"Between our lips a ghostly thing."  From The Lifted Cup by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, 1921.

A constellation of orbs hovers among the dancers.  From Queens College's 1957 yearbook.

The letters behind the light appear to be N S E.  The [U]NSE[EN] may communicate by the light captured in this image.  From the University of Rhode Island's 1966 yearbook.

"The spectre brass-band."  From Over the Plum Pudding by John Kendrick Bangs, 1901.

~ Classic Sightings ~

A cemetery as it appears on the other side,

from Memoir of Captain M. M. Hammond.

via The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine.

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