"Eerie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... horseman. Either here or in the racing stables at the Fair-grounds he spent his truant hours. It was a school that taught much, and Patsy was as apt a pupil as he was a constant attendant. He learned strange things about horses, and fine, sonorous oaths that sounded eerie on his young lips, for he had only turned ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... scented and mysterious. The wind was playing an eerie fleshless melody in the reeds of the brook hollow. The sky was dark and starry, and across it the Milky Way flung ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... other, hoarsely; "I could not keep away. But nobody else has been there. The place is dark and perilous; there are rats, and bats, and eerie creatures all about it. And folks are afraid, because of the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... ridden too far on the chase, And eldrich, and eerie, and strange is the place! The castle betokens a date long gone by. He crosses the courtyard with curious eye: He wanders from chamber to chamber, and yet From strangeness to strangeness his footsteps are set; And the whole place grows wilder and wilder, and less Like aught seen before. Each in ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... perhaps even that very night, for water had been splashed about the hole; but whoever it was, was gone. Wunpost studied the unshod horse-track, then he began to cut circles in the snow-white alkali and at last he sat down to await the dawn. There was something eerie about this pursuit, if pursuit it was, for while the horse had been watered from the bucket at the well, its rider had not left a track. Not a heel-mark, not a nail-point, and the last of the water had been dropped craftily on the spot where he had mounted. That was enough—Wunpost knew he had met ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... gone forth and found him, already half-dazed with fever and exhaustion, and had striven to lead his staggering horse up that precipitous trail. It was the poor brute's last climb. Blakely she managed to bring in safety to her lofty eerie. The horse had fallen, worn out in the effort, and died on the rocks below. She had roused Angela with what she thought would be joyful tidings, even though she saw that her hero was desperately ill. She thought, of course, the white girl knew the few words of Spanish that ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... with your horse's feet. Few among the older inhabitants ever take this drive, save from necessity, because it is conceded that the dampness there is enough, even in summer, to "give you your death o' cold;" and as for the young, to them the place wears an eerie look, with its miniature suggestion of impassable gulfs and roaring torrents. Yet no youth reaches his majority without exploring the Gully. He who goes alone is the more a hero; but even he had best leave ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... poem, While the pen, idly trailed in my hand, Writes on—, "Had I words to complete it, Who'd read it, or who'd understand?" But the little bare feet on the stairway, And the faint, smothered laugh in the hall, And the eerie-low lisp on the silence, Cry up to ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... furious musketry passed: blue dashes lighted the room with an eerie splendour, thunder clapped and rolled; died away toward the south as a fresh onslaught ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... subsided into silence for a while. There was no sound except the monotonous lap of the waves. The sea-gulls and cormorants had flown past at sunset and gone to roost. The absolute quiet, and the dark shadows, and the silver light of the moon gave such an eerie atmosphere to the scene that presently Fay could ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... the character, though naturally she could not appreciate this fact. But there was always something a bit eerie and fantastic about her, something not exactly of the everyday world—her high cheekbones and thin, emotional face with its scarlet lips and intense expression ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... almost within earshot of any tumult in the doomed citadel. But still there was no sound and no sign of the enemy. This time, at any rate, they knew that they were closing in on it mechanically, and they marched on under the lamplight and the dark without any of that eerie sense of ignorance which Barker had felt when entering the hostile ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Lozere, just outside the limits of the department, lies another newly-discovered marvel, more striking, stranger than the scenery of the Causses—as beautiful, though in quite another way, as the Canon or Gorge of the Tarn. This is the fantastic, the unique, the eerie Cite du Diable, or Montpellier-le-Vieux, with its citadel, ramparts, watch-towers, amphitheatres, streets, arcades, terraces—a vast metropolis in the wilderness, a Babylon untenanted from the beginning, a Nineveh fashioned only by the great ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of plaster from the walls lay littered about in the passages. The wind, too, penetrated the building through many cracks and crannies, so that there was a constant sighing and soughing in the big dreary rooms, which had a most eerie ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "There is something eerie here," I said, as I still gazed at the scene; for the dim gigantic shapes of the hills rose round us like sheeted ghosts, while the flying scud of the storm, filled with the white diffusion of unseen light, every now and then opened to let the glimpses out. "And see the witch-fires," ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... they will not fight for an oppressor in the day of his need. Thus gigantic empires have crumbled into dust at the first touch of an invader's footstep. For petty, as for great oppressions, there is a day of retribution growing out of themselves. It is often long in coming. Ut sit magna, tamen eerie lenla ira Deoruni est.