Rudyard Kipling




_My Own True Ghost Story_

As I came through the Desert thus it was--
As I came through the Desert.
_The City of Dreadful Night._


Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays
and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in
building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the
real insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will
insist upon treating his ghosts--he has published half a workshopful of
them--with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some
cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from
a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave
reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby
corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then
they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of
women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk,
or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer