ghost of any other animal would tend to have a comic connotation. Other
animals in fiction have power of magic--notably the cat--but they don't
appear as spirits. But the dog is seen as a pathetic symbol of
faithfulness, as a tragic sufferer, or as a terrible revenge ghost. Dogs
may come singly or in groups--Edith Wharton has five of different sorts
in _Kerfol_--or in packs, as in Eden Phillpotts's _Another Little Heath
Hound_.

An illuminating instance of the power of fiction over human faith is
furnished by the case of Arthur Machen's _The Bowmen_, included here.
This story it is which started the whole tissue of legendry concerning
supernatural aid given the allied armies during the war. This purely
fictitious account of an angel army that saved the day at Mons was so
vivid that its readers accepted it as truth and obstinately clung to
that idea in the face of Mr. Machen's persistent and bewildered
explanations that he had invented the whole thing. Editors wrote leading
articles about it, ministers preached sermons on it, and the general
public preferred to believe in the Mons angels rather than in Arthur
Machen. Mr. Machen has shown himself an artist in the supernatural, one
whom his generation has not been discerning enough to appreciate. Some
of his material is painfully morbid, but his pen is magic and his
inkwell holds many dark secrets.

In this collection I have attempted to include specimens of a few of the
distinctive types of modern ghosts, as well as to show the art of
individual stories. Examples of the humorous ghosts are omitted here, as
a number of them will be brought together in _Humorous Ghost Stories_,
the companion volume to this. The ghost lover who reads these pages will
think of others that he would like to see included--for I believe that
readers are more passionately attached to their own favorite ghost tales