~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait from Walt Whitman’s Complete Writings, recalling his allusion to “window-pierc’d façades.”

“Even if we cannot see the colored shapes as the ghostly portrait of a man, we do see the colors as something.” —Marc Bekoff

~ Mysterious Beards ~

Portrait of Henry Longfellow from Evangeline.

In the ghostly signature, there is no “fellow” in “Longfellow,” as befits the nature of the spirit world.

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from The life of Horace Greeley.

“He developed into a benevolent and magnanimous spectre, and, as far as it was possible for a headless apparition to be so, he was an interesting ghost.” —Edward Gordon, “The Ghost of Dundrumlie”

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from Memoir of Elder Benjamin Taylor.

"The stars and catherine wheels of light that filled his head dissipated.” —Wilbur Smith, Time to Die

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from Autobiography of the Hon. Humphrey Howe Leavitt.

“Faceless and eyeless, formless, without bound?” —Robert Buchanan

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.

“The head dissolved into the atmosphere while I watched it, there being no motion up or down.” —The Spiritual Magazine

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from A Memoir of Jacques Cartier.

"Uncertain whether a ghostly hand might not presently draw aside the curtain.” —Leith Adams

---

Antipater of Cydonia writes:

This suggests the Scanner Model of reality. That reality is a matter of faithful reproduction. Of what? I don't know. Most savvy people consider recreation a misnomer. Or a parlor trick. A museum. A diorama. A dilemmarama. That a copy of a copy of a copy gets less real. That's the Faith. That's the cherished human notion. Because of the lost substrate. But the other argument is that the copy of the copy of the copy is every bit as real as the original (arch-ecriture whatevah). It's memory which is fouling reality. Memory the copier. Memory  the bad copyist. The logical conclusion would seem to be that reality has nothing whatsoever to do with memory. Uh oh.

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from A Memoir of John Deakin Heaton.

“He, without eyes, surveying material and spiritual worlds.” —The Common School Journal

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from Biography of Rev. Leonidas L. Hamline.

“As if his high forehead touched cloud-land, and were obscured by dreams.” —Clemence Dane, Legend

~ Headlessness ~

Portrait from Autobiography by Moncure Daniel Conway.

“A beheaded man wanders about a headless spectre in the World of Shades.” —Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

~ The Veil ~

Portrait from The Confessions of a Beachcomber.

Note that the fisherman’s ghostly spear pierces the veil to make contact with the material realm.

~ The Veil ~

Portrait from An Autobiography by John Bartholomew Gough.

“Dark and heavy may the veil of Death have hung before us.” —S. Longfellow

~ The Veil ~

Portrait from Memoir of Rev. Samuel B. McPheeters.

"Though this specter’s face is never seen, he is recognized.” —Mark Moran, Weird Hauntings

~ The Veil ~

Portrait from Life of William Plumer.

“From this ghostly veil of vapor the form of a man was evolved.” —Ballou’s Monthly Magazine

We now formally introduce our repository of ghostly images that were never meant to be. The specters were conjured unwittingly, through a mechanical process of book scanning. Their portraits technically do not exist, except within this context. To explain: in old books, frontispieces were typically protected by a sheet of translucent tissue paper. So thorough is the Google Books scanning process that even this page of tissue paper is scanned. The figure in the plate beneath the tissue—"beyond the veil,” as it were—emerges as from a foggy otherworld. The frontispieces were never meant to be seen this way. Their wraithlike manifestations have been artificially "fixed" in time by the scanning process. In essence, timeless phantasms of dead writers have been captured and bound into a new age.

And so we call this phenomenon "unforeseen art," as it constitutes an aesthetic expression without original intent. Just as artists often credit their inspiration to a Muse, the accidental art herein is in the domain of real ghosts; every author here has departed to the Other Side. We call it "necromancy by proxy," as the scanning machine serves as our "spirit medium" or shaman.

See The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine.

~ The Veil ~

Portrait from Illustrations of the Author of Waverley.

"O You who unveils the hidden, reveal to me the secret of this.” —Simcha Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife