Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 July 1878 — Ghost Stories. [ARTICLE]

Ghost Stories.

Of all the abominable practices of w|iich sensible grown people can be that of telling ghost stories to en is the most abominable. The man who would do it ought to be tied up in a dark cellar and be, danced around by a troop of Jack-p’-lanterns till daybreak; and the woman Who would do it ought to be obliged to forego spring hats and pull-backs, and dress in ghostly white the rest of her lifeWho believes in ghosts? Does anybody? Did any person living ever see one, without the help of the imagination? * Children’s minds are new—they easily receive impressions, and first impressiors are lasting. What unimaginabl* terrors the poor little things have suffered through the indiscretion of their elders in repeating before them some silly story in which a ghost figured! They learn to be afraid of the dark. They will not go to bed without some one to sit beside them until sleep comes, lest the ghost may put in an appearance. And if they wake in the night they cover their heads in the bedclothes, and lie still and tremble, and

sweat, and wish they could hear somebody’s rooster crow, so that they could be sure morning was coining. Grown people thoughtlessly repeat stories of the supernatural, and descant upon signs, before children, never dreaming of the trouble and distress they aracatuthg. 1 Not long ago, a sweet little girl came to us, with tears in her eyes and terror on her face, and in trembling tones asked us if wo believed that breaking a looking-glass was a sign of death? Upon questioning her, she told us with a great deal of evident distress that she had broken a mirror, and that her aunt told her it was a sure sign of death in the family, and the poor child’s nearest relative being a dearly beloved mother, her fears had turned to her, and she was well-nigh distracted at the thought of losing hen She had not slept the whole night before, she said, and we mentally wished that we had the power to put that idiotic old aunt into a strait-jacket and feed her on broken looking-glasses “ till the day of Pentecost.” One sign we believe in sincerely—when you find a person who is continually croaking about this tiling and that being a sign of coming misfortune or death, it is a sure sign that there is Something lacking about the mind of that particular person. - Gan any reasonable, sensible man or woman believe that if God was about to take us hence, He would cause us to break a looking-glass in order to warn us? Would He send us an intiinati< n of what was coming-by the tick of an insect in the wall? or the crowing of a broken up sitting hen on Lhe doorstep? Let us be done with such absurdities! Life is too real, too earnest to be fooled away in any such manner as t his. Let the other world alone. God will take care of it. . But let us entreat you—whatever absurdities of ghost and spirit conversations you may indulge in, let it not be before children—for you make them unhappy, and plant within them the germs of a supernatural feat;, which will torment them all through life.— Kate Thorn, in N. Y. Weekly.