Famous Modern Ghost Stories
By Dorothy Scarborough
Ghosts are the true immortals, and the dead grow more alive all the time. Wraiths have a greater vitality today than ever before. They are far more numerous than at any time in the past, and people are more interested in them. Some persons claim to be acquainted with specific spirits, to speak with them, to carry on correspondence with them, and even some who insist that they are private secretaries to the dead. Others of us mortals, more reserved, are content to keep such distance as we may from even the shadow of a shade. But there’s no getting away from ghosts nowadays, for even if you shut your eyes to them in actual life, you stumble over them in the books you read, you see them on the stage and the screen, and you hear them on the lecture platform. Even a Lodge in any vast wilderness would have the company of spirits. Man’s love for the supernatural, which is one of the most natural things about him, was never more marked than at present. You may go a-ghosting in any company today, and all aspects of literature, novels, short stories, poetry, and drama alike, reflect the shadeless spirit. The latest census of the haunting world shows a vast increase in population, which might be explained on various grounds.
Life is so inconveniently complex nowadays, what with income taxes and other visitations of government, that it is hard for us to have the added risk of wraiths, but there’s no escaping. Many persons of today are in the same mental state as one Mr. Boggs told of in a magazine story, a rural gentleman who was agitated over spectral visitants. He had once talked at a séance with a speaker who claimed to be the spirit of his brother, Wesley Boggs, but who conversed only on blue suspenders, a subject not of vital interest to Wesley in the flesh. “Still,” Mr. Boggs reflected, “I’m not so darn sure!” In answer to a suggestion regarding subliminal consciousness and dual personality as explanations of the strange things that come bolting into life, he said, “It’s crawly any way you look at it. Ghosts inside you are as bad as ghosts outside you.” There are others today who are “not so darn sure!”
One may conjecture diverse reasons for this multitude of ghosts in late literature. Perhaps spooks are like small boys that rush to fires, unwilling to miss anything, and craving new sensations. And we mortals read about them to get vicarious thrills through the safe medium of fiction. The war made sensationalists of us all, and the drab everydayness of mortal life bore us. Man’s imagination, always bigger than his environment, overleaps the barriers of time and space and claims all worlds as eminent domain, so that literature, which he has the power to create, as he cannot create his material surroundings, possesses a dramatic intensity, an epic sweep, unknown in actuality. In the last analysis, man is as great as his daydreams—or his nightmares!
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Dorothy Scarborough
Emily Dorothy Scarborough (January 27, 1878 – November 7, 1935) was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories, and women’s life in the Southwest.
Early life
Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four, she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother’s health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College.
Academics and writing
Even though Scarborough’s writings are identified with Texas, she studied at the University of Chicago and Oxford University and, beginning in 1916, taught literature at Columbia University.
While receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia, she wrote a dissertation, “The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction”. Sylvia Ann Grider writes in a critical introduction that the dissertation “was so widely acclaimed by her professors and colleagues that it was published and it has become a basic reference work”.
Dorothy Scarborough came in contact with many writers in New York, including Edna Ferber and Vachel Lindsay. She taught creative writing classes at Columbia. Among her creative writing students were Eric Walrond and Carson McCullers, who took her first college writing class from Scarborough.
Her most critically acclaimed book, The Wind (first published anonymously in 1925), was later made into a film of the same name starring Lillian Gish.
Bibliography
- Fugitive Verses (1912)
- The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)
- From a Southern Porch (1919)
- Humorous Ghost Stories (1921)
- In the Land of Cotton (1923)
- The Wind (1925)
- The Unfair Sex (serialized, 1925–26)
- Impatient Griselda (1927)
- Can’t Get a Redbird (1929)
- Stretch-Berry Smile (1932)
- Famous Modern Ghost Stories (1921)
- The Story of Cotton (1933)
- Selected Short Stories of Today (1935)
Dorothy Scarborough
