operating table, is haunted to death by the dismembered arm. Fiction
shows us various ghosts with half faces, and at least one notable spook
that comes in half. Such ability, it will be granted, must necessarily
increase the haunting power, for if a ghost may send a foot or an arm or
a leg to harry one person, he can dispatch his back-bone or his liver or
his heart to upset other human beings simultaneously in a sectional
haunting at once economically efficient and terrifying.

_The Beast with Five Fingers_, for instance, has a loathsome horror that
a complete skeleton or conventionally equipped wraith could not achieve.
Who can doubt that a bodiless hand leaping around on its errands of evil
has a menace that a complete six-foot frame could not duplicate? Yet, in
Quiller-Couch's _A Pair of Hands_, what pathos and beauty in the thought
of the child hands coming back to serve others in homely tasks! Surely
no housewife in these helpless days would object to being haunted in
such delicate fashion.

Ghosts of to-day have an originality that antique specters lacked. For
instance, what story of the past has the awful thrill in Andreyev's
_Lazarus_, that story of the man who came back from the grave, living,
yet dead, with the horror of the unknown so manifest in his face that
those who looked into his deep eyes met their doom? Present-day writers
skillfully combine various elements of awe with the supernatural, as
madness with the ghostly, adding to the chill of fear which each concept
gives. Wilbur Daniel Steele's _The Woman at Seven Brothers_ is an
instance of that method.

Poe's _Ligeia_, one of the best stories in any language, reveals the
unrelenting will of the dead to effect its desire,--the dead wife
triumphantly coming back to life through the second wife's body. Olivia