{1} ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... when Hippolyte Lariviere, the cornet-player of the Palais de Cinema, ascended the stairs to his eerie on the top-floor of 10 bis the following evening the appetising odour of frying batter enveloped him as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... motioned to me for absolute quiet. Directly afterward I heard the thing for which he listened—the sound of a horse galloping, out in the night. I think that I may say I fairly shivered. The sound died away and left a horrible, desolate, eerie feeling in the air, you know. I put my hand out to the bell cord, hoping Parsket had got it clear. Then I ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... the weather was wet and sleety, and the nights were stormy, so that I could go little out, and few of the elders came in, they being at that time old men in a feckless condition, not at all qualified to warsle with the blasts of winter. But when Andrew left me to go back to his classes, I was eerie and lonesome; and but for the getting of the monument ready, which was a blessed entertainment to me in those dreary nights, with consulting anent the shape of it with John Truel, and meditating on the verse for the epitaph, I might have gone ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... man. The second occurred once when we were in reserve. The stench of the house in which the section was billeted was terrible. By (p. 113) day it was bad, but at two o'clock in the morning it was devilish. I awoke at that hour and went outside to get a breath of fresh air. The place was so eerie, the church in the rear with the spire battered down, the churchyard with the bones of the dead hurled broadcast by concussion shells, the ruined houses.... As I stood there I heard a groan as if a child were in pain, then a gurgle as if some one was being strangled, and afterwards a number of ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... shed its light luridly upon all outside, was not enough to find things by within. Bel took courage at this, thinking the heart of it must still be far off. She gave one look into the depth of the street, shadowed by its buildings, and having a strange look of eerie gloom, even so little way beneath that upper glow. Then she drew down the painted shades, and shut ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... not," she answered in Zulu; "pray to the Great One above who judges. Oh! man, man," she went on in a kind of eerie whisper, "what have I done to you that you should treat me thus? Why did you command the soldiers to kill my father and my mother? Why did you poison my lover? Why did you drive away my soul, and fill me with ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... and those weird tales in which the dead are the chief characters; nor tell why we should fall into converse about them when the winter evenings are far spent, the embers are glazing over on the hearth, and the listener begins to hear the eerie noises in the house. At such times one's dreams become of importance, and people like to tell them and dwell upon them, as if they were a link between the known and unknown, and could give us a clew to that ghostly region which in certain states of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... here, son!" I heard her cry. And to my wonder now I saw the long, lean figure of Andrew Jackson McGovern come forward, a carbine clutched in his hand, while from his mouth came some sort of eerie screech of incipient courage, which seemed to give wondrous comfort to his fierce dam. At about this moment one of the Sioux, mortally wounded by our fire, turned his horse and ran straight toward us hard as he could go. ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... the depth of the valley in a most lonesome and eerie spot. The huge trees on each side formed an arch over the roadway and partially sheltered it ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... by where Earn darts swiftly 'neath The rustic bridge to bear the music of the place To broader Tay, who murmurs from afar In the rich harmony of his many streams—yon isle, The haunt of lovers now, where hearts that touch And thrill, cling closer in the eerie sense Of fear that lurks amid the tumbled stones Of robbers' lair. Here, once upon a time, When might was right, and men made wrongful Gain of Nature's fastnesses, a ruffian couched And preyed upon his kind. Long time he throve, But vengeance woke at length, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... for one by one the men rolled themselves up in their blankets and sheep-skins, and slept soundly on two hundred feet of ice under a freezing sky; leaving Lenox alone with his pipe and his thoughts, and the silence that dwelt like a presence in the eerie place. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... alone here last evening. I cried and prayed that vengeance might not fall on you and him—the innocent—but on me alone—if all I have suffered up to now is not enough. And then a woodpecker came and sat outside under the window, with its eerie tapping. And a little after came a magpie croaking on the roof, like a chuckling fiend. It made me shudder all over. I dare say you will laugh at my weakness. But it might be one of those mysterious threads of ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... cry I ever heard, long-drawn-out, wild—eerie's the word for it, I guess," Frank Merrill said. As he spoke, he peered off into the darkness. "If it were possible, I should say it was a ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... his hands at them. They went away, stumbling and holding on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish situation of no-weight-whatever. There were other passengers from the moon-rocket in this great central space of the platform. There was a fat woman looking indignantly at the picture of a weighing-scale painted on the wall. Somebody had ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was already upon us as I stood there for a moment, contrasting the dead and almost eerie silence, with the lights and laughter that would ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... running distance from the schoolhouse at noontime or recess, crawled the little river, with its inevitable "hole," which each mother's son was warned to avoid in swimming, lest he be seized with cramp there where the pool was bottomless. What eerie wonders lurked within the mirror of those shallow brown waters! Long black hairs cleaved and clung in their limpid flowing. To this day, I know not whether they were horse-hairs, far from home, or swaying willow roots; the boys said they were "truly" hairs ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... have been tried, fagots are passed about, and by the eerie light of burning salt and alcohol, ghost stories are told, each concluding his installment as his fagot withers into ashes. Sometimes the cabbage stalks used in the omens ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... and strange are the fabrics he weaves; he lays queer spells; breathes so eerie an intoxication through the dusk; he can cast such glamours about a voice! He is the ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... during the Franco-Prussian War, Stacpoole's second novel, Pierrot (1896), recounts a French boy's eerie relationship with a patricidal doppelganger. Like its predecessor, it was a commercial failure, and it was at this point, perhaps, that Stacpoole began to view literary success only in terms of sales figures ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... cleanliness, warm colourings, and the peculiar mellowness which comes to rooms and furnishings that, through prolonged association, have grown in a great mutual friendliness of aspect—was very still, with the strange, almost eerie, stillness which seems to listen and to wait.—A singular stillness, from which the rough utilitarian activities of ordinary life are banished, the rude noise of them suspended, while spiritual presences, rare apprehensions, exquisite memories and hopes, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... looked into a crater. In the throat of this crater there seethed and spluttered an ugliness that was scarlet, green, brown and yellow. The sound of the steam blowing off was like the roar of the sea. The air was stifling. It was very hot, and there was a high eerie wind. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... look upon that her heart almost ceased beating. A white and haggard face, that seemed imprinted upon the darkness as if it belonged to no body nor substance but was a ghostly apparition of the night. All the eerie stories the poor child had heard during her life at the "County Farm," from the lips of the garrulous pensioners who had nothing better to do than invent them, came back to her now; and as the face appeared to be coming nearer, growing more and more distinct, she uttered a piercing ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... that night, none has left a more unpleasant odour in my memory than the manner of that woman in the chamber of death. Her voice was incredibly hard. Her dull, basilisk eyes, seeking in mine the answers to her questions, gave me an eerie sensation that makes my blood run cold whenever I think ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... firewood, freighted up to the mines, and did all manner of work that horses did in the Santa Clara Valley. Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but in the main they were the wild wolf husky breed. Every night, regularly, at nine, at twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie chant, in which it ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... in a manner which was "a little equivocal," wore a broad hat and a thick moustache, which, joined with the sternness of his pale cheek and the piercingness of his eye, must indeed have suggested something extremely eerie to a well-shaven, three-corner hat, respectable man of the eighteenth century; so that we are not at all surprised to hear that the doctor's imagination was crossed by "a sudden idea of the celebrated Torrifino," who, although his name sounds like a sweetmeat, was ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... he did not think she would live much longer. Round the lonely cottage the sea-mist drifted white and thick, and the darkness deepened, until—as the saying goes—it could have been cut with a knife. Never was there so eerie and weary ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... held his breath, a policeman tramped past slowly outside the railings. As the sound of his solid tread died away, Severac Bablon raised something to his lips and blew a long-sustained, minor note—shrill, eerie. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... the unusual, the great man, she would still have listened with a sense of delight, for in her mood that night his penetrating voice, which, in other moods, she found as insupportable as a needle-pointed goad, harmonized with the great, starry sky and the mysterious, eerie shadows of forest and mountain and lake close round their huge, bright fire. As they rose to go in, up came the moon. A broad, benevolent, encouraging face, the face of a matchmaker. Craig put his arm round Margaret. She trembled ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... languor of the sleepy afternoons, it was like a fresh awakening—the dawn of those white May nights. The wide plain stirred softly through all its miles of sage. The river's cadenced roar paused beyond the bend and outbroke again. All that was eerie and furtive in the wild dark found a curdling voice in ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... God very much, and spoke to Him often in my lonely wanderings, when I saw wee men in green coats among the heather, but oftener on the soft green turfy bits on the hill. And one awful time when the hill road was all silent and the grasshoppers hidden and quiet, an eerie humming came into my ears like a language I could not understand, and I felt myself waiting for something. Round the turn of the hill before you come to the old quarry it came, and I stopped stricken as a rabbit when a snake sways before it, for there came towards me a thing like a dog—but ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... came to the corner. There, just in front of her was the pollarded acacia, behind which the murderer had cowered for an hour—on the watch. The slowly withering leaves trembled in the breeze and their soughing sounded eerie in the night, like the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... warrior's eager lance Shone radiant in the eerie dance, A curling, lapping tongue of death To lick ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... where beeves are good, And men have quaint, old-fashioned ways, And every burn has ballad lore, And every hamlet has its song, And on its surf-beat, rocky shore The eerie legend lingers long. Old customs live there, unaware That they are garments cast away, And what of light is lingering there ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... No doubt this eerie feeling of loneliness had a great deal to do with my sensations later on, which, on looking back in after-days, have often struck me as being more acute and nervous than they had ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... looked up into the dark heavens; and high and spectral among the clouded stars he saw the home-coming of the cranes. He sat on the bench beside his door, and watched them sail past in thousands, filling the night with a fleeting clamour and eerie sounds. As he sat he mused on the strange longing which brought these birds over land and sea back home, year by year, with the returning spring, and he marvelled that the souls of men, which are but birds of passage in these earthly fields, should be so ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... hundred or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms; to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing things which human eyes behold not—is an eerie and unwholesome thing. Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a score of times without being able to communicate with the remote servants' quarters ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... no more for a while, but busied herself with certain rather eerie preparations. First she set the tripod and its bowl in an open space which I was glad to note was at some distance from the fire, since if either of us fell into that who would there be to take us off before cremation ensued? Then she drew ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Scotch music, I suppose?" from which Miss Blandy inferred that he was not in a good humour—though the inference seems somewhat strained. This manifestation was varied by rappings, rustlings, banging of doors, footfalls on the stairs, and other eerie sounds, "which greatly terrified Mr. Cranstoun." The old man was plainly annoyed by these stories, though he merely expressed the opinion that his guest was "light-headed." But when Cranstoun one morning announced that he had been visited in the night, as the ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... unlocked with a private key, into a vast, vacant room, with a lofty ceiling supported by huge, unwieldy pillars of stone, sculptured with all the loves and wars of Hindu mythology. At one end the fitful, eerie flare of a great bronze brazier revealed the huge proportions of an ivory throne, gorgeous with gems and cloth of gold, standing upon a dais and flanked by two motionless figures which at first sight Amber took to be ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... screens in the interest of the neighbouring pews; and then, just at the corner of the screen, from where he had been watching her, she saw Mr. Masters. Diana did not know whether to be sorry or glad. On the whole, she rather thought she was glad; the church was eerie all alone. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... other side of things was confined, in its increasing exemplifications of how impossible he was to get on with, to the furiously exciting incidents of public affairs; but the result was the same; the result was that, just as, on opening his door on return home at night, he had that chill and rather eerie feeling of stepping into an empty house, so, on entering the office of a morning, he came to have again that sensation that it was a deserted habitation into which he was stepping; no welcome here; no welcome there. