56. SARAH POLGRAIN 390

57. ELEANOR COBHAM, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER 393




INTRODUCTION


In this Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales,
has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real,
describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good.
Perhaps the very difficulty of it has rendered it more tempting to the
writers who have dealt with the subject. His collection, notably varied
and artfully chosen as it is, yet by no means exhausts the literature,
which fills a place apart with its own recognised classics, magic
masters, and dealers in the occult. Their testimony serves to show that
the forms by which men and women are haunted are far more diverse and
subtle than we knew. So much so, that one begins to wonder at last if
every person is not liable to be "possessed." For, lurking under the
seeming identity of these visitations, the dramatic differences of their
entrances and appearances, night and day, are so marked as to suggest
that the experience is, given the fit temperament and occasion,
inevitable.

One would even be disposed, accepting this idea, to bring into the
account, as valid, stories and pieces of literature not usually
accounted part of the ghostly canon. There are the novels and tales
whose argument is the tragedy of a haunted mind. Such are Dickens'