I will now proceed in Mr. Davies' words, heading each incident with the title given it in the collec
- Date of account
- Published 1911
- Source
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore
- Reference
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore · selected passage 173
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
However, at present we are only on the threshold of these marvels, and we who are not engaged in the task of occult discovery can still be interested and entertained by "ghost stories" as ghost stories, and can discuss various points and form our own ideas about them
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 onlyHowever, at present we are only on the threshold of these marvels, and we who are not engaged in the task of occult discovery can still be interested and entertained by "ghost stories" _as_ ghost stories, and can discuss various points and form our own ideas about them. And there is one feature common to a great many of these supernatural tales and incidents which I think must strike everybody, whether believers or sceptics, and that is their apparent lack of purpose. There are, as we have seen, ghostly happenings which come as "warnings," though, as I have remarked in a former chapter, these warnings seldom appear to avert disaster. But in nine cases out of ten odd things are seen or heard, and nothing particular happens afterwards. The question--and a puzzling one--is, why should these things occur at all? Why should such a tremendous reversal of the laws which ordinarily govern our human environment take place, as is implied by, let us say, the extraordinary experience of Miss Travers at Glanwern, related in Chapter III? Of course in this volume I have tried to collect ghost stories that _did_ mean something, as naturally they are the more interesting type of incident.
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.
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