"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blamed if my suddenly aroused and somewhat bemused senses played tricks with me, and my startled imagination began to conjure up the gruesome stories I had heard of weird visitants, and ghostly beings, heard but seldom seen, on the East Anglian meres and broads? Then again came the remembrance of the shriek or cry I had fancied I heard earlier in the night, and with a shudder I thought: "How ghastly if it should be the drowned body of him whose cry I had heard, knocking thus in grisly ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... with shame, as it abased me then, that for hours, while the darkness fell and the stars began their march over the tree-tops, the ghostly intruder kept watch with me as a bodily presence mocking us both, benumbing my efforts to sorrow. . . . Nor did it fade until calm came to me, recalled by the murmur of unseen waters. Listening to them I let my thoughts ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... mother, smiling at his enthusiasm, "that since you seem to like the ghostly part, you would be more than ever pleased with the attic ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... effect of producing in her that maddening fear of the dark which ghostly tales induce, and now he fainted again. She was afraid to cry for help, afraid even of the rustle of her own garments. She did not know how far she was from any house. And it seemed to her that this lover, who was almost a ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... and seeing him changed of colour and conduct asked him, "What is with thee to do, and what ill hast thou to rue that thy case and complexion are so changed to view?" "O Fakir," answered the other, "verily a matter of marvel hath betided me and I know not how to act therein." Quoth the ghostly man, "And what may that be?" whereupon the Merchant related to him all his affair first and last, and how he had heard a Voice saying to him, "In very deed thy daughter shall conceive after unlawful fashion by the King's son of Al-Irak." The Darwaysh was surprised on ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... raged and all was dim through a ghostly, whirling pall. The season of drifting snow had come, and Neale's winter work ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... through the fog on our right. Nothing was visible through the gloom, but we quickly hove to, and turned our canoe in the direction from which the feu-de-joie had sounded. As we approached the shore human forms began to appear in ghostly outline, more and more distinct, until they resolved themselves into a company of Indians, who were delighted to see us, and had been on the look-out for days. They had come sixty miles from the interior, and had camped on that point jutting out into the river, for the purpose ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... noticed a woman at the other side of the enclosure. Remembering how intensely superstitious the colored folks were said to be, he wondered at one of them coming alone into the grove so nearly darkened by the dense covering of pine, and with only the ghostly white of the tombs ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... its extension. His tone toward his opponents was correspondingly bitter. When he first arrived in Boston, after his speech, and spoke to the great crowd in front of the Revere House, he said, "I shall support no agitations having their foundations in unreal, ghostly abstractions." Slavery had now become "an unreal, ghostly abstraction," although it must still have appeared to the negroes something very like a hard fact. There were men in that crowd, too, who had not forgotten the noble ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... a dull September afternoon, and the clouds had settled thick round the chapel, which is never very light, and is nearly 4000 feet above the sea. I waited till such twilight as made it hopeless that more detail could be got—and a queer ghostly place enough it was to wait in—but after giving the plate an exposure of fifty minutes, I saw I could get no more, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... in order to avoid Kruger's Post Farm, which was occupied by the Boers. This took the column over some millraces, a biggish jump for the men. The mules, having been relieved of their loads, were man-handled across. Once over these and then a wade through a stream knee deep, the ghostly column again halted. It was now 3.30 a.m. The foot of the low hills behind which was the laager, had been reached, and the officers were ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... maid to meet her at a certain place not far from the house, exactly at the ghostly and dreadful hour of twelve, began to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... predominates and the zhing (or zing) in the pho or animal soul. At death the hwun (Or spiritual soul) wanders away, ascending, and the pho (the root of the Tibetan word Pho-hat) descends and is changed into a ghostly shade (the shell). Dr. Medhurst thinks that "the Kwei Shans" (see "Theology of the Chinese," pp. 10-12) are "the expanding and contracting principles of human life!" "The Kwei Shans" are brought about by the dissolution of the human frame—and consist of the expanding and ascending Shan ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... was shining brightly, giving to the dead whitened trees on the little island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore a pair of ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... in silence, and once more planted herself before him, her slim figure looking ghostly between the fading light of the departing day and the yellow flame ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... found it to be irresistible. "An archdeacon," wrote Mr. Carlyle afterwards to me, "with his own venerable lips, repeated to me, the other night, a strange profane story: of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days any ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... work. Each led his band of coureurs de bois, white Indians, without discipline, and scarcely capable of it, but brave and accustomed to the woods. On their left were the Iroquois converts from the missions of Saut St. Louis and the Mountain of Montreal, fighting under the influence of their ghostly prompters against their own countrymen. On the right were the pagan Indians from the west. The woods were full of these painted spectres, grotesquely horrible in horns and tail; and among them flitted the black robe of Father Engelran, the Jesuit of Michillimackinac. ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... the cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Sleep!—the ghostly winds are blowing; No moon's abroad; no star is glowing; The river is deep, and the tide is flowing To the land where you and I are going! We are going afar, Beyond moon or star, To the land ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... heard differs from yours," observed the Duke of Richmond: "it runs that the spirit by which the forest is haunted is a wood-demon, who assumes the shape of the ghostly hunter, and seeks to tempt or terrify the keepers to sell their souls ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was vague and ghostly, but to eyes accustomed to northern whiteness it was full of suggestion, full of secrecy; to nostrils accustomed to keen, rarefied air there was something poignant and delicious in the scent of turned earth, ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... to the Vosges, there are hundreds of thousands of graves where British soldiers keep the ghostly bivouac of the dead. They gave their young lives on the soil of France to save France, and when the great result is finally accomplished, a grateful world will never forget that "fidelity even unto ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... very mercifully awoke, and lay, for a while, blinking in the ghostly radiance of the moon, which was flooding in at the window directly upon me. Now whether it was owing to the vividness of my dream, I know not, but as I lay, there leapt up within me a sudden conviction that somebody was indeed standing ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the images, supine, Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay: And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray: 40 A crucifix of dim and ghostly white Surmounted the large ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost—not to my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own—by my stopping however idly for it. The day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... strange events of the evening, Paul Lanier lay awake all night after return from his visit with Agnes Randall. Longer he thought, deeper became the mystery. He mutters: "Not one weird circumstance alone, but such grouping of ghostly coincidents! Being ushered into the private room of Sir Charles was explained by Agnes, but why that fitful glare of lights? How came that copy of London Press, with underscored reference to the Thames ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... the ghostly narrative by a shrill little scream and making for the door, to Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, without the least ceremony. "You freeze the very marrow of my bones. Good-morning!" She coolly tossed the Oriental Cashmere Robe into Mrs. Wragge's expansive lap and ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the looking-glass at the side the reflection of part of the house, stalls, dress-circle, boxes, rows of faces, pretty dresses, bonnets, all as it were drowned in a blue haze, and presenting the colourless ghostly appearance of things dimly seen under water. During the entr'acte came the ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Earth. Men were now building it. Presently it would float as Joe dreamed of it, and where the sun struck it, it would be unbearably bright, and where there were shadows, they would be abysmally black—except, perhaps, when earthshine from the planet below would outline it in a ghostly fashion. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... on my heart. The room in which they were, communicating with that in which he stood, was only lighted by the fire. Ada sat at the piano; Richard stood beside her, bending down. Upon the wall, their shadows blended together, surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught from the unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects. Ada touched the notes so softly and sang so low that the wind, sighing away to the distant hills, was as audible as the music. The mystery of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... only with difficulty caught the terrible cuts of his weapon upon his shield. Like a gold-scaled dragon the Mohammedan swung himself round his antagonist with an agility which, with his long flowing white beard, was ghostly and horrible to witness. Heimbert was prepared to meet him on all sides, ever keeping a watchful eye for some opening in the scales made by the violence of his movements. At last it happened as he desired; between the arm and breast ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great drawing-room, once the dormitory of the monks, is now a splendid apartment richly decorated; above the chimney is a fine portrait ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... moon-misted