t.64 Another restless spirit on horseback appears in Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow, a small town “under the sway of some witching power,”65 is haunted by “theapparition of a figure on horseback, without a head,” said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper“whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball” in the Revolutionary War.66 The nextstory of this era is a bit different for it is not outright supernatural, but the whole mood of thework gives off an eerie feeling. It is Moby Dick by Herman Melville. H.P. Lovecraft, a horrorwriter, once wrote that the test if a story is truly unearthly and strange is “simply whether or notthere be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, of contact with unknown spheres andpowers” beyond the mortal realm.67 If this true, then Moby Dick passes the test. Melvillespeaks of “forbidden seas,”68 prophetic events, and a white whale of immense size and strangepowers. But as all of these stories are coming together, the United States is coming unglued.Next, America enters the Pre-Civil War period, a controversial time with equallycontroversial writers, but there remains the same old craving of the mysterious, if not amagnified one. William Cullen Bryant wrote his poem, “Thanatopsis,” during this period. Bryant’s poem deals with death, and peace in knowing that no matter where a man ends up, hewill be with all the others that have gone before. “So live, that when thy summons comes to joinThe innumerable caravan, which movesTo that mysterious realm, where each shall takeHis chamber in the silent halls of death.”69With The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain tells the story of a ‘white trash’ boy, arunaway slave, and their escape to freedom. This may not sound like a novel having anything todo with the supernatural, but “much of the choicest weird work [...
