“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. ”1 Therefore, it makes sense that if mortals cannot bear the darkness, they [should not] not go there. If man dislikes “black night and yawning chasms,”2 then should he not even consider them? Shouldn’t man seek out the sunshine, instead? The remedy is very simple: Avoid the darkness and seek the light. But, no. Mankind would never submit to this. He will immediately turn to the darkness.
Drawn by his own cords of fear and onging, man will imagine that he is tired of the light and his small, familiar world. “No amount of rationalization… or Freudian analysis” can overcome “the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. ”4 Why? Children will always be afraid of the dark and men will always shudder at what they do not understand, yet everyone will continue to seek it. 5 Perhaps it is because society, particularly American society because of its history, believes the final horrors are ghosts and demons, when truly it is the hidden aspects of its own soul. As reflected by its literature, American society has always held a deep fascination with the supernatural.
Evidence of this is seen throughout American history, from the Puritan era onward. In modern society, one would think that there isn’t any place for fantasy and superstitions, but the United States is full of people who are convinced that psychics can predict their future, they have ghosts living in their houses, aliens visit the Earth in flying saucers, and even that they can talk to the dead. 7 People believe in the supernatural because they want to elieve, because it makes them happy, even if those beliefs exist against logic or opposing evidence.
In Detroit, “ghost-busting is back big time,” with “at least five ‘ghost hunting’ clubs” springing up in the metro area. 9 The Great Lakes Ghost Hunters Society and the Ghost Hunters of Southern Michigan are just two of the organizations that supposedly embrace the unknown, even claiming to have documentation of “floating orbs [and] ethereal specters. ”10 “Armed with video cameras, sophisticated recording equipment, and an undying belief in the inexplicable,”11 he ranks of the ‘ghost hunters’ are growing.
This is most likely due to the fact that American society is “[inching] ever closer to embracing phenomena that science [cannot] answer. ”12 Even highly esteemed academic publications such as the Journal of Scientific Exploration “now treat the paranormal with as much respect and analysis as physics or the chaos theory. ”13 The possibility of life existing on other worlds has been the subject of speculation for years. 14 In May, 1988, NASA began using a “super computer” that is intended to pick up signals from any distant civilizations.
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, has launched many projects over the years, but has yielded nothing so far. 16 Despite the lack of evidence, many Americans have no doubt that aliens exist. This is the result of their belief system. “Whether something’s really there or not may be irrelevant,”17 because many Americans tend to fall back on faith. “[Jill Cook Richards] is twenty-eight years into a career as a self-described psychic,”18 which depends exclusively on her faith. Richards relates the story of how, when she was young, she always said she wanted to talk to God.
Because of this, she claims that “when things started coming to me, they came to me as voices. It’s the voice of God talking. ”19 At the age of fifty-two, Richards can still support herself and her husband with the money she earns as a Ghost hunting clubs, alien-searching satellites, and psychics are only a few of the many outlets available to Americans in modern times. Media plays a large role in arousing the public’s interest in the fantastic. 21 The novels of Anne Rice, a gothic-horror writer, appeal to a large audience, and her three book series have quite a cult following.
Her two main series are The Vampire Chronicles and The Mayfair Witches. 22 The Vampire Chronicles portrays modern vampires through a vampire’s eyes, often as victims of the “dark gift”23 of vampirism, struggling to come to terms with their nature or accepting it and moving on. A dominant theme in this series is “the belief in the supernatural [as being] part of the human soul… ”24 These books are romantic, realistic, and supposedly written by various vampires to the mortal world. Because of this, a large following of Rice’s characters has developed, especially Lestat de Lioncourt.
Lestat s the hypothetical author of The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, and Memnoch the Devil. 25 His fans, including Rice herself, are deeply fascinated by this “tall, fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair. ”26 They dream of this intriguing vampire stealing into their room with a “graceful, almost feline quality to his movements,”27 moving closer, “his gray eyes [burning] with an incandescence,”28 and whispering to them some unknown truth that would explain the workings of the universe. Another famous author with a large cult following is Stephen King.
His works have gained a great audience not because of their characters or stories, but because of King himself. King’s readers are fascinated by the mind that can produce such horrifying stories, and they see him as a sort of preternatural being. Many movies and books have been devoted to this ‘king of horror. ’30 Both of these authors, Rice and King, along with other writers, journalists, and novelists, serve to bring the supernatural to their fans and unite them under its banner. As observed by King, “one touch of horror makes The Puritans of America’s early days did not understand much about their universe.
In a vain attempt to explain what befell them, the Puritans built up “such personifications [and] marvelous interpretations”32 as to reveal their own morbid fascination with the unnatural. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible best illustrates this hypocritical attraction-abhorrence nature of the Puritans. They believe that the forest was “the Devil’s last preserve. ”33 Hence, when the Salem minister, Reverend Parris, discovers a group of girls from the town, including his daughter, Betty, and niece, Abigail, dancing and “conjuring up spirits”34 with his slave girl, Tituba, “the rumor of witchcraft [spreads] all about.