sea came a procession of ghostly sails. Every ship seemed to bear troops of white-robed maidens and, as they floated past, they gaily waved their hands to me, calling for comradeship and understanding, a wide-open heart, freedom ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Indian file, the chief as before at the head of the line and Blackstaffe at the rear. The moon had now faded a little, and the light over the forest turned from silver to gray. Many of the stars had withdrawn, but on sped the ghostly procession of seven. No, not of seven only, but of eight, because behind them at a distance of two hundred yards always followed a youth of great build, and of wilderness instinct and powers that none of them ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... pines, for acres upon acres; sufficient, I should think, to furnish all the navies of the world, present and yet unborn, with spars. What a solemn and wintry aspect these northern forests have; what weird murmurs and ghostly sighs haunt their virgin glades. Sometimes in the midst of this almost black greenness, some forest monarch, bleached and scared by the icy breath of generations of Siberian winters, stands out with skeleton distinctness. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... silence. Piotr came to tell the heir that his old room was prepared; but Ivan still sat beside the fire, smoking, lost in vague conjectures. It was as well that he had not gone to bed. Precisely at midnight—the ghostly hour—the older doctor ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... sky there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northern lights, pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines, like aigrettes set in a band of silver. Then these slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... lived in his loneliness and cursed curses that were prayers, and here for near five decades he read and thought and dreamed and wrote. Here the spirits of Cromwell and Frederick hovered; here that pitiful and pitiable long line of ghostly partakers in the Revolution answered to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... seemingly phantom host ever quivering before him in the tremulous heated air against the cloudless horizon. Now all his energies were bent toward finding the way that led to the camp by the water-holes, but sense of locality seemed to have left him, and the ghostly company which hung so persistently on his flanks gave no indication of direction, but merely followed as before they had fled. One by one the Count's soldiers succumbed, and when at last the forty spears hedged ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-spangled banner. It was ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens. And yet there are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds, beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only (timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive again for ever. They are known to be healthy and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time to bring in the clothes before leaving, but a willing neighborhood had guarded the premises for them, so Clothes-line Park was shrouded in a whiteness that looked ghostly in ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... in the streets wandering from ghostly passage to passage, one hears no step but that of the watchman with staff and lantern. Presently there appears, far off, a light like a low-flying firefly, as it comes nearer, it is seen to proceed from the Mellah lamp of open-work brass ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... fog curtain, of ghostly outline, a jutting cliff appeared and Sammy luffed slightly. On both sides of us the seas were dashing up some tremendous rocks, but directly ahead there was an opening between the combers that hurled themselves aloft, roaring and impotent, to fall back ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... longer daylight when they came out of the little apartment in the Rue Spontini. Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered the carriage with Therese. Close together, they rolled among the vague shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around them ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... the Black Watch's ghostly piper that plays proudly when the men of the Black Watch do well, and ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... from the hill-top to which we have removed, we notice more how the appearance of the mountains changes with the changes of the sky. This morning they were all rose-color; and are now so ghostly, the snow like shrouds about them. Before, we had only single chains and solitary peaks; here, we look into the bosom of a mountainous country, and every change in the light reveals something new. Where we have many times looked without ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... next on tip-toe. He stood in the dining-room, before the fireplace. He had sat where he now stood on so many evenings of winter days whose suns had set with his youth. The barren hearth was full of ghostly flames which struck a chill into his heart. There was the room opening to the left, which Mabel and Vi, the little twin daughters of his former chief, used to occupy. He seemed to hear the laughter of the children echoing from some far-off paradise of the past, before the portal of which ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... for his help, and they two stood there, some yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city of ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... and sudden fell, As though some mighty wizard Had hushed them with a spell; And every sound was