~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Henrik Ibsen: The Man and His Plays.

“The ghost was like a man in old-fashioned clothes, with a beard; but you couldn’t see very well because it was only half-lit, like luminous paint on match boxes.” —Frederic Stewart Isham, Three Live Ghosts

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from The Poetical Works of Owen Meredith (Robert, Lord Lytton).

"‘Maybe he has a mysterious beard.’ ‘Who cares? It’s his soul that matters.’” —Munsey’s Magazine

---

June ponders:

Maybe they were calling Shakespeare "The Beard" and pronounced it "bard"!

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from The Man Christ Jesus, under a shroud of tissue paper.

“The Holy Ghost is also represented with a beard, to signify his being equal to the Father and the Son, and that like them, he had eternity for his portion.” —Adolphe Napoléon Didron, Christian Iconography

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Memoir of Charles Lowe.

“[The] specter raises the prospect of an immaterial beard.” —Jack Selzer, Rhetorical Bodies

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Autobiography of Henry Taylor.

“One venerable ‘ghost’ . . . appears repeatedly with his flowing, patriarchal beard.” —Elliot Coues, “Can Ghosts Be Photographed?”

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Memoir of John Wingate Thornton.

“His mustache and beard faded more and more into gray.” —Charles Neville Buck, The Key to Yesterday

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Memoir of LeBaron Botsford.

“Should ghosts grow beards?” —Frederic Stewart Isham, Three Live Ghosts

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Life of Abraham Lincoln.

“The initial appearance of form is nothing more or less than the appearance of a shadowy quality or a gray splotch.” —The American Journal of Psychology

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Bayard Taylor.

“I fancied I saw a pale blue misty outline of a human figure, but an outline so indistinct that I could only distrust my own vision.” —Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Autobiography of Andrew T. Still.

“[A] mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes.” —O. Henry, “The Thing’s the Play”

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Autobiography of Enrico Morozzo della Rocca.

“Nebulous and gruesome shreds of blue-fog like wraiths.” —Frederick Albert Cook

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from A Memoir of Randolph Sailer.

“What does the well-dressed ghost wear under his sheet?” —Marilyn Redmond

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

“I am acquainted with a ‘seeing medium,’ who has seen the beard-atmosphere.” —George Cruikshank, A Discovery Concerning Ghosts

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

“Without wanting to draw overmuch on the Freudian trope of ghosts and the uncanny here, one can nonetheless add Tennyson’s ghost to all the others.” —Thomas Hardy

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from the Martin B. Anderson biography.

“I have come across only four references to the beard of an apparition in the Census collection.” —J. G. Piddington, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait of Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days.

“His eyebrows, his beard, faded into a smoke, into nothing at all.” —Louis Golding, Magnolia Street

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait John Bartholomew Gouch from Sunlight and Shadow.

The book title is eerily appropriate, as we see Gouch in both his corruptible and incorruptible states.

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Daniel Pratt’s biography.

“Complete with owl eyes and spectral beard.” —Osbert Sitwell, qtd. in Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir.

“I do not allow any cold steel ever to profane this ghostlybeard of mine.” —Frederic Townsend, Spiritual Visitors

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Biography of Zadock Pratt.

“His face is the face of a spirit dimly bright.” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning