"I hope you don't take this the wrong way.  I know you're running from something, something that terrifies you."
—Linda Broday, Twice a Texas Bride

"A messenger of evil," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

"And crawled beneath the sofa in despair!"  From The Bashful Earthquake by Oliver Herford (1899).

It's only funny if the joke speaks for itself.  Here's "the autobiography of a good joke," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, edited by Percy Bolingbroke Saint John, 1884.

Here's a precursor to David Copperfield's talking necktie illusion, from The Last of the Nine, 1890.  The caption reads, "'Don't touch that woman!' said a voice, 'It is the command of the black tie!'"

From Leslie's Fate, and Hilda, or the Ghost of Erminstein by Andrew Charles Parker Haggard, 1892.

From Hysteria and Certain Allied Conditions by George Junkin Preston, 1897.

From The Davenport Brothers, 1869.  This should be of interest: Seance Parlor Feng Shui.

"The curse," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

From St. Nicholas magazine, 1904.

From The Oxford Thackeray.

From the Peace Institute's yearbook The Lotus, 1921.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

Here's a banshee from The World of Romance, 1892.

"What is this love that must always remember, holding fast to dim touches of earliest grace?"
—William Peter Blatty, I'll Tell Them I Remember You

"'A miracle!  A miracle!' they cried."  From Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

From The Works of Charles Dickens Household Edition.

Here's a classic sheet ghost from Buffalo Bill's Rough Riders, 1890.