muffled, And every soldier's tread Fell lightly as a mother's 'Round her baby's cradle-bed; And rank, and file, and column, So softly by they swept, It seemed a ghostly army Had passed him as he slept; But mightier than enchantment Was that with magic move— The spell that hushed their voices— Deep ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... through its crannies and the creaking of its beams and rafters become strangely like the tones of the human voice, or thundering laughter, or heavy footsteps treading the deserted chambers. It is as if the echoes of half a century were revived. Such were the ghostly sounds that roared and murmured in our ears when I took leave of the circle round the fireside of the Province House and, plunging down the doorsteps, fought my way homeward against a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a child who discovers some curious phenomenon of nature, Agatha tried her voice again and again, listening, between whiles, to the ghostly tones reverberating among the pines. She sang the slow majestic "Lascia ch'io pianga," which has tested every singer's voice since Haendel wrote it; and then, curious, she tried the effect of the aerial sounding-board with quick, brilliant runs up and down the full range of the voice. But the effect ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... quarters throwing up dirt and pebbles, the air became so ominously and deathly still that the little girl and Sassy fairly gasped for breath. Over the grass tops the heat halted and lay in long, faintly visible waves, like a ghostly sea. And in the west there began to arise, silently and swiftly, a vast mountain of peculiar, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... rattling the window-sashes, and swaying the white curtains in a ghostly way. Later, a gray fog stole softly over the roofs, soothing the wind-roughened surfaces, and inwrapping all things in an uncertain light and a measureless peace. She lay there very quiet—for all her troubles, still a very pretty bride. ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... it still," he said, "drip! drip! faster and plainer than ever. That ghostly dropping of water is the last and the surest of the fatal signs which have told of your father's and your brother's deaths to-night, and I know from the place where I hear it—the foot of the bed I lie on—that it is a warning to me of my own approaching end. I am called where my son and ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... ill. The flakes of the first snow of the season were whirling past the windows—no more on autumn leaves they looked, no more on far-off bare but azure mountains, feigning summer. The distant ranges were ghostly white. The skeleton woods near at hand were stark and black, and trembled with sudden starts, and strove wildly with the winds, and were held in an inexorable fate, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... a truck," suggested Henri, peering into the gloom, and seeing the ghostly outline of twenty or more trucks which stood upon the rails in a siding quite close to them. ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... Elsie, therefore, was surprised, when they passed through the door-way to the street, at the apparition of a man covered from head to foot in a long robe of white serge, with a high-peaked cap of the same material drawn completely down over his head and face. Two round holes cut in this ghostly head-gear revealed simply two black glittering eyes, which shone with that singular elfish effect which belongs to the human eye when removed from its appropriate and natural accessories. As they passed out, the figure rattled a box on which was painted an image of despairing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... distinguish one object from another. Then slowly my eyes adjusted themselves to the change, and, taking one uncertain step forward, I came suddenly face to face with a Capuchin priest appearing almost ghastly with his long, pale, ascetic countenance, and ghostly gray robe ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... last long. Major Kent drove into the town in his pony trap and pulled up opposite the statue. He called to Father McCormack, who had satisfied himself about Mary Ellen's appearance, and was prowling round the statue, making mild jokes about its ghostly appearance. Doyle detected a note of urgency in the Major's voice, and hurried across the square, reaching the pony trap just as Father ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... have watched his vast creation Loom through its smoke—the spectre-haunted Thane, The Sisters at their ghostly invocations, The jealous ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... perverse and unaccountable feeling which causes a heart-broken man at a dear friend's funeral to see something irresistibly comical in a red-nosed or one-eyed undertaker, I receive your communication with ghostly facetiousness; though on a moment's reflection I find better cause for consolation in the hope that, relieved from your most trying and painful duties, you will now have leisure to return to pursuits ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... comrades, who in their madness leaped into the water and were floated ashore in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, and death ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... for the removal of corpses from the field to the North. There were quantities of spirits, consigned mainly to Quartermasters, but evidently the property of certain Shylocks, who watched the barrels greedily. An embalmer was also on board, with his ghostly implements. He was a sallow man, shabbily attired, and appeared to look at all the passengers as so many subjects for the development of his art. He was called "Doctor" by his admirers, and conversed in the blandest manner of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... "Mohabdi! Mohabdi!" When the forceps came near, he cried: "Don't put them in!" And after this he maintained a silence made up of dignity and indolence. During the day he was to be seen wandering about the wards, holding up his ghostly muffled arm with his sound hand. In the evening, he learned to play draughts, because it is a serious, silent game, and ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... probably employ a "bird chorus," the use of talking-birds as messengers; that they would repeat the plots current in other countries, and display the same non-Christian idea of death and of the future world (see "The Lyke-wake Dirge"), the same ghostly superstitions and stories of metamorphosis, and the same belief in elves and fairies, as are found in the ballads of Greece, of Provence, of Brittany, Denmark and Scotland. We shall now examine ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... thoroughly terrified savages, who by this time realised that to remain in the canoe was but to court death. Yet what else could they do? There was but one alternative, and that was—to jump overboard, and trust to their ability to swim to the island that loomed ghostly in the moonlight ahead. And this they did, one after the other—the laggards being stimulated by another shot or two from Leslie's rifle—until the canoe, a fine big craft of about five feet beam and forty feet long, fitted ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... organ, and sitting there alone in the little glow, practice the hymns and chants for the service. The whitewashed arches retreated into darkness, the sound of the organ and the organ-pedals died away upon the unalterable stillness of the church, there were faint, ghostly noises in the tower, and then the music swelled out ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... water. The "L" trains crawl over the Wells Street bridge and the water below them becomes alive with a moving silver image. For a moment the reflection of the "L" trains in the river seems like a ghostly waterfall. Then it changes and becomes something else. What? The light reflections in the dark water are baffling. It is a game to stand on the bridge and make up similes about them. They look like this, like that, like something else. Like golden pillars, like Chinese writing, like monotonous ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Of all species of ghostly phenomena, that commonly known as "haunted houses" appeals most to the ordinary person. There is something very eerie in being shut up within the four walls of a house with a ghost. The poor human being is placed at such a disadvantage. If we know that a gateway, ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... the Channel, to and from the anchorage at Spithead. Some were low in the water and venomous looking, with bulbous turrets and tiny masts. Others were long and stately, with great lowering hulks and broad expanse of canvas. Occasionally a foreign service gunboat would pass, white and ghostly, like some tired seabird flapping its way home. It was one of Kate's few amusements to watch the passing and repassing of the vessels, and to speculate upon whence they had come and whither ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... called to me that day with a hundred faint voices and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no certain message for me, but the message ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is one to do, when a friend is so pressing? Now, as to going over everything thoroughly, it is out of the question; it would take us years. Meanwhile, I should have the hue-and-cry out after me, you would be neglecting your ghostly work, Pluto would lose the shades that you ought to be shipping over all that time, and Aeacus would never take a single toll, and would be proportionately furious. We have only to think, therefore, of contriving you a general view of what is ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... was carried out in a ghostly manner, in order, without a whisper, without a sound, through forests, ravines, and valleys. A tortuous and ill-omened march. A stealthy gliding ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... was the first to find a solution of Tchitchikof's conduct. He asserted that Tchitchikof, in his love for money, had committed some fraud or some misdeed to obtain it, and that his conscience smiting him, he had sought ghostly solace from some minister, by whom he had been ordered, as adequate penance, to get off a certain portion per annum in bad bargains—thus at once doing good to the sellers and torturing the avaricious ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... hands are light, they are singing with emptiness. Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . . What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; And hew rock out of the earth, and build ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element—real though slight—is subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the sunny air he springs; To his timid mate he calls; With dangling legs and fluttering wings On the tangled smilax falls; He mutters, he shrieks— A hopeless cry; You think that he seeks In peace to die, But pity him not; 't is the ghostly chat, An imp if there is one, be sure ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... from her brow and cast it from her, and, thereafter, laid by her rings and jewels, and coming to the open casement fell there upon her knees and reached forth her pale hands to where, across the valley, the dark forest stretched away, ghostly ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... scout told him of a change in their surroundings. He felt rather than saw the difference. They had crossed the sand belt, and the contour of the prairie was rising. Then the Cimarron was near! Even as the conviction took shape, the ghostly outline of a small elevation loomed through the murk. He stared at it scarce believing, imagining a delusion, and then sent his cracked voice back in a shout on ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... answer back to him. His heart grew colder and colder, when suddenly the cloud above him was rent in a dozen places, and lightning flashed through the valley, and the thunder rolled over the echoing mountains. In the lurid glare of the lightning Cuglas saw a hundred ghostly forms sweeping towards him, uttering as they came nearer and nearer shrieks so terrible that the silence of death could more easily be borne. Cuglas turned to escape, but they hemmed him round, and pressed their ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... whispering gallery of ghostly fears in which her life crouched, Michael's voice spoke to her also. She could hear his grave, low tones. "Think ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... afternoon when we went again, but this time we took the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far as the navyyard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among the vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships. The grass grew in the Kittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and those pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than they would have been if resonant with saw and hammer. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wherewith she was pressing out the seams of Lady Margaret's night-gown. On the second occasion, she fled along the kitchen hall, shrieking piteously, and preceded by Doll, the kitchen wench, the latter having in her seeming a certain ghostly appearance, as she was clad only in her shift, which the draughts in the hall inflated to a great size. The poor maid fled affrighted into her room and locked the door behind her; yet when I did essay to assuage the terror of Mistress Butter, identifying ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... and the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... lingered by the side of the deep old road where this robbery was committed, to cast wistful glances into its mysterious windings; and when night deepened the shadows of the trees, have urged my horse on his journey, from a vague apprehension of a visit from the ghostly highwayman. And then there was the Bollin, with its shelvy banks, which Turpin cleared at a bound; the broad meadows over which he winged his flight; the pleasant bowling-green of the pleasant old inn at Hough, where he produced his ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... street a derelict house rears ghostly debris of roofs and chimney-stacks upward to the sky. A tiny square of yellow light, blinking like a giant eye through a curtainless window, pierced the wall of the house. Roger pointed ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... we feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal des Ursins chronicles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... return home. On his arrival at the castle, as he was passing up the stairs, he heard a footstep behind, and on turning round he perceived the same apparition. He hastily entered his room, and bolted, locked, and barred the door, but to his horror and surprise this offered no impediment to his ghostly visiter, for the door sprang open at his touch, and he entered the room! The apparition was seen by various others, all of whom asserted it bore the strongest resemblance to their deceased master! One gentleman spoke to him, and the spirit told him "that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... nun-like ghostly face hung before him, stronger in outline the farther time widened between ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... away, regarding him breathlessly, hatted, gloved, all in white, one hand resting lightly on the center-table, one folded about the crook of a dainty draggled parasol. The match threw a small and ghostly light, but he saw her, and ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... grinding and crumbling to pieces against the faces of the cliffs. A cloud of snow-spray, rising like a thick white mist, filled the whole ravine—as if to conceal the work of ruin that was going on—and underneath this ghostly veil, the crushing and tearing for some moments continued. Then all at once the fearful noises ceased, and only the screaming of the birds, and the howling of beasts, disturbed ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... glided by little restaurants where the Venetians, in olden days, talked liberty for themselves and death to the Austrians, and at length they came out upon the Grand Canal where the Rialto curves its ancient blocks of marble and stalactites gleam ghostly overhead. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... haze in the distance. In the sea, just below him, several heads of swimmers moved. One boy was "making death." He floated on his back with his eyes closed and his arms extended. His body, giving itself without resistance to every movement of the water, looked corpselike and ghostly. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... on Midsummer Eve of this year, and as the hour grew later, and nine o'clock drew on, the irradiation of the daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of indistinctness. Imagination could trace upon the trunks and boughs strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights; the surfaces of the holly-leaves would here and there shine like peeping eyes, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... it that says, "After all, let a bad man take what pains he may to push it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unique possession for a bad man to have?" During the time that had elapsed between the death and burial of his father and wife, Philip had become thoroughly acquainted with the truth of ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... appeared. Gone was the far sweeping expanse of forest-clad mountain side, stretching off to the sunrise; in its place lay a level space closed in by substantial buildings of marble, granite and brick—the Art Museum, Latin School and clustered hospitals,—their walls changing from ghostly gray to growing rose and gold. She drew a comfortable dressing gown—the gift of her new friend—about her girlish form, and sat down by the window in the familiar posture with her chin on her cupped hands. By Miss Merriman's description of the view which the window gave upon she recognized ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... laid by some upon the simple declaration of this man, who in all probability died in the faith of a roman catholick. This, however, I am apt to think, will not disparage his declaration in the opinion of some great men at home, even tho he did not make his confession to a ghostly physician. ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... never still. And with their yapping came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora, like the song of a vast piece of mechanism in the still farther north. Toward this Wapi turned his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just beyond the ghostly pale of vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had slunk out and around it, cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had caught its smells and its sounds; he had come near enough to hear the voices of men, and those voices ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... place was weird and death-like; there she stood in her loveliness, as if just attired for some merry-making; her rosy lips seemed ready to break out into song and laughter and shout, to startle this ghostly scene. ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... church stood a large crucifix still undamaged. The roof had gone, and the moonlight flooded the ruins through the broken Gothic windows. To the left, ploughed up with shells, were the tombs of the civilian cemetery, and the whole place was ghostly and uncanny. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the church to the subdued rustle of Sunday silks and the whisper of Sunday voices. At the door some one shook hands with Callandar and remarked in a ghostly whisper that it was a fine day. A grave young man, in black, led them to a pew half way down the aisle. Most of the pews were already full, the latest comers showing slight signs of hurry; and as they seated themselves the bell stopped and ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer—balmy sleep—but did not get it—a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and should ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... expressed the negative stress of conscience, the "thou shalt not" of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom. Socrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a message from heaven. He taught a feeble voice—senseless like all ghostly voices—to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element within himself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for some external sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man is obviously so small a part of the world, that he could reasonably subordinate reason ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... night, and the Adventurer made extremely slow progress, a leadsman at the bow calling off the depth of water, and a huge light, rather ingeniously arranged, casting a finger of radiance along the ghostly shore line. With no marks of guidance on either bank, the wheelsman felt his uncertain passage upward, advancing so cautiously progress was scarcely noticeable, and I could frequently distinguish the voice of the anxious captain from the upper deck, above the hiss of the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... not like about the cavern was that it had innumerable passages and windings about, and odd places, with dark holes, and ghostly-looking corners. I was not satisfied until I had explored them all, blocking up narrow little slits, and doing all I could to rout out anything that might be harbouring there. There was one passage very long and steep, the entrance to it out of the cavern was so narrow ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... in the face of this, he turned sick at the thought of going forward to the certain annihilation awaiting him in that ghostly wilderness of mist and wet and wreckage ahead. On the other hand, how in God's name could he keep from going, he asked himself, when the blood of innocents was calling on every side! He felt again the "something strong within him ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... and drew nearer, and she stood waiting passively, as if daring him to touch her again; but he stooped and peered into her face. The night was not dark and in the ghostly moonlight he could see the cold anger ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... In a very few moments something of an unusual and ghostly appearance—so much only I could discover of what afterwards became a very familiar sort of