The Guardian in the Graveyard

For tonight's countdown to Halloween, I present you another ghost, but a specific type. This image can be found in All About Ghosts, the schlocky paranormal book that haunted (literally) my childhood and fired up my imagination. You can read more about it here. I found this image particularly haunting (excuse the pun). This cloaked phantom is a graveyard guardian. According to the book, unlike what many think, you will not find many ghosts in a cemetery because ghosts haunt the place of their death, not their burial. Only one ghost exists in the graveyard: the graveyard guardian, the spirit of the first person to have been buried in it. So he protects the place against troublemakers and evil spirits (who should have been haunting their place of death anyway, right?). And the book added that in ancient Europe, they sometimes sacrificed a living person to make sure the graveyard had a guardian.

Now what I wonder as an adult is: where the heck did they take their info from? I am to say the least very skeptical about this claim. That said, as a child and even now, I found and find the idea fascinating. I once blogged that the issue with ghosts in scary stories is that they are all appearance and represent no physical menace. They may induce terror, but have no claws to shred with or fangs to bite with. While this is not quite true and many stories managed to have ghosts that represent at least partially a concrete menace, often the ghost is an appearance. But this one, well, he is a guardian. He must have coercive powers to guard. And he must be committed to his mission, if not fanatical about it. That he might have been sacrificed to fulfill his duty makes it all the more sinister. And there is the image itself. Since I saw it, I think about it every time I walk by or through a graveyard. I would love to read a scary story about such ghost. Or write one, if I can.

All About Ghosts

This is my countdown to Halloween post. I am pluging here a rather bad book, All About Ghosts. I bought it in a French translation back in the 80s. I said it is a bad one and I am even tempted to say that it has no education value whatsoever. Which is why it is a bad book: it is basically is a children's guide to the paranormal. There was some chapters about how people faked hauntings, but overall it was a pure embrace of supernatural explanations for unexplained phenomenons. I didn't develop my critical thinking reading it. That said, I can't help loving it and I still enjoy reading it.

There are two reasons for this: 1)the images. Oh gosh the images! Beautiful, eerie, scary, they were a source of inspiration for many games of our childhood. 2)with all its flaws, it still taught me a few things about ghostly folklore, superstitions, legends and more particularly British folklore, superstitions and legends. You can find more art and more about the book on this blog. If you want to write horror fiction (say someone invites you to write one), I would actually recommend to have this work on your bookshelves.