Sublime

‘She was the wife of John Bell, who owned Lowlands until his death in 1889, and we’ve never known anything more about her: it’s as if she’s been cut out of time. We have records of their marriage, but not of her death; we have no portraits of her anywhere, and when the house and contents were sold none of her possessions were listed in the inventor

Miss Scott’s hair was so bouncy and her cheeks so bright that the three best friends could only adore her with full-moon eyes.

She has what writers like to describe as a hint of sadness around her mouth and is the sort of woman whose family, centuries past, would find after her death a journal of poems that no one knew she’d been writing her whole life, or a perfumed packet of fading letters from an ill-fated love who’d been dead for decades.

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive. The artist Robert Montgomery wrote that sentence after a friend from art college was hit by a car and killed.

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

He has black eyebrows and black hair on the back of his hands.

One of my favourite spooky stories is The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706) by Daniel Defoe (the Robinson Crusoe man). Really, this is the first modern ghost story in the sense that it happens in a homely domestic setting, and without any supernatural build-up.