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Ghostly   /gˈoʊstli/   Listen
Ghostly

adjective
1.
Resembling or characteristic of a phantom.  Synonyms: apparitional, ghostlike, phantasmal, spectral, spiritual.  "A phantasmal presence in the room" , "Spectral emanations" , "Spiritual tappings at a seance"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books



... away—passed off the earth as much as Goldsmith or Horace. The times in which he lived, and in which very many of us lived and were young, are changing or changed. I saw Hood once as a young man, at a dinner which seems almost as ghostly now as that masquerade at the Pantheon (1772), of which we were speaking anon. It was at a dinner of the Literary Fund, in that vast apartment which is hung round with the portraits of very large Royal Freemasons, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... numbers, and what no one of them could perhaps have done singly they finally accomplished by taking turns, keeping close together all the while as the ghostly cavalcade wound its way ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall

... In the distance, to the right, Fort Sumter, looking remote and inaccessible,—the terrible rattle which our foolish little spoiled sister Caroline has insisted on getting into her rash hand. How ghostly, yet how real, it looms up out of the dim atmosphere,—the guns looking over the wall and out through the embrasures,—meant for a foreign foe,—this very day (April 13th) turned in self-defence against the children of those who once fought for liberty at Fort Moultrie! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... flooded his bedroom with silver light, and he felt the presence of his mother. His bed stood ghostly with its white curtains, and he remembered how every night his mother knelt by its side in prayer for him. He is a boy once more, and repeats the Lord's Prayer, then he cries again, "My mother! my mother!" and an ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... shelter of the wharves the wind buffeted us wildly, and the black waves were threshed into phosphorescent foam against the sides of the tug, while their crests, self-luminous, stretched away in changing lines of faint, ghostly fire. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... except on one point, by the advice of this second ghostly confessor, Balthazar came to Tournay, and held council with a third—the celebrated Franciscan, Father Gery—by whom he was much comforted and strengthened in his determination. His next step was to lay the project ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... voice broke off, because a new sound was coming from the speaker. It was a voice that was unhuman and queerly horrible and somehow machine-like. Hoots and howls and whistles came from the speaker. Wailing sounds. Ghostly noises, devoid of consonants but broadcast on a wave-length close to the G.C. band and therefore produced by intelligence, though unintelligible. The unhuman hoots and wails and whistles came through for nearly a ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... a part of the night, reflecting that when he had returned from The Islands in the King's yacht, he had met the Prince's own private vessel on her way thither, gliding over the waves, a mere ghostly bunch of white sails in the glimmering moon. He had concluded that it was under orders to embark the Prince for home again in the morning; and yet, though this was a perfectly natural and probable surmise, he had been unable to rid himself altogether of a doubtful ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... Suddenly, and ghostly at first through that lifting haze, loomed the outline of a ship; gradually the lines of her red hull became more and more sharply defined as she swept nearer with poles all bare save for the spread of ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... and seven the next morning, this mute ghostly waif from Palestine, with the half-century old dust of a pomegranate flower in its keeping, had come up that dark stairway. It appeared now that the letters were always found on the fourth stair from the top. This fact had not before been ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson

... appearance. Heavy black cloth had been tacked over the transom to shut out all light and two or three candles burned about the room dimly. On the wide couch six ghostly figures rocked back and ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs

... she. "Set down here." She drew up another chair close beside Rose and sat down. There came a flash of lightning and a terrible crash of thunder. A blind slammed somewhere. Out in the great front yard the rain swirled in misty columns, like ghostly dancers, and the flowering shrubs lashed the ground. Horace watched it until Sylvia called him, also, to what she considered a place of safety. "If you don't come away from that window and set on the sofa I shall have a conniption fit," she said. Horace obeyed. As he sat down he thought of ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... stories take their rise from the "Knickerbocker Legend," and they are thoroughly American in coloring and flavor, even if they did happen to be written in England. No story in our literature is better known than that of Rip Van Winkle watching Hendrick Hudson and his ghostly crew playing ninepins in the Catskill Mountains and quaffing the magic liquor which caused him ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow and a ghostly dream, till it has touched our hearts, till we have found out and obeyed its spiritual lesson? Be sure that one really pure legend or ballad may bring God's truth and heaven's beauty more directly home to the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... illumination that subdued, but could not quench, the soft moonlight with which all outside was silvered. A dozen boats, striving against a current or clinging as best they could to the ship's side, glided into the light and became real and solid; or dropped back into the ghostly white unsubstantiality of the moon. They were long, narrow boats, with small flush decks fore and aft. We looked down on them from almost directly above, so that we saw the thwarts and the ribs and the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... civilization. That the ancient Greeks believed in one Supreme God has been conclusively proved by Cudworth. The argument of his fourth chapter is incontrovertible.[391] However great the number of "generated gods" who crowded the Olympus, and composed the ghostly array of Greek mythology, they were all subordinate agents, "demiurges," employed in the framing of the world and all material things, or else the ministers of the moral and providential government of the eis Theos agentos—the one uncreated God. Beneath, or beyond the whole system ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... of birds' wings. There were clicks from telegraph wires, scraps of talk from other telephones, and curious little squeals that were unlike any known sound. The lines running east and west were noisier than the lines running north and south. The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of midnight, for what strange reason no one knows, the babel was at its height. Watson, who had a fanciful mind, suggested that perhaps these sounds were signals from the inhabitants of Mars or some other sociable planet. But the matter-of-fact young telephonists agreed to ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... this point you will, I know, have reached also the conclusion (with a sigh) that I am embarked upon some commonplace experience of ghostly return, or, at least, of posthumous communication. Perhaps I wrong you here, but in any case I would at once correct the inference, if it has been drawn. You remember our adventures with the seance-mongers years ago? ... I have not ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood

