers are not the only artists giving the puppets life. On a separate platform to the right of the action, three male chanters sit in a neat row, next to men playing the shamisen, a stringed instrument with a raw and piercing tone which is often used in vocal accompaniment. The chanters give the puppets voice with intense and compressed screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, and remorse—but they themselves slip from our awareness. Their disembodied voices operate like a soundtrack, synchronized with puppet gesture and emotion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, a feverish shake.
Jennifer Homans, "The Puppet Masters." The New Yorker, 11/4/2024.
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But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty.
Virginia Woolf, "A Haunted House."
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Fear seemed to exude from the walls, to dim the mirrors with its clammy breath, to stir shudderingly among the tattered draperies, to impregnate the whole atmosphere as with an essence, a gas, a contagious disease.
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The puppies had a pretty good life, except at night when the ghosts that lived in our house came out of the stone-floored pantry, and down from the big cupboard to the left of the chimney breast. Depend upon it, they were not dripping or ladies or genteel; they were nothing like the ghost of drowned Clara, her sodden blouse frilled to the neck. These were ghosts with filed teeth. You couldn't see them, but you could sense their presence when you saw the dogs' bristling necks, and saw the shudders run down their backbones.
Hilary Mantel, "Destroyed."
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Anno 1670, not far from Cyrencester, was an Apparition: Being demanded, whether a good Spirit, or bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious Perfume and most melodious Twang.
John Aubrey, Miscellanies, 1696.
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