Quotes & Sayings About Hauntings

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down. — Janet Frame

Every anxiety is a mild form of premonition, and from that point the shade deepens till we get the forebodings and hauntings that merge into lunacy. — Arthur Alfred Lynch

Every city is a ghost.
New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park. — Libba Bray

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Apparitions are often confused with hauntings. The difference is that apparitions are "live" (intelligent consciousness) and hauntings are "recordings. — Loyd Auerbach

Poppy used to share the room with her older sister, and piles of he sister's outgrown clothes still remained spread out in drifts, along with a collection of used makeup and notebooks covered in stickers and scrawled with lyrics. A jumbled of her sister's old Barbies were on top of a bookshelf, waiting for Poppy to try and fix their melted arms and chopped hair. The bookshelves were overflowing with fantasy paperbacks and overdue library books, some of them on Greek myths, some on mermaids, and a few on local hauntings. The walls were covered in posters-Doctor Who, a cat in a bowler hat, and a giant map of Narnia. — Holly Black

Happy Hauntings; and, pleasant dreams! — Peter James

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape - shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves. — Virginia Woolf

To weep not for the way things had once been but for the way things had been supposed to go and did not. People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn't the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures. — Michael Koryta

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead man who had answers. — James Caskey

That night, they spoke in hushed voices around the fire, almost expecting to see or hear something jump from the shadows. Gonjo had been spotted dancing on the railway station on last two consecutive nights. Such an innocuous act as dancing could surely have been ignored but the gravity of the matter lay in the chilling fact that Gonjo had died a week back. Those hushed voices were only adding more fuel to the fire, not the one which kept them warm, but the wildfire of ghostly hauntings by the Begunkodor railway station. What happened at the station this particular night, however, would clearly disabuse any misgivings towards the ghost of the dancing woman - Excerpt from the story 'Begunkodor Ghost Station — Manish Mahajan

My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also ... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue — Alexander Chee

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high in weeds and young trees. The trees have entirely encased a speed limit sign, strange sight, nothing so pointless as a speed limit sign in the midst of dense woods, pointless and beautifully so. — Tim Gilmore

One day, I tell myself, the sting will subside and I'll be able to look at a fucking orange and not think of her.
Or maybe it won't. Maybe life is about living with the hauntings. — Tarryn Fisher

The popular notion that ghosts are likely to be seen in a graveyard is not borne out by psychical research ... A haunting ghost usually haunts a place that a person lived in or frequented while alive ... Only a gravedigger's ghost would be likely to haunt a graveyard. — John H. Alexander

In Gothic fiction, characters must contend with the dead, with active hauntings or with hallucinations of hauntings, as well as whatever other trying circumstances they might find themselves in: orphanhood, lunacy, imprisonment, inheritances that go astray, troubling romantic situations. The Gothic novel does not strive for subtlety, and it isn't to everyone's taste. It can seem adolescent, an immature version of the stately, measured, grown-up realist novel, except that the line between Gothic and the realist is never clear. A disdain for the Gothic is limiting, since this literature, in all its flagrancy, has something to say about emotional as well as physical death, and a tale of a haunting can have a narrative vitality that is far from conclusive. Gothic stories linger especially in the mind. — Brenda Walker

The graveyard is full of the names of ancient magical families, and this accounts, no doubt, for the stories of hauntings that have dogged the little church beside it for many centuries.' "You and your parents aren't mentioned, — J.K. Rowling

Charleston is an extraordinary place. There is a deep connection between the residents and nearly three hundred and fifty years of history, and those ties between daily life and the distant past are strengthened by the occasional glimpse beyond the veil. — James Caskey

Hauntings only repeat what occurred once upon a time. — Anne Rice

Descending south into St. Augustine's Historic District along A1A, visitors are immediately confronted by an edifice which serves as a stark reminder that the city was originally founded as a military outpost, deep in hostile territory. Jutting up like a molar from the defensive teeth of the Ancient City is the forbidding fortress of Castillo de San Marcos, a coquina fortification which has served many roles it its nearly three hundred fifty year history. — James Caskey

It was haunted; but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory. — Anne Rice

Why would a demon haunt a house? The answer is simple: demons will resort to any means possible to persuade people to focus on ghosts and hauntings rather than on God. Consider our culture's high level of interest in books, shows, and movies that deal with demonic infestation. By getting people to focus on meaningless spiritual diversions such as haunted houses, the demons hope to distract them from truly important spiritual realities such as sin and the state of their own souls. — Mike Driscoll

I'm just saying it doesn't always have to be spirits and magic. Sometimes hauntings are in your mind. It doesn't make them less real. — Kendare Blake

Of the first few hauntings I investigated with Lockwood & Co. I intend to say little, in part to protect the identity of the victims, in part because of the gruesome nature of the incidents, but mainly because, in a variety of ingenious ways, we succeeded in messing them all up. — Jonathan Stroud

But certainly the two best-known tales in the neighborhood - the key hauntings, if you will - concern the Red Room and the Screaming Staircase.'
There was a profound silence, abruptly broken by an enormously loud rumble from George's stomach. Plaster didn't actually fall from the ceiling, but it was close.
'Sorry,' he said cheerfully. 'Famished. I think Ill have another doughnut, if you don't mind. Any takers? — Jonathan Stroud

She ran her hand over his cock and said, "This is the only thing I ever want to come between us."
His grin couldn't have stretched any further. — Terry Spear

Overhead the sky was melting, the cracked cream color rubbing off in cogs of brine.
The fields far ahead of me in endless pudding, studded here and there with what had been: homes and houses, hair and heirlooms, habits, hallways, hauntings, hope. — Blake Butler