st 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 to-day
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 seance 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 explanation
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 to-day who are "not so darn sure!"

One may conjecture divers 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 bores 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!

Ghosts have always haunted literature, and doubtless always will.
Specters seem never to wear out or to die, but renew their tissue both
of person and of raiment, in marvelous fashion, so that their number
increases with a Malthusian relentlessness. We of to-day have the ghosts
that haunted our ancestors, as well as our own modern revenants, and
there's no earthly use trying to banish or exorcise them by such a
simple thing as disbelief in them. Schopenhauer asserts that a belief in
ghosts is born with man, that it is found in all ages and in all lands,
and that no one is free from it. Since accounts vary, and our earliest
antecedents were poor diarists, it is difficult to