Betty will not wake from what seems to be a deep sleep36. Almost everyone in the town jumps to the conclusion that she has been put under a witch’s spell. 37 One of the first things Goody Putnam asks about Betty is “How high did she fly? ”38 This clearly illustrates how instinctive and deeply entrenched was this desire for the supernatural. Exasperated, Reverend Parris calls on Rev. Hale, who is an expert in the “demonic arts,”39 to evaluate the situation. The fact that they even have an expert of the demonic arts speaks volumes about their superstitious way of life.
When Mr. Hale arrives, it is quickly etermined that “Tituba knows how to speak to the dead,”40 and that more went on than simply dancing. From these meager details it is resolved that “there is a murdering witch among [them]. ”41 Tituba is called in to speak to Rev. Hale, who forces confessions out of her as if he wants them to be true. Finally, she sobs that she “danced for the Devil [and] wrote in his book. ”42 Thus begins the string of names cried gleefully by Betty, Abigail, and Tituba to insure their own freedom from blame.
With that, almost every woman in town is accused of being a witch, and the cycle continues. 3 Another important example of hysterical paranoia from the Puritan era is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This novel does not deal so much with witches as it does with the Black Man, which “is a traditional American name for the Devil. ”44 In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne commits adultery with Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. She is discovered and forced to wear a mark of shame, the scarlet letter A, on her dress for the rest of her life. Soon Mr.
Prynne, her presumed-dead husband, returns to discover all of this. 45 Now called Roger Chillingworth to hide his identity, he sinks to a new low as he ortures Dimmesdale by keeping him alive to suffer his guilt and shame. 46 Chillingworth becomes an almost supernatural being, part devil, part medieval alchemist, and part evil scientist. 47 Hester’s daughter, Pearl, is described as a “demon child”48 who constantly taunts her mother. She is also another unnatural link to this story.
It is of common belief that Mistress Hibbins, the town witch, often dances in the forest with the Devil. 9 One day, she calls to Hester, saying “there will be merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne” would be there. 0 To this Hester answers no, but this situation presents the stereotypical witch that many Puritans feared, but that probably did not exist. The next occurrence is the meteor in the sky. “Nothing was more common in those days than to interpret all meteoric appearances and other natural phenomena” as supernatural revelations.
When Dimmesdale, in all of his guilt, sees the meteor streak across the sky, he imagines that it is “an immense letter… A marked out in line of dull red light. ”52 Many other people of the town see it as well, but each interprets it to his own liking, never once suggesting that it may just With the Age of Reason on the horizon in the late 18th century-early nineteenth century, “the area of the unknown [is] steadily contracting,”54 but “it has always existed, and it will always exist. ”55 America’s first professional writer, Charles Brockden Brown, has a deep attraction to horror and gothic writing.
His four major novels, Wieland or The Transformation, Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Edgar Huntly, are deeply influenced by early English Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley. 57 Wieland, or The Transformation, for example, is about the Wieland family and all of the paranormal events that appen to them. Next is “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving. This short story is “the first to seize the American imagination. ”58 This is a tale of a man who goes into mountains to hunt, and, while there, he encounters ghostly men who offer him a drink.
This mysterious cider causes him to become drowsy, and soon he falls asleep, but for twenty years. 59 Irving also wrote two other chilling folk tales about the supernatural. “The Devil and Tom Walker,” which is very similar to the Puritan writings, is about the “black woodsman,” or the Devil. 60 Just as in Puritan ife, the forest is seen as evil where “savages [hold] incantations… and [make] sacrifices to the evil spirit. ”61 Tom Walker makes a pact with the Devil to become extremely rich, in exchange for his soul. 62 It ends in a truly folktale-ish manner.
Tom Walker is “come for” by the black woodsman, and no one seems to mind much. 63 But the forest is “haunted in stormy nights by a figure on horseback, in morning gown and white cap,” which is said to be Tom Walker’s restless spirit. 64 Another restless spirit on horseback appears in Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow, a small town “under the sway of some witching power,”65 is haunted by “the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head,” said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper “whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball” in the Revolutionary War.
The next story of this era is a bit different for it is not outright supernatural, but the whole mood of the work gives off an eerie feeling. It is Moby Dick by Herman Melville. H. P. Lovecraft, a horror writer, once wrote that the test if a story is truly unearthly and strange is “simply whether or not here be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, of contact with unknown spheres and powers” beyond the mortal realm. 67 If this true, then Moby Dick passes the test. Melville speaks of “forbidden seas,”68 prophetic events, and a white whale of immense size and strange powers.
But as all of these stories are coming together, the United States is coming unglued. Next, America enters the Pre-Civil War period, a controversial time with equally controversial writers, but there remains the same old craving of the mysterious, if not a magnified one. William Cullen Bryant wrote his poem, “Thanatopsis,” during this period. Bryant’s poem deals with death, and peace in knowing that no matter where a man ends up, he will be with all the others that have gone before.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death. ”69 With The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain tells the story of a ‘white trash’ boy, a runaway slave, and their escape to freedom. This may not sound like a novel having anything to do with the supernatural, but “much of the choicest weird work [has] fragments scattered hrough material whose massed effect” is very different. 70 The first example is Huck. His superstitions are not based on any real fact.
He just believes in them. Sitting at his window, Huck claims “the wind [is] trying to whisper something to [him]. ”71 Then “a spider went crawling up [his] shoulder,” and he flicks it into the candle. 72 To him, this is a bad omen. He gets up, turns around three times, crosses his breast three times, and ties a lock of his hair in a thread “to keep witches away. ”73 Jim, the runaway slave, has different superstitions. He always as “that five-center piece” around his neck because he says it is a charm the devil gave to him to call witches. 4 Jim also has a strange hairball that he claimed holds a spirit, and “it knowed everything. ”
However, Huck’s father, Pap, has superstitions that spring from a different origin: his own guilt. When he was drunk one night, he begins “screaming and saying there was devils a-hold of him” and that the dead were coming after him. 76 But this age was crying for more than superstitions; it had an “insatiable appetite for wonders,” and Edgar Allan Poe was usually three jumps in advance of the boldest of his contemporaries.
He never falls into tradition, but creates his own. 78 “Into regions of terror where Hawthorne [and] Irving would have shrunk back disgusted,” Poe plunges ahead, writing stories and poems such as “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Ligeia”, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Raven. ”79 At their best, Poe’s works are vehicles for “exploring the hidden hinterland of the human mind. ”80 Nevertheless, this exploration will soon come to a momentary halt because America will have ther things on its mind, namely the Civil War.
Amid all of the bloodshed and cannon fire of the Civil War, unnatural musings still find a niche in the back of mortals’ minds. Stephen Crane writes The Red Badge of Courage as a naturalistic realist, but, “as if to discharge from [his mind] certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt [him],” he includes that sense of dread that makes a novel truly unnatural. 81 Crane’s brand of naturalism makes his novel ghostly. As the protagonist of the book, Henry Fleming, is fleeing from battle, “the creepers [catch] against his legs [and] cry out arshly. 82 “The swishing saplings” try to “make known his presence to the world. ”
“It [seems] Nature was not quite ready to kill him,”84 when Henry reaches what looks like a safe spot. But there he encounters an eerie sight. “He [is] being looked at by a dead man” from two glassy, pale eyes. 85 He imagines all sorts of things that the dead man might do: get up and chase him, speak “in horrible menaces” after him, or reach out to grab him. 86 On his way back to camp, he is knocked out by a fellow soldier fleeing from battle, but he gets supernatural protection from a ‘faceless man. He [threads] the mazes of the tangled forest with strange fortune” and protects Henry from the sullen surroundings.
When Henry arrives at his camp, he feels hope in the “warm and strong hand clasped” to his. Then man leaves, cheerfully whistling, but the sense of something strange comes when Henry realizes “that he had not once seen his The early- to mid-twentieth century American fiction is sparsely populated with mystery and wonders, but the few than remain are jewels of their own kind. In O Pioneers! , Willa Cather’s one, extraordinary moment is when Alexandra speaks of her dream.
The phenomenon of dreaming” aids in building up “the notion of an unreal or spiritual world,”89 and that is exactly what Alexandra tapped into. “She used to have the illusion of being lifted”90 and carried by a large, strong, and swift man. He is “yellow like the sunlight, and there [is] a smell of ripe cornfields about him. ”91 During the Roaring Twenties, the Harlem Renaissance produced eerie poetry and prose. In Gwendolyn Bennett’s “Lines Written at the Grave of Alexandre Dumas,” Bennett speaks of cemeteries as “places for departed souls [and] roving spirits. 92
In The Grapes f Wrath, John Steinbeck tells the story of a migrant family traveling with the former preacher, Jim Casy, who is seen by Ma and the other women as a kind of messiah. Their strange perception of this is revealed by “the look in [their eyes]”93 as he speaks. “The Night the Ghost Got In,” by James Thurber, is a humorous look at a strange situation. A ghost gets into Thurber’s house and begins a “quick-cadenced walking around the dining-room table. ”94 He does not tell his mother because she is “even more afraid of ghosts than burglars. ”95 Later, he admits that he wishes he had “just let it keep on walking.
This treatment of the supernatural as an everyday occurrence reveals how comfortable Americans have become with the paranormal. Another example of this same theme is Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Throughout the entire book, the supernatural happenings that take place are described as if they are not anything to be too terribly shocked about. For instance, the lightening-rod salesman says “you got to be ready in every dialect with every shape and form to hex St. Elmo’s fire”96 while trying to sell his rods to the two main characters, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade.
From the Puritan era onward, American society has always held a deep fascination with the supernatural. This is greatly reflected by the literature produced over the years. From the Salem Witch Trials to psychic hot-lines, Americans will always share an enchantment, if not a respect, for the unknown universe. “The real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening,”97 but it is thrilling to know that there is still that uncharted territory to discover, that mysterious frontier. However, as modern society has found, just because something has not been discovered, doesn’t mean it will be discovered. 98
