S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Ghosts
I remember last winter there were several young girls of the neighbourhood sitting about the fire with my landlady’s daughters and telling stories of spirits and apparitions. Upon my opening the door the young women broke off their discourse, but my landlady’s daughters telling them that it was nobody but the gentleman (for that is the name which I go by in the neighbourhood, as well as in the family), they went on without minding me. I seated myself by the candle that stood on a table at one end of the room, and, pretending to read a book I took out of my pocket, heard several dreadful stories of ghosts, as pale as ashes, that had stood at the feet of a bed, or walked over a church-yard by moonlight; and of others that had been conjured into the Red Sea for disturbing people’s rest and drawing their curtains at midnight; with many other old women’s fables of the like nature. As one spirit raised another, I observed that at the end of every story the whole company closed their ranks, and crowded about the fire. I took notice in particular of a little boy, who was so attentive to every story, that I am mistaken if he ventures to go to bed by himself this twelvemonth. Indeed, they talked so long, that the imaginations of the whole assembly were manifestly crazed, and, I am sure, will be the worse for it as long as they live…. Were I a father, I should take a particular care to preserve my children from these little horrors of imagination, which they are apt to contract when they are young, and are not able to shake off when they are in years.