... moss-grown wall, and through a broken gateway entered what is called the Park of Chambord. There is very little of it to be seen now, the trees have been ruthlessly cut down and mutilated, and of the wild boars, which Francis I. was so fond of hunting there is left only the ghostly quarry that Thibault of Champagne chases through the air, while the sound of his ghostly horn echoes down the autumn night as the fantom pack sweeps by ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... gas-lit window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway, and half-invisible trains shunted—a steady ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... along the sides of the boat glancing over their shoulders at the end of the day's journey. They would have preferred to spend the night somewhere else than on this lagoon of weird aspect and ghostly reputation. Moreover, they disliked Arsat, first as a stranger, and also because he who repairs a ruined house, and dwells in it, proclaims that he is not afraid to live amongst the spirits that haunt the places abandoned by mankind. Such a man can disturb the course of fate by ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... raining, and the roof leaks," I said to myself, while an unpleasant thrill went through me, and fancy, aided by indigestion, began to people the house with ghostly inmates. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes

... we get after seeing a stirring drama. What has just interested us is not so much what we have been told about others as the glimpse we have caught of ourselves—a whole host of ghostly feelings, emotions and events that would fain have come into real existence, but, fortunately for us, did not. It also seems as if an appeal had been made within us to certain ancestral memories belonging to a far-away past—memories ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson

... in the north-eastern quarter, and if this were so she ought now to be somewhere astern of us, since we were running off about south-west; and, sure enough, there she was, about a point and a half on our starboard quarter, just visible in the midst of the ghostly glare of the phosphorescent foam. She was, like ourselves, running dead before the gale, and I thought I could make out that her topsails had withstood the tremendous strain of the outburst and were still doing their duty. If this were so, since we were scudding under bare poles, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood

... the ghostly procession thrice tracks the four ambulatories of the cloisters, solemnly chanting ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... ceased with light; Of Nature's psalm no echo lingers. The death-cold mist, with ghostly fingers, Shrouds world and soul ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... Sheer below them the sea, driven by tide and wind, rushed upon the huge masses of rock or beat direct upon the cave-indented cliffs. The spray leapt high into the air, to be caught up by the wind in whirlpools, little ghostly flecks, luminous one moment and gone forever the next. Far away across the pitchy waters they could see at regular intervals a line of white where the breakers came rushing in, here and there the agitated lights of ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the Knight in Armour, who kept pace on either side of the ghostly cab and mocked at him, tossing roses to each other as they sped along, until finally his father appeared, called Isobel a young serpent, at which she laughed loudly, and bore off Sims to be buried in the vault with the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... whatever of the invisible spiritual economy. And some of them would be pleased with a still more complete exemption from such thought. For there are among them those who are liable to be occasionally affected with certain ghostly recognitions of something out of the common world. But it is remarkable how little these may contribute to enforce the salutary impressions of religion. For instance, a man subject to the terror of apparitions shall ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... an old brass lantern, and presently he was flashing his way up among the dark sounds of the black old wood, with that ghostly face ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne

... house stood on a high hill, and we could see the stars of heaven through the ruined door and one of the back windows. Uncle Eb lifted the leaning door a little and shoved it aside. We heard then a quick stir in the old house—a loud and ghostly rattle it seems now as I think of it—like that made by linen shaking on the line. Uncle Eb took a step backward as ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... began to assemble on the road in front of their communities and were preparing for the festival by chattering with one another as loudly as one would think possible. A hush began to fall upon them like a descending fog when we came out, though, and within a few moments it had died down to a ghostly silence, for all that could be heard was the wind's constant blowing. Ramma took the head of the procession of Munams that had formed on the road, and I took the place next to him. With a sort of quiet anticipation of the joys to come, there was little movement, and what little there was, ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... until the boy was panting. Then while he sat on a beer keg until he should be in breath again the unwinded Spike would skip the rope—a girl's skipping rope—or shadow-box about the room with intricate dance steps, raining quick blows upon a ghostly boxer who was invariably beaten; or with smaller gloves he would cause the inflated bag to play lively tunes upon the ceiling of its support. After an hour of this, when both were sweating, they would go to a sheltered ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester ... Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx; Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill; Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by ... And in that garden, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... nut-tree by the roadside indifferently. An ox spoke in Sicily. A precocious baby cried out "Io triumphe" before it was born. At Spoletum a woman became a man. An altar was seen in the heavens. A ghostly band of armed men appeared in the Janiculum (Livy, xxiv., 10). On such occasions the "aruspices" always ordered a vast slaughter of victims, and no doubt feasted as did the wicked sons ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... he lived over again the exciting evening before election. He recalled the moonlit night, the rushing automobile, the ghostly shadows chasing themselves in swift procession ever behind him. He remembered the shock and the overturn and finding himself face to face with Gertrude Van Deusen on the pine-shaded road. He lived again through the rushing ride home, ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow

... rooms are small and dark and dreary, Ruggieri's being in one of the corner towers, with small windows cut in the wall, which is over two metres in thickness. From whatever reason, these apartments are the most weird and ghostly that we have seen, fitted up as they are with many memorials of Catherine, and two portraits of her, one in a rich costume, an extinguisher gown with pink underskirt and wide full sleeves bordered with a band of fur, each one ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... spot in the busy hours of day. Midnight is the witching hour that should be chosen to listen to the music of St. Martin's belfry. It may be a late and inconvenient hour for the experiment, but it is worth it—if the bells still chime at that "ghostly" hour. ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton

... me for the night, thinking I slept, but when the clock struck five I wrapped myself in a cloak, and went out and down the avenue. I was half afraid of the ghostly trees, so black against the snow, but I was more in terror of the melancholy corners of my own room, the solitary light, the dreary ashes in the grate. I walked as far as the gate, and even ventured out on the road, hoping to see some wayfarer coming past who might ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland

... have recovered.'[100] An utterance of courage and common sense equally rare and useless. Reginald Scot, perhaps the boldest of the early impugners of witchcraft, was yet convinced apparently of the reality of ghostly apparitions. ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... Greece I found the place, though earth Has many such; and wandering there alone, One Autumn evening when the moon rose late, I heard this song, though none was there to sing. A ghostly rune, yet left the alarmed dark Quivering with life, ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan

... and each fall the death of a hero. Soon there was no one left standing, no man and no standard, nothing but a gray heap of bodies, whose limbs palpitated and moved like some fabulous sea creature, making groaning, ghostly sounds. Ten or twelve poor fellows wounded by stray shots sheltered themselves in the sandpit without weapons, with staring eyes and distorted features. That was all there was left ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... which was located on the opposite shore, strongly appealed to my imagination and somewhat excited my mirth. One needs a powerful imagination, I thought, to live in these regions where the native element, the hill-folk, dwell so fondly and earnestly upon the ghostly and mysterious. Three miles down the river, Dunderberg, "the thundering mountain," on the west bank, with the town of Peekskill on the opposite shore, was passed, and I entered Haverstraw Bay, the widest part of the river. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... forest wore that morning! At last, we came out on the pond. Very black it looked, for it was what is called a "warm pond." Ice had not yet formed over it. The snow-clad crag where the cave was, on the farther side, loomed up, ghostly white ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... oleander was in full bloom everywhere. The streets are old and very narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by awnings stretched from house to house. Bright stuffs and handkerchiefs, curiosities, ancient frames of carved wood, old chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins, angels, and staring daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath, it was very quaint and lovely. All this was much set off, too, by the glimpses one caught, through a rusty gate standing ajar, of quiet sleepy court-yards, having stately old houses within, as silent ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... the house," and closed with "the beating of a drum like that at the breaking up of a guard." The mental torture of the Squire and his family may be easier imagined than described. And before long matters grew much worse, when, becoming emboldened, the ghostly drummer laid aside his drum to play practical, and sometimes exceedingly painful, jokes on ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... sadness of the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful, solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his cattle and she lay alone under the white ceiling that sagged above her bed and heard the weak wind picking at the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair

... be, we should not long live, for lack of sustenance. And as it is necessary for to have this ploughing for the sustentation of the body, so must we have also the other for the satisfaction of the soul, or else we cannot live long ghostly. For as the body wasteth and consumeth away for lack of bodily meat, so doth the soul pine away for default of ghostly meat. But there be two kinds of inclosing, to let or hinder both these kinds of ploughing: the one is an inclosing to let or ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer

... sweeping and swaying about as Milton imagines the bones of his friend Edward King, in that wonderful 'Lycidas.'" Then I told them the conversation I had had with the sexton at Kilkhaven. "But," I went on, "these fancies are only the ghostly mists that hang about the eastern hills before the sun rises. We shall look down on all that with a smile by and by; for the Lord tells us that if we believe in him we shall ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... been observed for over a quarter of a century, and appears to be almost immobile upon this colossal globe. This spot, which was red at its first appearance, is now pale and ghostly. It is oval (vide Fig. 45) and measures 42,000 kilometers (26,040 miles) in length by 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles) in width. Hence it is about four times as long as the diameter of our Earth; that is, relatively to the size of Jupiter, as are the dimensions of Australia in proportion to our ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion

... later, the same ghostly procession was filing past, but in an opposite direction. This meant that, sooner or later, my rest must be disturbed, or I might be left in an exposed and dangerous position. Present comfort, however, being the stronger motive just then, prevailed, ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride

... countless tombs, where lie these breathin' corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend to the ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... paced by the restless feet of the wind, curtains swayed as if shaken by ghostly fingers; rugs and carpets rose and fell upon the floor, and, whether one sat alone or with others, the air seemed full of stealing presences, sad, and sometimes terrible; and of immemorial whispers ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... though Thomas, in the years to come, should choose his own path. At present there was for both of them the merry, shifting life of the roads, the passing friendships, lightly made, lightly loosed, the olive hills, silver like ghostly armies in the pale moonlight, the sweetness of the starry flowers at their twisted stems, the sudden blue bays that laughed below bends of the road, the cities, like many-coloured nosegays on a pale chain, the intimate sweetness ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... stood temptingly half open; no creature was to be seen—no sound to be heard. Rose's heart throbbed fast; the mysterious stillness of the night, the ghostly shimmer of the moonlight, the mystery and romance of her adventure, set every pulse tingling, but she did not hesitate. Her slippered feet crossed the hall lightly; she was beside the green door. Then there was another pause—a moment's breathless listening, but the dead stillness of midnight ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... penitent soul might feel in the midst of purifying flames. He remembered again that the flippant young Frenchman had said, "Un ancien curA(C), qui a fait quelque bAtise." Was it possible that some tragic sin lay under this gentle life? And was the four-funnelled, twin-screwed Parana but a ghostly ship bearing a cargo of haunted ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... the prow into the current, heading to weather Sant' Elena. Lawrence took an oar silently. He liked the rush on the forward stroke, the lingering recovery. The evening puffs were cool. They slid on past a ghostly full-rigged ship from the north, abandoned at the point of Sant' Elena, until the black mass of trees in the Giardino Pubblico loomed up. A little off the other quarter the lights from the ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... bud and stem and root and branch and leaf and fruit," precisely as in the living vegetable kingdom. It is not a growth by accretion, as in crystallization, but by intussusception, as in life. These ghostly things exhibit the phenomena of circulation and respiration and nutrition, and a crude sort of reproduction by budding; they repair their injuries, and are able to perform periodic movements, just as does an animal or a plant; they have a period ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... still there lay a mile of open prairie between him and shelter; still those bounding ponies, with their yelping, screeching riders, were fast closing upon him, when suddenly through the dim and ghostly light there loomed another shadow, wild and daring,—a rider who came towards him at ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... It appeared ghostly in the dark, the big steel girders taking on weird and fantastic shapes. A train rushed across its span, roaring and throwing a shower of ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene

... the lover of nature—and who has the courage to avow himself aught else?—the sea-shore can never be monotonous. The swirl and sweep of ever-shifting waters, the flying mist of foam breaking away into a gray and ghostly distance down the beach, the eternal drone of ocean, mingling itself with one's talk by day and with the light dance-music in the parlors by night—all these are active sources of a passive pleasure. And to lie at length upon the tawny sand, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... prints—upon stable lanthorns two storeys in height. Many holes, drilled in the conical turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness, carrying his own sun by a ring about his finger, day and night swung to and fro and up and down about his footsteps. Blackness haunted his path; he was beleaguered by goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he found ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to blow outside, shaking open the dark clouds and letting gleams of moonlight flicker on the thinning fog. A ghostly ray came through a crack between the logs and lit Alice's face with a pathetic wanness. She moved her lips as if speaking, but Hamilton heard ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... at all ghostly and they did not care to intrude, they were about to retire as softly as they had come, when Joe was startled by hearing his own name. Jim's hand shot out and clenched his friend's arm, and they ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... response. With a muttered blasphemy he renewed his potations. Presently he forgot all around him, sank into a daze, but suddenly awoke to see standing before him someone or something like a battered, ghostly edition of his sister. For a few moments there came upon him a sort of fear. The woman before him, with distorted features and burning eyes seemed hardly human, and the only thing that seemed a reality of his sister, as she had been, was her wealth of golden hair, and ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker

... No locks on the doors and no bells. Stairs leading straight up the gallery from the courtyard, carts going and coming, soft footsteps stealing up and down, whispers that sounded suspicious (though they were only orders to kill chickens and pick salad for the morrow), and a ghostly whistle that disturbed Lavinia so much, she at last draped herself in the green coverlet, and went boldly forth upon the balcony to ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... Dancing Hall, which formerly rang with the weird music accompanying the "woven paces and waving hands" of Court bedayas, in their spangled pink robes, now echoes to the tread of alien feet; the dim arcades teem with ghostly memories, and the mournful desolation of the Taman Sarie borrows fresh poignancy in the former scene of mirth and music. A moss-grown and slippery stairway leads to the green twilight of a subterranean grotto, containing ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... mongrels," both of them, and as happy as if they were the most aristocratic of Irish setters! See near by the tree full of flowers that has lasted the winter through. That is a tulip-tree, holding up its thousand delicate ghostly cups. Its grand trunk rises straight and unbroken full thirty feet, then branches in symmetry, and holds up as if to catch the sunshine and the rain its fairy goblets. And here is an oak that has not yet let go its grip on last year's dead leaves. How sharply ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... They saw the doubts and fears of his little light, and would fain carry him off into purgatory ere it died out. But his saviours came: they were the ghosts of those great lights that founded the pillars of our Republicanism. Down they sat, in ghostly conclave, and with instruments in hand set about driving away the carrier devils and working the problem of Mr. Pierce's political policy. It was impossible!—not all the trigonometry of which they were masters sufficed to aid them in the task. It seemed like attempting to solve the principle ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... of cedar, The fish-hawks drop at noon; When night comes trailing up the stars, We hear the ghostly loon; And watch the herons swing their flight ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts

... wilder, and the foliage each day spring-like. We were on a high hilly plateau between Hat Creek and the valley of Lake La Hache. We passed lakes surrounded by ghostly dead trees, which looked as though the water had poisoned them. There were no ranches of any extent on these hills. The trail continued to be filled with tramping miners; several seemed to be without bedding or food. Some drove little ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... Supernal guest and sharer of my might, Wherefore and whither dost thou fly away, Exquisite phantom, nude and ghostly white, Never with me again to flit and play, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... psychologist &c. V. note, notice, mark; take notice of, take cognizance of be aware of, be conscious of; realize; appreciate; ruminate &c. (think) 451; fancy &c. (imagine) 515. Adj. intellectual[Relating to intellect], mental, rational, subjective, metaphysical, nooscopic[obs3], spiritual; ghostly; psychical[obs3], psychological; cerebral; animastic[obs3]; brainy; hyperphysical[obs3], superphysical[obs3]; subconscious, subliminal. immaterial &c. 317; endowed with reason. Adv. in petto. Phr. ens rationis [Lat]; frons est animi janua [Lat][Cicero]; locos y ninos dicen la verdad ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... pretend to be; but the making or marring of the book lies elsewhere. I do not think that it lies in the construction, though Fielding's following of the ancients, both sincere and satiric, has imposed a false air of regularity upon that. The Odyssey of Joseph, of Fanny, and of their ghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a little haphazard, and might have been longer or shorter without any discreet man approving it the more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in the abounding humour and satire of the artist's criticism, but even ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... not far beneath him, a ghostly violet haze was spreading through the fog, and the fog itself was coiling back from it until it formed a dense ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... leaned towards each other from the opposing banks, and together with the overhanging rocks, mantled with fern, made a twilight of the pass beneath. Here and there the silver stem of a birch stood up tall and straight, and looked a ghostly sentinel. "Do you hear it still?" demanded Landless when they had gone some distance in ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... Now every ghostly care they drown With jokes and jeers and loud guffaws. A wine-cascade is running down Each rusty ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier

... till day come in; Pure of his vice, that he might ease her woe, Not brand her with his own. Not yet the glow Of false dawn throbbed, nor yet the silent town Stood washt in light, clear-printed to the crown In the cold upper air. Dark loomed the walls, Ghostly the trees, and still shuddered the calls Of owl to owl from unseen towers. Afar A dog barked. High and hidden in the haar Which blew in from the sea a heron cried Honk! and he heard his wings, but not espied ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett

... sable thicket, far in the distance a great blurred mass rearing a sombre head, a chain of silent villages seemingly twined about our road, and once in a long while the broad, brave flash of laughing water—these and their ghostly like made up our changing neighbourhood. Then came a link in the chain that even Wizard Night could not transfigure—sweet, storied Coarraze, fencing our way with its peculiar pride of church and state; three miles ahead, hoary Betharram, defender of the faith, lent us its famous bridge—at the ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... man, as respected all bodily enemies or the dangers of human warfare, but was as sensitive and timid as the most superstitious of old women in facing the frowns of a priest or under the vague anticipations 10 of ghostly retributions. But had it been otherwise, and had there been any reason to apprehend an unsteady demeanor on the part of this prince at the approach of the critical moment, such were the changes already effected in ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... befitted the atmosphere and hour, the talk of the little circle fell upon things ghostly and mysterious—strange happenings and prophetic dreams. Dorothea, who had a love of horrors, lent a suddenly attentive ear; but Jennie, though plainly fascinated, uttered a protesting plaint. "Oh, please stop! You don't know how you frighten me! Dorothea ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... and respected as his own life." Objecting that "it was a matter of conscience to take away so much blood," Catesby replied that he was "resolved that in conscience it might be done," whereon Rookwood, "being satisfied that in conscience he might do it, confessed it neither to any ghostly father nor to any other." (Exam, of Rookwood, Gunpowder Plot Book, article 136.) Sir William Wade writes that "Rookwood can procure no succour from any of his friends in regard of the odiousness of his actions," (Additional Manuscript ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... the sub-commissioner told him that the work was ended. They shook hands. It was dark when Jan came out from the company's offices, dark with a pale gloom through which the stars were beginning to glow—with a ghostly gloom, lightened still more in the north with the rising fires of the northern lights. Alone Jan stood for a few moments close down to the river. Across from him was the forest, silent, black, reaching to the end of the earth, and over it, like a signal light, beckoning him back to his world, ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... of the countless birds fluttered low, as if frightened at the advancing dark, brushed her cheek, then winged on and up and was lost in the tree above her. Somewhere deep in the gloom shrouding the little graveyard came the ghostly flutter of ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White

... on the open plain until far into the night, a great deal of traveling was done at night. It was easier for man and horse. On moonlight nights that white light shining through the thin atmosphere made the prairie as light as day, but ghostly; moonlight softened the contours of the plains and robbed them of their color; sounds traveled great distances, seeming to come from space; the howling of coyotes down the draw, the shrill, busy sound of insects in the long grass, the ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... Thus the slopes were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival. Sometimes Honora, watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge, and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the lake and the rushing river: and she saw these same mists gather again, shivering, at nightfall. In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... said Mitchell, "I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis

... house, and went into every room, Beth following her faithfully, at a safe distance. In the nursery she stood some little time looking round at the bare walls, and seeming to listen expectantly. No doubt she heard ghostly echoes of the patter of children's feet, the ring of children's voices. As she turned to go she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes. In her own room she lingered still longer, going from one piece of furniture to another, and laying ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... not proceed. For on the other mantelpiece to the right there was a clock, and while staring in the ghostly silence at the footprints, he had fancied that his ear caught the ticking of the clock. Imagination, doubtless! But he dared not proceed until he had satisfied himself that his ears had deluded him; and, equally, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... test.' In the Paradiso it was, that he saw in beams of crystal radiance the ideal of the unity of the religious mind, the love and admiration for the high unseen things of which the Christian church was to him the sovereign embodiment. The mediaeval spirit, it is true, wears something of a ghostly air in the light of our new day. This attempt, which has been made many a time before, 'to unify two ages,' did not carry men far in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless it were an ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... a narrow close. The great clock of a church in the neighbouring street had just begun to strike five of a wintry afternoon, dark with snow, falling and yet to fall: how often in after years was he not to hear the ghostly call of that clock, and see that falling snow!—when a gentle tap came to his door, and the girl I have already mentioned came in with a tray and the materials for his most welcomed meal, coffee with bread and butter. ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald

... funerary statuettes,—all this mummery which seems to be so characteristic and so essential, is only the means to an end, and an ever changing means to secure a successful comfortable existence of the spirit in the life after death,—in the ghostly ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner

... thy love,' continued Emma, 'or canst thou hope for my affection whilst that ghostly gift divides us? Never! Inhuman man, thou wilt teach me to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... time stretches itself out to weeks—abnormal, weary weeks, when the boundaries of day and night confound themselves—when each steps over into his brother's territories—when it grows to feel natural, wakefully, to watch the candle's ghostly shadows, flickering at midnight, and to snatch fitful sleeps at noon! to watch the autumnal dawns coldly breaking in the gloom of the last, and to ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... unknown, He sits—nor deems his Helen flown, Tearless and voiceless on the spot; All desert, but he feels it not! Ah! soon alive, to miss and mourn The form beyond the ocean borne Shall start the lonely king! And thought shall fill the lost one's room, And darkly through the palace gloom Shall stalk a ghostly thing. [26] Her statues meet, as round they rise, The leaden stare of lifeless eyes. Where is their ancient beauty gone?— Why loathe his looks the breathing stone? Alas! the foulness of disgrace Hath swept the Venus from her face! And visions in the mournful night Shall ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. Again and again I tried to shriek, to make some noise, but physically I was utterly dead. I could only feel myself go mad with the terror of hideous death. The eyes were close on me,—their movement so swift that they seemed ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... disclosure, once more to make the experiment coolly in her company. Accompanied by a trusty servant, they accordingly repeated their visit next night, and again heard, as the marquess had done before, the same ghostly and inconceivable noise; and nothing but the anxious wish to get rid of the castle, cost what it would, enabled them to suppress their terrors in presence of the servant, and to ascribe the sound to some accidental cause. On the evening of the third day, when both, determined to probe the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various

... for mother's treasure, Shall I pine as I repeat Rumour's strange report, which says you're Virtually obsolete? Shall these lips a doleful lyric Proffer at your ghostly bier, Or compose a panegyric ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various

... spoken some ghostly consolation, but she answered with pettish impatience, "Waste not words—waste not words!—Let me speak that which I must tell, and sign it with my hand; and do you, as the more immediate servant of God, and therefore bound to bear witness to the truth, take ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... wealth to spare. Give him back his own. At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. See his little lanthorn-spark. Hear his ghostly tune, Glimmering past you, in ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes

... ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned: 'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... and I gazed with horror upon the pale face close to mine, fortunately insensible; my eyes seemed ready to start from their sockets with horror; there was a sensation as of a ghostly hand stirring my wet hair; and then once more I gave utterance to a strange hoarse cry that startled even me; for as—in spite of my weakness—my mental energies grew momentarily clearer I thoroughly realised the horror of our position, and that we were being dragged rapidly away ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... boat, our silent boatman, like a spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them waterways to the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... say!" exclaimed Aunt Kate, who was an old-fashioned, motherly soul. "If the ghost comes I'm going to talk to it, and ask how things are— er— on the other side. Girls, it's a great privilege to have a ghostly friend. If the man who owns this island knew what was good for him he'd advertise the fact that it was haunted. If Mr. Lagg were here I'd get him to make up a poem about the ghost. That would scare it off, if ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope

... puffing sounds, uniting in one grand puffing chorus, and saw advancing down a white road toward them a long, ghostly train, as if a vast troop of extinct monsters had returned to earth and were marching this way. But John knew very well that it was a train of automobiles and raising the glasses that he now always carried he saw that they were ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler

... satellite of Earth. Men were now building it. Presently it would float as Joe dreamed of it, and where the sun struck it, it would be unbearably bright, and where there were shadows, they would be abysmally black—except, perhaps, when earthshine from the planet below would outline it in a ghostly fashion. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... green star Was slipping from sight in the pale void afar; The spirits of change and of awe, with faint breath, Were shifting the midnight, above and beneath. The spirits of awe and of change were around And about, and upon her. A dull muffled sound, And a hand on her hand, like a ghostly surprise, And she felt herself fix'd by the hot hollow eyes Of the Frenchman before her: those eyes seemed to burn, And scorch out the darkness between them, and turn Into fire as they fix'd her. He look'd like the shade Of a creature ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... the tall chimney-stacks and the high roofs and the white walls of the Chateau, looking spectral enough in the wan moonlight,—ghostly, silent, and ominous. One light only was visible in the porter's lodge; all else was ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... dull house called to me that day with a hundred faint voices and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no certain message for me, but the message ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... and a round face that would have been nearly meaningless if the features had not been emphasized—italicized, so to speak—by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her glory was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... was a crash as if the very mountain had split asunder, and the adventurers saw a great ball of purple-bluish fire shoot down, as if from some cloud, and strike against the side of the crag, not a hundred feet from where stood the ghostly figure ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton

... upper darkness, while we held our breath at the unique sight of a whale breaching at night. But when he fell again the effect was marvellous. Green columns of water arose on either side of the descending mass as if from the bowels of the deep, while their ghostly glare lit up the encircling gloom with a strange, weird radiance, which reflected in our anxious faces, made us look like an expedition from the FLYING DUTCHMAN. A short spell of gradually quieting struggle succeeded as the great beast succumbed, until ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... more cautiously, but more fearlessly than before. As I wound down the hill, the moonlight fell full upon the remarkable and lonely tree I had observed in the morning. Bare, wan, and giant-like, as it rose amidst the surrounding waste, it borrowed even a more startling and ghostly appearance from the cold and lifeless moonbeams which fell around and upon it like a shroud. The retreating animal I had driven before me, paused by this tree. I hastened my steps, as if by an involuntary impulse, as well as the enfeebled animal I was leading would ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... engines carrying us up the James. Dancing Point reached sharply out as if to intercept us. But the owner of those strong dark hands that happened to be at the wheel knew the story of Dancing Point—of how many an ebony Tam O'Shanter had seen ghostly revelry there; and Gadabout was held ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... anxious glance in the direction of the wretch whom he meant to abandon to the desert. To his horror he saw a lean, smirched, ghostly face looking at him in a dazed way, as if out of the blinding shades of death. The quickness of this villain was so wonderful that one is almost tempted to call it praiseworthy. He perceived at once that Thurstane would be discovered, and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... humility and reverence, as conveying clearer conviction and information than in his life he had ever before attained. Presents too, of which, as well as of flattery, these holy men were not insensible, were distributed among them, as a small retribution for their prayers and ghostly counsel. And by all these artifices, more than from any regard to the beauty of his genius, of which, during that time of furious cant and faction, small account would be made, he prevailed so far as to have his life spared, and a fine of ten thousand ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... rough couches which were to be shared between four priests and myself. Despite the fact that I occupied the place of honour between the two oldest and wisest of my ghostly entertainers, sleep refused to come; the din outside had grown to a pandemonium. I lay awake till, at 2.30 a.m., one of them arose and touched the others with a whispered and half-jocular oremus! They retired ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... the setting, either appearing quite suddenly or being more gradually dissolved in, different studios having different methods of accomplishing this. The point is that visions of this kind are obviously written into the scene proper, just as you would introduce any new character. If it is a ghostly visitor of some kind, you simply say: "Harding looks in horror (at whatever point of the room or location you desire). Vision of Blake, standing quite still and pointing an accusing finger at Harding." Or, if Tom is in the city and has reason to believe that Frank, back on the farm, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... clumsy boats are moored, waiting for chess and balk carriers to be told off, and the crews to man the heavy sweeps. Up on the heights to the rear, planted thickly on every knoll and ridge, are the black-mouthed guns, and around them are grouped the squads of ghostly, grisly, fog-dripping cannoneers. One may walk along that line of heights for mile after mile, and find there only grim ranges of batteries and waiting groups of men. All is silence; all is alertness; all is fog. Back of the lines of unlimbered cannon, sheltered as far as ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... wooden jetty. It seemed as capital a nursery for ague and fever as Death could hit upon anywhere, and those on board the steamer who knew it confirmed my opinion. As we arrived a steady down-pour of rain was falling from an inky sky; the white men who met us on the wharf appeared ghostly and wraith-like, and the very negroes seemed pale and wan. The news which met us did not tempt me to lose any time in getting up the country to my brother. According to all accounts, fever and ague, with some minor diseases, especially dropsy, were having it all their ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... of the moonlit house, which was, as it were, embosomed and framed among them. She paused a moment, struck by the strangeness and beauty of the spectacle. The Tudor front had the air of some fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weird gathering of ghostly knights. Then she turned to her room, impatiently longing in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments and tumble ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... leading from the railway to the sea, with the shops and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... rapid walking, we came within hail of the intrepid young detective. We were also opposite the marble yard of Cornelius Lawson, who wrought monuments for the dead of Little Arcady. In front of the shop were a dozen finished and half-finished stones, ghostly white in the dusk. It seemed indeed to be a spot impressive enough to meet even Billy's captious requirements, but we had underrated the demands of his artist's ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky—for even the guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls—and at the same time so huge and grandiose—there were walls thirty feet thick, galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls, king's apartments and queen's ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... Algia's dancing when the silver moon comes up and the Kabyle dogs round the nomads' tents begin their serenades. And then I give Safti five francs and my blessing, and he bids me "Bonne nuit!" and his ghostly figure is lost in the black shadows of ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... experience of this kind is still well remembered. It was a fine crisp March morning, and the sun had not yet shown himself among the distant tree-tops as we hurried along through the ghostly wood. Presently we arrived at a place where there were many signs of the animals. Then each of us selected a tree and took up his position behind it. The chipmunk-caller sat upon a log as motionless as he ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman

... books or musical instruments. The gas burned dimly and the fire was dull and smoky, for there was a heavy fog outside which no light could fully penetrate. The company were nearly all middle-aged and respectable-looking. Their hands were full of cards, and they were playing with them like men in a ghostly dream. They never lifted their eyes. They threw down cards on the table in silence, they gathered them up with a muttered word and went on again. They seemed to John like the wild phantasmagoria of some visionary hell. Their silent, mechanical movements, their red eyelids, ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... he went on with a smiling shake of his head, after a glance at the dark clouds which were gathering blackly on the other side of the river behind the spectral cottonwoods, now bare of leaves and ghostly white. ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... ghostly stare 15 Troops of Despots in the air, Obstreperously Jacobinical, The madman froth'd, and foam'd, and roar'd: The other, snoring octaves cynical, Like good John Bull, in posture clinical, 20 Seem'd living only when ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... the moss, so that he himself, light-footed as a cat, might cross ahead of the unsuspicious Bull, and lure him to his death. "There," he said finally, as he sat on his haunches and rested for a minute, looking like a ghoul in the ghostly moonlight, "I think that's a trick worthy of my Wolf cunning." Then he hastened back to the ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser

... Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap, which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises, tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... burnishing all the arms in ecclesiastical and legal arsenals for the approaching fray, the sound of louder if not more potent artillery began to be heard in the vicinity of Paris. The candid Henry, while seeking ghostly instruction with eagerness from his papistical patrons, was equally persevering in applying for the assistance of heretic musketeers and riders from his protestant friends in England, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... deceased, indicating the sex, is procured, and entrusted to the chief of a village, who sets it up in a funeral hut in the middle of a large taboo house adorned with plants. The survivors believe that the ghostly ogre, being so well provided for, will abstain from ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the garden ghostly shapes arose, phantoms of the dawn that gradually resolved into familiar forms of tree and shrub. From the rookery there swelled a din of many raucous voices. The dog in the distance began to bark again with feverish zest, and from the stables came ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... hangs at the upper stairs: it has been there for forty years—bon Dieu! Can't you see the ghosts of little faces peering over it? I wonder whether they get up in the night as the moonlight shines into the blank vacant old room, and play there solemnly with little ghostly horses, and the spirits of dolls, and tops that turn ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the owl high in the air and opened her fingers. There was a small ghostly flutter and in another instant Deacon had ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... reeled as I went from my bed to the fire, and steadied myself by laying my hand on Mammy Theresa's shoulder. I demanded of Margaret what she had been saying. The women both started, with expressions of surprise, alarm, and tender affection, raised by my ghostly looks, and begged me to get back into bed again. I stood fast, bearing on ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... hers. She halted before the dark hut and waited. Insects whizzed about her ears as though they little feared her. The long branches of the weeping willow dragged themselves across the tin roof with a ghostly sound. This was Tessibel's night of heart experiences—her first day and her first night. Oh! to go back to yesterday, with the hidden fear of the student sleeping soundly in her breast and a Daddy, a dear stooping old Daddy. She slipped open the shanty door, lighted a candle and looked ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... way he surveyed the empty chairs made me feel as if I had intruded upon a tiffin of ghostly Presences. ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... He seemed to be almost impatient for Everett's ownership, giving many hints as to what should be done when he himself was gone. He must surely have thought that he would return to Wharton as a spirit, and take a ghostly share in the prosperity of the farms. "You will find John Griffith a very good man," said the baronet. John Griffith had been a tenant on the estate for the last half-century, and was an older man than his landlord; but the baronet spoke of all this as though he himself were about ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... mist hangs round the College tower, The ghostly street Is silent at this midnight hour, Save ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray

... of grey and ghostly trees before the little priest answered. Then he bit his finger reflectively and said: "Why, the mystery is a mystery of psychology. Or, rather, it is a mystery of two psychologies. In that Brazilian business two of the most famous men of modern history acted flat against their characters. Mind ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... night about him began to fill with ghostly life. His shadow beckoned and grimaced ahead of him, and the stunted bush seemed to move. His eyes were alert and questing. Within himself he reasoned that he would see nothing, and yet some unusual instinct moved him to caution. At regular intervals he stopped to listen and to sniff the air ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... giant-regiment, of which the world has heard so much in a vague half-mythical way. The giant-regiment was not a Myth, however, but a big-boned expensive Fact, tramping very hard upon the earth at one time, though now gone all to the ghostly state. As it was a CLASS-BOOK, so to speak, of our Friedrich's,—Class-Book (printed in huge type) for a certain branch of his schooling, the details of which are so dim, though the general outcome of it proved so unforgettable,—readers, apart from their curiosity ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... terror. I had long ago dressed; but even had I wished to sleep again, curiosity to know the meaning of that awful cry would have been too strong for me. So, as soon as I saw that my mother was asleep, I took my boots in my hand and crept downstairs. The kitchen looked so ghostly in the dim light, that I had almost resolved to give up my plan and go back, but reflected that it behoved me to play the man, if only to be able to cheer mother when I came back. So, albeit with ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... he had used to do long ago in Heatherton church, and Dosia smiled down at him. There were no dimples now, but her smile was very sweet. The ghostly finger of old Henry Ford, pointing down through the generations, had lost its power to brand with its malediction the life of these, his descendants. Wesley and Theodosia had joined hands with their ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... and Monongahela at Pittsburg. Scarcely ever a man had so much relish for the supernatural, and so little faith in it. One must confess, however, that the most sceptical might have been overcome at Glamis Castle, for its appearance, by all accounts, is weird and strange, and ghostly enough to ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... shore, but some optical delusion had detached them from the land on which they stood, and they had the appearance of so many little vessels sailing along the coast of it. I mention the circumstance, because, with the ghostly image of Dumbarton Castle, and the ambiguous ruin on the small island, it was much in the character of the scene, which was throughout magical and enchanting—a new world in its great permanent outline and composition, and ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

... was not lighted in his room, but the street light glowed through the windows. Once again the waving fronds of the ailanthus tree flung ghostly shadows on the walls. There was a faint sweet odor of blossoms, so soon to become ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Grace's subjects, spiritual and temporal, occasioned, as they say, by the uncharitable behaviour and demeanour of divers ordinaries: to this we, the ordinaries, answer, assuring your Majesty that in our hearts there is no such discord or variance ort our part against our brethren in God and ghostly children your subjects, as is induced in this preface; but our daily prayer is and shall be that all peace and concord may increase among your Grace's true subjects our said children, whom God be our witness we love, have loved, and shall love ever with hearty affection; never intending any ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... remarks made concerning his childhood. His meditative tendencies were especially noticed as most characteristic. There was besides this a natural leaning toward the mysterious,—the mysterious, I mean, as depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which excites gloom or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable as moving in darkness. Take, for example, the idea of a grand combination of human energies mustered together ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the insecure windows and sighing forlornly about the corners of the house. The door unlatched itself, swung inward hesitatingly, and hung wavering for a moment on its sagging hinges. A formless cloud of gray fog blew into the warm, steamy room. But whatever ghostly visitant had paused upon the threshold, he had evidently decided not to enter, for the catch snapped shut with a quick, passionate vigor. The echo of the slamming door ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... coming directly toward where he was. Basilio was not naturally superstitious, especially after having carved up so many corpses and watched beside so many death-beds, but the old legends about that ghostly spot, the hour, the darkness, the melancholy sighing of the wind, and certain tales heard in his childhood, asserted their influence over his mind and made his ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... the Inspector's house. A kind of fete is held in the evening and a procession passes with lanterns on poles, but there is very little singing or noise of any kind and the whole affair is rather ghostly. ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... Siddhas and Charanas. Those delightful mountains are overgrown with diverse kinds of herbs and adorned with various species of flowers. At that time they were peopled by the different tribes of Apsaras and crowds of ghostly beings. There the great god sat, filled with joy, and surrounded by hundreds of ghostly beings who presented diverse aspects to the eye of the beholder. Some of them were ugly and awkward, some were of very handsome features, and some presented the most wonderful appearances. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... time to bring in the clothes before leaving, but a willing neighborhood had guarded the premises for them, so Clothes-line Park was shrouded in a whiteness that looked ghostly in the moonlight. ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates

... Yes, it is night. It was night then, when I awoke to feel That deadly chill, and see by ghostly gleams Of moonlight, creeping through the grated door, The coffins of my fathers all about. Strange, hollow clamors rang and echoed back, As, struggling out of mine, I dropped and fell. With frantic strength I beat upon the ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... Ned felt a superstitious thrill as he looked at these ancient and solemn ruins. He and they were absolutely alone. Antiquity looked down upon him. The sun was gone now and the moon was coming out, touching pyramids and tumuli, earthworks and causeway with ghostly silver, deepening the effect ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler

... felt, at such moments, that there were ghostly and phantasmal wires connecting mind with mind; that across these telepathic wires one anxious spirit could in some way hold dim converse with the other; that the Soul itself had its elusive "wireless," and forever carried and gave out ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... and I walked for'ard. The beauty of the night was extraordinary. The yacht seemed to be veneered with a soft luminous paint that gave us the appearance of a ghostly ship skimming ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... inclined to renew the ghostly topic of conversation when left alone with her brother-in-law, but Simon gave her no chance. He stalked off down the hall and entered his study, a small room that opened off the comfortable, old-fashioned parlor. He closed the door from the hall behind him, and ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... and had damp fat fingers; the hymn-singing, the wheezy harmonium, the amazing pseudo-mystical oracular messages that revealed nothing which a religiose fool could not invent—in fact the whole affair, from the sham stained-glass lamp-shade to the ghostly tambourines overhead, the puerility of the tricks played on the inquirers, and all the rest of it—this seemed as little connected with what he had experienced with Mr. Vincent as a dervish dance with High Mass. He had reflected with almost ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... side of me, And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions, I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... visions as recorded by the inmate of the asylum. The rapid and continuous transition from scene to scene, and period to period, is the same in both. Foreign kings and other potentates reappear, as with De Quincey, in ghostly and repellent forms:— ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger

... window, her elbow on the sill, her chin resting in her hand, she kept watch on the river—but did not see the river: but saw the sea, wind-tossed and dark, where the lights go wide apart. Eleven o'clock. Ghostly moonlight filled the room. The tenement, restless in the summer heat, now sighed and fell asleep. Twelve o'clock. She had not moved: nor dared she move. There was a knock at the door—a quick step behind her. She turned ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan

... it is the completion of Baptismal grace, and without, like poor Sophia, expecting that effects would ever have been perceptible, I think that had I known how to seek after the Spirit of Counsel and Ghostly Strength, I might have given way less to the infirmities of my character, and have been less wilfully insensible ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... tears Mean but themselves, each fittest to create And to repay each other! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good? Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf, That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun! Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst have none; ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... the "Myrtle Grove" was haunted by ghosts, but the ghosts, if any there were, must have been pro-Boers, since they never disturbed us. But though we had no ghostly visitors we certainly had some of another kind. The house was perfectly infested by particularly large and bold rats. These thieving rodents, not satisfied with robbing our larder, had the audacity to sup off our fingers ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen



Words linked to "Ghostly" :   ghostliness, ghostlike, ghost, supernatural



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