Famous Modern Ghost Stories

ore I fell again into a troubled and restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept,

that woke me, but the slow approach of something that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow small

to me that my breathing came with difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely was pressing steadily against the sides of th

the wind. Still half caught by the other branches, it would fall with the next gust and crush us, and meanwhile its leaves brus

the tent was free. There was no hanging bough;

s. Several hours must have passed since I stood there before, watching the ascending figures, and the memory of it now came back to me horribly, like an evil dream. Oh, how tired it made me feel, that ceaseless raging wind! Yet, though the deep lassitude of a sleepless

f anything to cause alarm. This deep, prolonged dist

of them, I'm certain; the provision sack and the extra lantern hanging together from the tree; and, crowding everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows, those endless, shaking

he interminable sea of bushes stretching to the horizon, looking ghostly and unreal in the wan light of dawn. I walked softly here and there, still puzzling over that odd sound of infinite pattering, and of that pressure u

rvousness and malaise

y forehead. Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the exquisite freshness of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath the very bushes where I had seen the column of figures ris

es under the trees. And altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an unknown and immense kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt before, that it woke a sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to counteract its worst effects; and when I re

nd round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery l

e me a different view, but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the relation of the tent to the willows, and o

of themselves? I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror. I swayed for a moment in the wind like a tree, find

e no more readily than the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous imaginings brought the ad

and longer than I knew, afraid to come down at close quarters with the willows. I returned quietly, creepily, to the tent, first taking another exhaustive look round and-ye

. Provided my experiences were not corroborated, I could find strength somehow to deny them, perhaps. With the daylight I cou

sted, yet still in dread of hearing again that weird sound of multitudinous patteri