Machen #AScareADay
Mind over matter; will over flesh--statements of truth? Or might reason & will be transmuted by ingesting a peculiar powder?
The powder is analyzed chemically, broken into essential elements that reveal, to the horror of the witnesses to its effects, humankind's primordial core.

The title of the poem implies that this mysterious woman is a witch, but all her talk of endless wandering makes me think that she might be in that class of Cursed Immortals like we saw in “The Spectre Bride” earlier this week. Has she come to collect a soul?

#AScareADay
3/3

The speaker of the poem is clearly no scholar of #AScareADay texts, or they would know that acquiescing to a ghost bride is never a good idea.
We don’t know what happens after the speaker ill-advisedly carries her in, except that their hearth was lit nevermore…

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Day 9 of #AScareADay is “The Witch” by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge.

In this short and sweet poem, a mysterious woman begs to be let inside someone’s house. But more than just a verbal invitation like a vampire needs, she requests to be carried over the threshold like a bride.

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Coleridge #AScareADay
"The Witch" seems to be a poem of supernatural possession b/c of the 2 different 1st-person narrators:
* the walker in the snow (stanzas 1 & 2);
* the dweller in the house (st. 3).
The possession is signified by the repetition of "lift me [later "her"] over the threshold".
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Now, she has spent the undeterminable time since that day watching over her beloved and yearning to communicate. Yet eventually she is “called” and “beckoned” away by some greater force.

I’d much rather be haunted by this ghostly lover than the one from “The Cold Embrace”!

#AScareADay
4/4

Death also seems to cause a kind of restlessness. As much as the narrator wanted to stay and comfort her beloved on the morning she died, she felt compelled to rush outdoors and flit about to the different places she loved to spend time before ending up before an unnamed Presence.

#AScareADay
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The prose is dreamlike as the spirit has a vague and unfocused sense of time, shifting between tenses. “Would she? Does she? Will she?”

Death does not seem so bad, except that we can sense the narrator’s frustration with not being able to communicate with her beloved.

#AScareADay
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Day 8 of #AScareADay is “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a gorgeously written and heart-wrenching tale of love after death.

The ghostly narrator has returned to the side of the woman she loves to try to tell her about the afterlife, but “Death is dumb, for Life is deaf!”

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For today's #AScareADay read, we read 'Since I died' by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

It's a sad and beautiful tale written with a quiet, haunting desperation.

You can read it here

www.steve-calvert.co.uk/since-i-died...

2/2 Phelps #AScareADay
Pondering the ending:
*Who is the Presence? Former or unrequited love?
*What do the narrator's unspoken words mean?
Maybe: What's not recognized when alive stays forever unspeakable?
If we don't speak what's on our mind & heart while living, it will remain eternally unspoken?

Phelps #AScareADay
The narrator, a soul released, ponders her corpse's physicality before leaving (earthly) home.
She encounters a Presence ["P"], whom she describes in intimate ways.
The Presence stays silent. The narrator is mournful & mute, but wants to say "Death is dumb, for Life is deaf!"
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Today (well... yesterday now), we read Amelia Edward's 'In The Confessional' for #AScareADay

There's a good simple story in here somewhere, a tasty kernel surrounded by way too many descriptions of trees, flowers, hedges, houses, clothes and a rhododendron

The experience freaks our narrator out, but it comforts the kindly current priest who is relieved that someone else can see the ghost of the murderer.

Much like Harker in Dracula, Père Chassez would rather know supernatural horrors are real than continue to doubt his own mind.

#AScareADay
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Indeed, he goes as far as committing murder and sacrilege to get the answers he seeks—and then clearly did not like those answers.

Our young narrator learns this story after unintentionally surprising an evil-looking priest in the confessional.

#AScareADay
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Day 7 of #AScareADay is “In the Confessional” by Amelia Edwards.

This one isn’t a tale of tragic lovers but of an abusive marriage. It does involve some oaths, though!

Caspar, a Swiss peasant, is suspicious of his young, pretty wife and swears he will do anything to prove her unfaithfulness.

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#AScareADay
Edwards pens "In the Confessional" w/ confessions of presumed sin & of lingering torment.
One leads to the murder of a wife by her husband; another to the peaceful death of a priest wracked by family tragedy.
YET: How can the narrator see the apparition when townspeople apparently can't?

I loved today's #AScareADay story 'The Cold Embrace' by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. A thoughtless young artist and the cousin who loved him. I love this haunting. Is it real? Is it guilt? What does he actually think about his cousin's death beneath his pretence that everything is just fine...?

I realised that I didn't write anything for day 5 of #AScareADay. We read 'The Unholy Compact Abjured' by Charles Pigault-Lebron. Whose premise is 'what if you just refused to fulfil a demonic contract?'

The answer is the devil gives in at the first attempt.

So lazy.

Yet she is a phantom, unable to inflict actual physical harm on the youth, only to torment him mentally until he is driven to starvation and exhaustion.

She’s no figment of his imagination, though—the dog can sense her too!

#AScareADay
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