Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,--whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition I could not be quite sure.

If I have not heard a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess it--I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that nonsense out of any man's head! It is not our beliefs that frighten us half so much as our fancies.

A man not only believes, but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it does n't worry him much.

On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,--the old man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the country-people have called it "the haunted house,"-- the owners have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking, -- take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone,--how do you think he will like it?
He doesn't believe one word of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images.

It is not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.