ABSTRACT
This chapter examines four major ghost stories of the early twentieth century where the author's purposes are clearly didactic as well as poetic, where the ghost becomes, intermittently at least, the primary level in an allegory, or is too rapidly and obviously reduced to a psychological emission. In the four stories, the ghosts stay disturbing, refreshing and releasing. It attempts explanation of how and why the first flowering of the English ghost story seemed to expend itself around 1914. The ghost story, in the form of elegantly edited anthologies from major publishing houses, is available in convenient packaging to a larger number of consumers than ever before. Whether in traditional form, or fashionable manifestations, angel and alien, the ghost maintains a vigorous presence on the margins of culture, perhaps the closest approach of the history of humanity supplies to embodied literary text.
