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)

~ 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

~ 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.

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

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: