The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the

chimneys quaked and rocked; the crazy casement

rattled with the wind, as though an impatient hand
inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was
there, and it opened no more.

from Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens

The bat skimmed in fantastic flights through the heavy

air, and the ground was alive with crawling things,
whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten
in the rain.

from Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens

With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and

heavy, thoughts hurried and disordered, he felt as
though the light were a reproach, and shrunk
involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and
hideous thing.

from Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens

There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too,
were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in
anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned
like an unresting sorrow.

from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

There was a half-moon, and by its light they could see

that the garden was a tangle of scraggy, winter
vegetation, which had, in some places, almost
overgrown the path. It was all very still, very gloomy
and very ominous.

From The Land of Mist, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

They only knew that the black shadows at the top of

the staircase had thickened, had coalesced, had taken a
definite, batlike shape.

From The Land of Mist, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the
banks of the river, seen through which the trees were
the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of
water.

From Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches

cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances,
to its moaning music.

From Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens

He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the

wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones,
like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he
counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.

From Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

The goblins of her fancy lurked in every shadow about
her, reaching out their cold, fleshless hands to grasp
the terrified small girl who had called them into being.

From Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the

shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man
seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the
slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling
forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a
meal.

From Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

"I am Oz, the Great and Terrible," spoke the Beast, in

a voice that was one great roar. "Who are you, and
why do you seek me?"

From The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but
never fast, for they come circling down with a dead
lightness that is sombre and slow.

From Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems

to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the
ghosts of sound-strange cracks and tickings, the
rustling of garments that have no substance in them,
and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no
mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow.

From Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the

faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller
branches like dead garlands.

From The Battle of Life, by Charles Dickens

It was a still afternoon--the golden light was lingering
languidly among the upper boughs, only glancing down
here and there on the purple pathway and its edge of
faintly sprinkled moss: an afternoon in which destiny
disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant
veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us
with violet-scented breath.

From Adam Bede, by George Eliot

The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with

unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to
her hiding-places.

From Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous,

ghastly, and spectral.

From The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur

Conan Doyle
There was something awesome in the thought of the
solitary mortal standing by the open window and
summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of
the nether world.

From “Selecting a Ghost,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

There are mysteries which men can only guess at,

which age by age they may solve only in part.

From Dracula, by Bram Stoker

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty

trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy
seas.

From “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes

They whirled past the dark trees, as feathers would be
swept before a hurricane. Houses, gates, churches, hay-
stacks, objects of every kind they shot by, with a
velocity and noise like roaring waters suddenly let
loose.

From The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we

call the dead?

From The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this

way comes.

From Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

The whole group of us were covered for an instant by
a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary
vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy
eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my
amazement, with little, gleaming teeth.

From The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle