The sleeves hung six inches over the hand. Unmistakably a figure, tall and broad, clad in a black garment like a monk’s robe, with a wide, loose cowl, which hung over the head down just below the throat, thus completely hiding the features. But there was no peg in that corner and not a breath of air stirring. There was something there! It looked like an ample black crape veil hung on a peg and moved by a gentle breeze. I felt menaced and was compelled to watch that corner. There was something in the corner! I tried to see.Īfter awhile something moved. My eyes wandered to the windows and onto the angle referred to. My bed was in the opposite angle, the wall to my left. From a window to the apex of the angle formed by the return wall was 3 feet. There was no moon, so the trees and building were outlined in inky-black silhouettes against the star-studded sky. On the right of the bed and distant perhaps eight yards were the windows-three, very large, very lofty and all wide open. The room, a large one, was fairly well lit from a lamp burning on a table by the wall, about four yards from the bed and nearly facing it. I looked about the great apartment, but saw nobody. One night I awoke in my bed with a feeling that something strange was about to happen. When I was living in Calcutta in an old house near the heart of the city, I was leading juvenile man in a theatrical company.
Today we look at Fearing the Reaper through a story about a man’s fight–to the death–with a hooded figure of Death: But no matter what its origins, the skeletal figure of Death still terrifies and has even had a resurgence in the cult of Santa Muerte. I have not found 19th-century reports of apparitions of the Grim Reaper (as called by that name) and they are still rare today. I will say that the phrase “Grim Reaper,” at least in the 19 th-century papers, was found only in connection with stories of death or in obituaries. The skeleton began to be clothed in a hooded robe in the 15th century, but the “classic” Grim Reaper is primarily a 19 th-century image. I have neither the space nor the time to thoroughly explore the origins of the term “Grim Reaper” (earliest US newspaper occurrence 1840s) or the imagery of the skeleton with the scythe (possibly 14 th century, reaping with the Black Death). Today, in our series of Things That Scare Us, we look at the fear of Death, particularly as personified by the hooded Grim Reaper figure. Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
Fearing the Reaper: A Fight with Death Death Walking the Earth