THE PHANTOM HAND: And Other American Hauntings

Harter's ghosts are mere shadows tacked onto the end of historical incidents--the pounding of pony express riders heard by ""some"" along their old route; the spirits of Sagamore Hill's mounted game trophies roaming the house at night; even the soul of John Brown which as we all know still ""goes marching on."" On the near side of mortality things get pretty soggy: of Longfellow's grief over his wife's death, we're told ""He never wrote another famous poem. It was as though the genius of his heart and mind had died in the blaze that consumed his loved one."" For all that, we admit to a certain fascination with these famous phantoms, though their manifestation is no more than a feeble echo of Osceola's Head (1974).