Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

The Haunted House 1908 - Segundo de Chomón

Humorously creepy stop motion silent film

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

The Haunted House - Kemp

The Haunted House
By Harry Kemp (1883-1960)

It is vacant in the daylight,
There is nothing living there.
But at night the foot of Something
Goes up and down the stair.

There’s a fence of rusted pickets;
In the yard the tangled grass
Clutches at the feet in warning:
Every pane’s a shattered glass;

On a plot where burst a fountain
Prone a marble naiad lies
Staring up in sun or starshine
With unseeing, soulless eyes;

Ancient weeds have choked the flowers
That in patterned order stood;
Step by step wit sure encroachment,
Marches in the gloomy wood….

It is vacant in the daylight,
There is nothing living there;
For at night the foot of SOMETHING
Goes up and down the stair.

---

From Chanteys and Ballads, 1920

Is it haunted?

Haunted Houses - Longfellow

Haunted Houses
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table, than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapors dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star,
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,--

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

---

Birds of Passage, 1858

Is it haunted?

The Listeners - de La Mare

The Listeners
By Walter de La Mare (1873-1956)

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

---

The Listeners and Other Poems, 1916

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?

Is it haunted?