~ 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

INSTRUCTIONS: Click on the puzzle image below to reveal one possible solution.

Opposing us is the more or less well-established conventional doctrine that has spun like a cocoon around mind upon this earth, shutting off research, and stifling even speculation, shelling away all data of relations and relatability with external existences, a doctrine that, in its various explanations and disregards and denials, is unified in one expression of Exclusionism.  —New Lands

~ 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”

INSTRUCTIONS: Click on the puzzle image below to reveal one possible solution.

~ 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

My head, like the sun, contained nothing except lucid flame,
and the message came from the sun to me without words.
—Lois Phillips Hudson, Reapers of the Dust

INSTRUCTIONS: Click on the puzzle image below to reveal one possible solution.

~ 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

 

by DrewMyers

~ 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

INSTRUCTIONS: Click on the puzzle image below to reveal one possible solution.

My suspicion is that we've got everything reversed; or that all things that have the sanction of scientists, or that are in agreement with their myths, are ghosts: and that things called 'ghosts,' are, because they are not in agreement with the spooks of science, the more nearly real things.  I now suspect that the spiritualists are reversedly right—that there is a ghost-world—but that it is our existence—that when spirits die they become human beings.

I now have a theory that once upon a time, we were real and alive, but departed into this state that we call 'existence'—that we have carried over with us from the real existence, from which we died, the ideas of Truth, and of axioms and principles and generalizations—ideas that really meant something when we were really alive, but that, of course, now, in our phantom-existence—which is demonstrable by any X-ray photograph of any of us—can have only phantom-meaning—so then our never-ending, but always frustrated, search for our lost reality.  We come up chimera and mystification, but persistently have beliefs, as retentions from an experience in which there were things to believe in.  I'd not say that all of us are directly ghosts: most of us may be the descendants of the departed from a real existence, who, in our spook-world, pseudo-propagated.  (Wild Talents, 1932)

"An amazing, glittering, glowing, Proustian, Conradian, Borgesian, diamond-faceted, language-studded, myth-drowned dream!" —Cynthia Ozick, describing this book

~ 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