A Ghost Story by D.F. Lewis

Following ‘Mansions Without Roofs’ here: https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=14207

The figure entered the hallway with a pure white head - the term ‘head’ including the whole face where the hair, mouth, nose and ears should have been, but on one side was a single large vertically eye-shaped hole to let any light through. The outline of the face itself was moon-wide upon a black neck that led to a body dressed in what appeared to be an armless black gown in the otherwise dim space in which I stood watching it.

It was a household that eked out its electricity supply with proud stubbornness, so everywhere in it was mainly dark, with the denizens currently sitting in the only fully lighted room in the whole mansion. They indeed called it their sitting-room.

I had not expected such an apparition, but being what I like to call a ghost hunter, indeed the ghost hunter, I should not have been surprised, let alone as shocked as I was. But bearing in mind that this was my very first ghost apparition to witness, any emotion could have been excused, ranging from a love of awesome things to a mild fear, then to this utter terror. From frisson to a prison of self. Shutting every sense down so as to block out what I had seen. Not even shouting out to those in the sitting-room.

Whether the ghost had vanished after my initial sight of it, I was never to discover. All I can remember is that there was one slit in my soul that let it in like light. The next time you read some narrator’s words claiming to be the ghost hunter in a series of forthcoming short ghost stories like this one, it will not be me.