The words of the elephant have turned out to be true, for no man goes now-a-days into the silent and deserted…
- Date of account
- Published 1914
- Source
- My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories
- Reference
- My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories · selected passage 7
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-25
Record summary
The words of the elephant have turned out to be true, for no man goes now-a-days into the silent and deserted woods but he feels as though something were haunting them, and thinks of goblinry, and starts at every sound
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyThe words of the elephant have turned out to be true, for no man goes now-a-days into the silent and deserted woods but he feels as though something were haunting them, and thinks of goblinry, and starts at every sound. Out of the shadows which shift with the sun, forms seem crawling and phantoms appear to glide, and we are in a fever almost from the horrible illusions of fancy. We breathe quickly and fear to speak, for the smallest vibration in the silence would jar on our nerves. I speak the truth, for when I am in the woods near the night, there swims before my eyes a multitude of terrible things which I never see by the light of day. The flash of a fire-fly is a ghost, the chant of a frog becomes a frightful roar, the sudden piping of a bird signalises murder, and I run.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.