title: Ghosts across our landscape: Haunting Tales and Living Verse of Ulaid
author: Colin T. Mercer
description: Colin T. Mercer is an Irish poet and writer who has also recently published 'For Irish Eyes  poetic experiences from Ireland'.
zlib_text: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
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  My Own True Ghost Story  
    
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com
  
  
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  # My Own True Ghost Story
  
  
  ### Rudyard Kipling
  
  >
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
      
  
  As I came through the Desert thus it was—
  
  
  As I came through the Desert.
  
  
  The City of Dreadful Night.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures
  
  
  and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who
  
  
  spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who
  
  
  writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name
  
  
  is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treating his ghosts—
  
  
  he has published half a workshopful of them—with levity. He
  
  
  makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt
  
  
  outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a
  
  
  Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you mu