vehicle—was waiting for me alongside the platform. The only means of getting into it was through an opening directly in front. Towards this I was encouraged to ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... thunder of the approaching train, and were in time to see the gates of the level-crossing at the end of the platform swing silently open as if by ghostly hands, till their red lanterns blocked the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... in its place he saw the stern brow, and gleaming garments, and drawn flaming sword of the Avenger. And then he was in a great wood alone, and wandering, when the well-known voice called his name, and entreated him to turn from that evil place; and he longed to turn,—but, whenever he tried, ghostly hands seemed to wave him back again, and irresistible cords to drag him into the dark forest, amid the sound of mocking laughs. Then he was sinking, sinking, sinking into a gulf, deep and darker even than the inner ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... descendants of the Prophet, wearing monster green turbans and green kammerbunds; the women are dressed in white throughout—white socks, white pantalettes, and white shrouds; they move silently about, more like ghostly visitants than human beings. Distinctly different types of people from the majority are sometimes met with—full-bearded, very dark-skinned men, whose bared breasts betray the fact that they are little less ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... a wild glare far into the depths of the great, black, silent woods. The trees seem to stand out like startled giants, gazing at the unusual scene; and all above and around the frightened shadows lurk, in ghostly boughs, behind dark trunks, among the deep grasses, and in hollows of the black morass. And the darkness of the night overhangs the army like a vast ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... was burned down, but the place has been haunted. I, myself, good gentlemen, have heard ghostly music, and I swear ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... always learned law-doctors and ghostly confessors to strengthen and to absolve them, they could never expect anything but broken faith and contempt ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one'? To this 'mystic or secondary impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august soul-exalting echo.' Has anything that has been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... transfigured in glorious array. Now the last of the twilight purple has vanished, the stars begin to shine, and all trace of the day is gone. Looking across the fiord the water seems perfectly black, and the two great glaciers are seen stretching dim and ghostly into the shadowy mountains now darkly massed against ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... know, no doubt, How quickly such news flies— Throughout the place, From "Higgses Chase" Proceeded ghostly cries. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... shaken with nervousness while she read her aunt's letter aloud, but Quentyns held the sheet of thin paper steadily. As the sentences fell from his lips, his full tones seemed to put new meaning into them—the ghostly terrors died out of Hilda's heart. When her husband laid down the sheet of paper, and turned to her with a triumphant smile, she could not help smiling back at him ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... window in the second story, and glanced across the desolate, bare forest, which, with its snowy mantle, had a ghostly, uncanny look. ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... close chamber. It should seem they had drunk deeply before they died here—perhaps they had collected the last liquids, and resolved to perish when they had once more feasted: for there was wine still in some of the vessels, nay, in one there was water; and the ghostly shapes were adorned and fantastically covered with jewels and velvet, and all sort of rare and exquisite ornaments. Some were still on chairs, some fallen forward on the table, some prostrate, as if they had lain down to sleep. There were fragments of shivered glass on the floor; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... loftier Brother shall be King, High-priest be thou to Brahma unrevealed, While thy white sanctity forever sealed In icy silence leaves desire congealed. In ghostly ministrations to the sun, And to the mendicant stars and the moon-nun, Be holy still, till East to West has run, And till no sacrificial suffering On any shrine is left to ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... so sad and solemn, that things meant in jest are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become dreadful earnest,—gayly dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is laid off utterly without regard to human consideration, and serves no purpose save as a means of defining voting boundaries and limiting the spheres of constables and sheriff's deputies—a mere ghostly phantom of a social entity that we need not consider ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... mine, seemed to nod imperceptibly above the ghostly grey of my sleeping-suit. It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... and pleasant murmur Of its subsiding, As the pulse of the storm beats firmer, And the steady rain Drops into a cadenced chiding. Deep-breathing rain, The sad and ghostly noise Wherewith thou dost complain,— Thy plaintive, spiritual voice, Heard thus at close of day Through vaults of twilight-gray,— Doth vex me with sweet pain! And still my soul is fain To know the secret of that yearning Which in thine utterance ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop |
