ghosts

I bolted upright in my bed, gasping for air and still feeling his touch on my hand. I could feel him watching me. I could feel him waiting for me.

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.

Banks frown when employees torch the home of their principal account holder.

I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.

And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?''Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's wife, 'wha would investigate, as ye call it, a thing that nobody believes in? Ye would be the laughing-stock of a' the country-side, as my man says.''But you believe in it,' I said, turning upon her hastily. The woman was taken by surprise. She made a step backward out of my way.'Lord, Cornel, how ye frichten a body! Me! there's awful strange things in this world. An unlearned person doesna ken what to think. But the minister and the gentry they just laugh in your face. Inquire into the thing that is not! Na, na, we just let it be.' ("The Open Door")

You tell me the dead are coming through a crack in my barn, but I shouldn__ worry?

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population of a city or country will just happen to look in the mirror at the same time, and from then on there was a city in the sky, as all cities are if we consider that the sky reaches to the ground, and this city, too, thought it was alive, and the candles walked off by themselves.

Hazel frowned. "Why that one?""You don't see the ghost?" Frank asked."Ghost?" Nico asked.Okay... if Frank was seeing a ghost that the Underworld kids couldn't see, something was definitely wrong.

If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God.

It was past dark when I reached the city and I__ mostly shoved my ghosts back into their graves. I let the gray mare pick her own pace and browse in the grain fields along the way.

Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?""I don't know. Maybe. Yes.""Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be.""Yes," Kirsten said, "that's exactly it.

I__ tired. Dead tired. So tired I can barely stay awake to write this. After helping Mr Bircher search for his head all night, I__ a little annoyed too. Dad doesn__ help. He doesn__ know what it's like for a girl my age, trying to fit in at school as much as possible, and trying to fit in all the dead people. It__ not easy being a soul helper.

...his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking

Turns out there__ a reason smoking is not allowed on construction sites.

There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations__he angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts.

Every ghost has a story. Monsters are nothing without mythology.

Ghosts are laid to rest when injustices are righted, when their duties are fulfilled. But my mother's duty is to make me happy so long as I live. So there is not rest for her, and no escape for me. I will be happy and happy until it kills me.

I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.