Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dead Pope, had been broken. Torch-bearing guards searched the Apostolic Palace to see that no intruders were present. Then, as Camerlengo (prelate in charge of the Holy See between pontificates), Cardinal Pacelli personally locked the big bronze door. Next day, after the Mass of the Holy Ghost, he marched with 61 other cardinals into the conclave. On 62 throne chairs around the Sistine Chapel, facing Michelangelo's Last Judgment, sat the princes of the Church. One by one, the cardinals advanced to the altar, knelt in prayer, and then slid their ballots into a chalice...
...WEEK END BOOK OF GHOST STORIES (280 pp.)-Edited by Hereward Car-rington-Washburn...
...clock still ticks in the passage, the moonlight still shapes a white pool on the floor, a gust of icy wind still shakes the old house-but, often enough nowadays, the ghost that comes stalking is fresh from a textbook of modern psychiatry. Such old props as bleeding heads tucked under skeletonic elbows, or crimson stab wounds on vaporous bodies, are out of fashion. "Many modern ghosts," observes Editor Carrington in The Week End Book of Ghost Stories, "have become more human...
Freud and his busy followers have had their effect. As Editor Carrington notes, modern man is far more terrified by a spooky representation of "the state of [his] own mind" than by any problem that may be on the ghost's mind. Moreover, abstract art and surrealism seem to have made an impression on ghost fashions; e.g., some current phantoms do not bother to represent anything at all but simply join the victim in bed on a dark night, remaining strictly intangible and indefinable. The advance-guard ghosts in this collection include one which appears simply as a spot...
...humble village priest, by night "the Lord Romuald," lover of Clarimonde, living in an Italian palace amid such pomp and splendor that "I do not believe that since Satan fell from heaven, any creature was ever prouder or more insolent." Clarimonde, however, has the old ghost-story habit of sucking the blood from her lover's arm so as to keep herself "alive." This allows the distressed hero to come right out with an old-fashioned moral for the clergy: "Never gaze upon a woman, and walk abroad only with eyes fixed upon the ground; for . . . the error...