I think of these things frequently, because I know the German people. Among them might arise the legend of Hitler, because Hitler was not heard from in this trial. Time always has some reconciling effect. On every ruin there eventually grows grass, and then some shrubbery, and finally, before you realize it, what is really an old hideous ruin becomes a romantic sight and legend.

Throughout man's history, the reports have been consistent. There are demons, spirits, goblins, gremlins, and assorted subhuman entities always hanging around humanity to make life miserable. Are these myths? Hallucinations?

Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passé; Summers’ idylls or Stoker’s melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century. Well, it was true.

Germans always like to think that they have a very liberal attitude towards Africans. But when you scratch the surface you can see that they they still carry around the prejudices of their childhood. In German fairy tales black people always appear as the bogey man. You don't forget things like that so easily.

Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.

So even in hell, there are clowns.

Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.

If this myth of the harpies were a reality, what of the other legends—the Hydra, the centaurs, the chimera, Medusa, Pan and the satyrs? All those myths of antiquity—behind them did there lie and lurk nightmare realities with slavering fangs and talons steeped in shuddersome evil? Africa, the Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world!

The myth of the Germans before Germany is hard to suppress because, owing to its great age and genesis in the sources themselves.

Every love story is a ghost story.

…in talking it over with Negroes, I find that the tale is so old and so well known that it is almost folklore. It has many variations: sometimes it is the woman’s brother, husband, son, lover, preacher, beloved master, or even her father, mother, sister, or daughter who is killed. A Negro sociologist tells me that there are literally hundred of these stories. Anyone could have written it up at any time.

Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of supernatural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region ; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Yan Tassel's, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the headless horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the churchyard.

"THE INFERNAL NAMES

Abaddon - (Hebrew) the destroyer
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Asmodeus - Hebrew devil of sensuality and luxury, originally "creature of judgement"
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Azazel - (Hebrew) taught men to make weapons of war, introduced cosmetics
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Bast - Egyptian goddess of pleasure represented by the cat
Beelzebub - (Hebrew) Lord of the Flies, taken from symbolism of the scarab
Behemoth - Hebrew personification of Satan in the form of an elephant
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Coyote - American Indian Devil
Dagon - Philistine avenging devil of the sea
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Dracula - Romanian name for devil
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Fenriz - Son of Loki, depicted as a wolf
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Hecate - Greek goddess of underworld and witchcraft
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Kali - (Hindu) daughter of Shiva, high priestess of Thuggees
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Lilith - Hebrew female devil, Adam's first wife who taught him the ropes
Loki - Teutonic devil
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Mania - Etruscan goddess of Hell
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Midgard - son of Loki, depicted as a serpent
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Pluto - Greek god of the underworld
Proserpine - Greek queen of the underworld
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Sammael - (Hebrew) "venom of God"
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Shiva - (Hindu) the destroyer
..."