This is an version of The Wonder Reader, a e-newsletter by which our editors suggest a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up right here to get it each Saturday morning.
In December of 1908, the author and Presbyterian minister Frank Crane revealed an article in The Atlantic referred to as “Ghosts.” In it, he explains that as you develop up, the great ghosts die younger, and the dangerous ones dwell on.
Crane’s dangerous ghosts are metaphors: He’s lamenting the lingering shadow of concepts, politics, and even trend—he actually hates tall hats—of many years previous. But the great ghosts he yearns for are certainly specters—of a kind: “The kindly fee-faw-fums of childhood, how many delicious shivers we owe them; the Things that stood behind floors … that lurked in closet corners and under the bed … we miss them, for fear is a condiment, like Cayenne pepper; a little is an excellent relish.”
I couldn’t agree extra. So for the primary version of The Wonder Reader, I’ve scoured The Atlantic for the perfect issues to examine these guests who encourage a scrumptious shiver—and typically even assist us see the world in another way.
On Ghosts
By Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin
You can consider within the story with out believing within the ghost.
The Broken Technology of Ghost Hunting
By Colin Dickey
Spirit-tracking instruments work the alternative of most client electronics—the extra glitches, the higher.
Eight Ghost Stories in Which the Dead Won’t Go Quietly
By Colin Dickey
Books about ghostly guests—comedic and horrifying, welcome and unwelcome—that can cling to you lengthy after you’ve put them down
Still Curious?
- Where science and miracles meet: Recent speculations in physics reveal that believers and nonbelievers could have extra in frequent than they suppose, the physicist Alan Lightman wrote final yr.
- When cameras took footage of ghosts: In pictures’s early days, individuals used it to recommend the endurance of the departed, Megan Garber wrote in 2013.
Other Diversions
P.S.
I’ll depart you with these traces from Robert Graves’s 1942 essay “Common Sense About Ghosts,” which have been making me smile since I learn them: Of the one time he believes he noticed a ghost in daylight, Graves writes, “There may have been a slight cosmic accident, assisted by my memory … and (if you insist) by three or four glasses of Pommard.”
Have an important day, and I’m wanting ahead to sharing weekends of marvel with you.
— Isabel