There is something, a haunting . . .

Here’s the truth.

I do not like horror movies.

No. I will be the first one out of the room, head under a pillow, eyes shut tight. My heart still races when I think of The Exorcist and Silence of the Lambs.

Did anyone else in the theater sit for two hours with their eyes closed? Maybe I had at least one kindred spirit as I counted the seconds for the credits to finally roll.

Today is Halloween.

Ghouls, vampires, and zombies come alive on hundreds of streaming channels. We can thank the Celts, who over 3,000 years ago celebrated the harvest at the end of summer, lit bonfires, and wore costumes to ward off ghosts. We carve pumpkins, but the Irish carved turnips. Go try that!

Beyond movies, books hold frightening and haunting words. I remember locking all the doors and leaving on the lights after reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Literature often inspires, grabs our imagination, and can scare the living daylights out of even the staunchest horror lover. Writers across time have used words to immerse our senses in the grotesque and eerie.

When I started searching for a few of the most haunting quotes from literature, I soon filled a couple of pages. Those were only from the books, poems, or plays that had seared their words into my psyche like those that follow.

“The goblins of her fancy lurked in every shadow about her, reaching out their cold, fleshless hands to grasp the terrified small girl who had called them into being.”
Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery

“The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelated and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places.”
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

“Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.”

“Something wicked this way comes.”
Macbeth, William Shakespeare

“When the spooks have a midnight jamboree/They break it up with fiendish glee/The ghosts are bad but the one that’s cursed/Is the headless horseman; he’s the worst/That’s right, he’s a fright on Halloween night! When he goes a joggin’ ‘cross the land/Holding his noggin in his hand/Demons take one look and groan/And they hit the road to parts unknown/Beware, take care he rides alone!”
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving

“…the world seems full of good men—even if there are monsters in it.”
Dracula, Bram Stoker

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
“The Raven,” Edgar Allen Poe