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... shadows where the women crouched the face of Teata rose like an eerie flower. She had adorned the two long black plaits of her hair with the brilliant phosphorescence of Ear of the Ghost Woman, the strange fungus found on old trees, a favored evening adornment of the island belles. The handsome flowers glowed about ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... "Skeek!" "Skeel!" "Skeek!" "Blub!" "Glub!" "Chralk!" Gladys's eyes started out of her head at the unearthly noises. Her nerves were just about on edge from their incessant piping when suddenly a long, eerie laugh rang out ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... thin, stretched thus unnaturally. It seemed curious to Roger that the burro did not kick nor lunge. But Peter's patience, won by who knows what beaten and burdened ancestry, did not desert him. He did not tug at his rope but he brayed again, as if he were giving an eerie shriek of warning. ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Zinzendorf's own words, "to proclaim the Saviour to the world"; and the Count's noble motto was: "The earth is the Lord's; all souls are His; I am debtor to all." There was a dash of romance in that Pilgrim Band, and more than a dash of heroism. They lived in a wild and eerie district. They slept on straw. They heard the rats and mice hold revels on the worm-eaten staircases, and heard the night wind howl and sough between the broken windows; and from those ruined walls they went out to preach ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... second victory he had become morose and untalkative. At home he often sat silent for hours together, drinking and glaring at the place where the Cup had been. Sometimes he talked in low, eerie voice to Red Wull; and on two occasions, David, turning, suddenly, had caught his father glowering stealthily at him with such an expression on his face as chilled the boy's blood. The two never spoke now; and David held this silent, deadly enmity far ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... to press him down like a malignant weight. The mysterious and eerie sorrow of the northern night went home to ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... her without turning her head, and it shone pale in the mist, an eerie beacon, and thus the boat passed from view in the greyness, though as the paddles dipped for the start the song still rung ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... is linked with a set of tales about a father who apprentices his son to a wizard, sometimes to the Devil, from whom the youth escapes with great difficulty. The principal Russian representative of the second set is called "Eerie Art," "Khitraya Nauka," (Afanasief, v. No. 22, vi. No. ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... There was something eerie in the night, in the wreck and confusion of the storm, in our loneliness without father and mother, and in the possible awfulness and change that were so near,—over there in Grandfather ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... retorted, in the mere wantonness of power. "Ye hae seen yon auld hauntet kirk, whaur witches an' warlocks Hang an' loupit, an' Auld Nick himsel' screwt his pipes an' gart them skirl, till roof an' rafters a' did dirl! ye hae keekit intil yon eerie auld ruin!—an' syne ye daunert awa', an' thocht naethin' o' 't! Be ma saul, Bobbie Birns didna' think ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the boats together and put off into the slow current. A haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished ebony—a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of dusk, except where some lone ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... O eerie was the Urisk that convoy'd me o'er the moor! When I was all so helpless and my heart was full of fear, Nor when it was beside me or behind me was I sure— I knew it would be following—I knew ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... a minute; then she understood that he meant afraid of Sir Archie. It was the last straw, and she broke down under it; but, instead of bursting into tears, she laughed—so wild, so eerie a laugh, that Wolfer was alarmed. But the laugh ceased suddenly, and she lowered her veil. He held out his hand again, and held hers in a ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... flying? I didn't go, but I sketched the others going. And these are some notes. A bombing raid. It had been ordered in the morning. A raid on ——. After a cheery dinner we trooped out, singing foolish songs. The hangars a few hundred yards away across the mud. They looked huge and eerie, looming up from the dark ground, all stately in the moonlight. The moon had a halo, but was very bright, bright enough ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... ELINOR MORDAUNT, has collected into the volume that she calls Before Midnight (CASSELL) a series of short stories of a psychic (though not always ghostly) character, which, while not very eerie, or on the same high level, are at their best both original and impressive. The first of them, which affords excuse for a highly-intriguing cover-picture, is at once the most spooksome and the least satisfactory. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... almost hear you breathe." Each man then took up his position a few hundred yards away from me, so that I felt, to all intents and purposes, absolutely alone. I am "free to confess," as our American cousins say, that it was a very eerie sensation. It was now past ten o'clock; the darkness was intense, and the silence as deep ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... such Things be? or, the Weird of the Beresfords,—no relation to Lord CHARLES of that ilk,—starts, and will make the reader start too, with a very creepy idea. The story would have been a genuine weird and eerie one but for the continual twaddling interruptions about "spookikal" research and metaphysical problems, which, however, the experienced skipper, who knows the chart, can easily avoid after the first two or three bumps, and even the inexperienced reader ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... powder-blue battle jackets, patrolled the fences around the county road crater. And around the fence that now enclosed the immediate vicinity of the Circle T ranch buildings. Floodlights bathed the wire and cast an eerie glow over the mass of parked cars and persons jammed outside the fence. A small helicopter sat off to the right of the impromptu parking lot and an NBC newscaster gave the world a verbal description of the scene while he tried to talk above ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... a windy glitter that was flung back by a neighboring tarn. The call of the curlew seemed more mournful, the crying of lapwing rose from the meadow land, and she started at a hollow hoot as an owl swept by on muffled wing. The night voices filled her with an eerie sensation—there was, she recollected, always something creepy about Crosbie Ghyll, and, for Millicent was superstitious, she shivered again at the reflection that she had cheated a dying man. But she could make partial reparation ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... as music is mystical—like poetry, and love, and faith, and prayer, and all else that makes it worth our time to live; but its mysticism is sweet, sane, and natural, far from fantastic, and in nowise eerie, unreal, or unbalanced. Of course these words fail to describe it, as all words must, and it is therefore that Masonry uses parables, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... laugh. I suppose it's because I come from a country where we think houses aged at fifty, and antique at a hundred; but these old fortified towns and ruined castles frowning down from rocky heights give me the kind of eerie thrill one might have if one had just died and was being introduced to scenery and society on the ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to rise, and in the midst of it I saw a tall man, in a tweed suit, jump into the water, and sink. In a moment the darkness was gone, and I again became sensible of the heat and sunshine, but I was awed, and felt eerie. This happened about June 25, and on July 3 a Mr.——, a bank clerk, committed suicide by ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... have a fellow-witness," I said. "It's so eerie I might have concluded there was something ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... by a stretcher-bearer and we went through the gate into the large garden where we saw the still smoking hole in the ground which the shell had made. I remember that, as I looked into it, I had the same sort of eerie feeling which I had experienced when looking down the crater of Vesuvius. There was something uncanny about the arrival of shells out of the clear sky. They seemed to be things supernatural. The holes made by the seventeen ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... cheek beneath the cottage bonnet she wore was almost white. The cheeks were sunken from what had once been a charming contour, the delicate aquiline nose was pinched ever so little, the lips were dry, and there were fine wrinkles everywhere. There was something almost eerie in the youthfulness of the eyes, which shone in the midst of all her faded souvenirs of beauty. Had the eyes been old the face would have been beautiful still, but the contrast they presented to their setting was too striking for beauty. They gave the old ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... sobbed with him. Outside the window it wailed in eerie lamentation. It dashed a near-by shrub, a ragged rosetree that Seth had planted, against the window. The twigs tapped at ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... started on once more, and soon, by the echoing sound of the footsteps of the bearers and the increased noise of the water caused by reverberation in a confined space, I knew that we were entering into the bowels of the great mountain. It was an eerie sensation, being borne along into the dead heart of the rock we knew not whither, but I was getting used to eerie sensations by this time, and by now was pretty well prepared for anything. So I lay still, and listened ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... for as I entered the room I had the eerie feeling which one gets sometimes at night; I felt that there was somebody else in the room. Sure enough there was somebody else—two somebodies—and my heart leaped up in joy to see them. Sitting on the ground, tied by the body to some of the boxes over which I peered, were the ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... shaking little voices all a-quiver In the mushy little, rushy little, weedy, reedy bogs, Droning little, moaning little chorus by the river, In the croaking little, joking little cadence of the frogs. Eerie little, cheery little glowworms in the gloaming Where the clover heads like fairy little nightcaps rise, Creep! Creep! Creep! Time to go to sleep! Baby playing 'possum ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... Seemed like I saw the march o' regiments o' children, Marching to the robin's fife and cricket's rat-ta-tat! Lily-banners overhead, with the dew upon 'em, On flashed the little army, as with sword and flame; Like the buzz o' bumble-wings, with the honey on 'em, Came an eerie, cheery ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... desolate, and eerie was our mound when we got to the top of it. By that time the sun had set, and a universal ghostly grey, fast deepening into night, banished every sensation of joy aroused by the previous lightness. Although the scene ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... rugged waste, with no signs of animal life about it. It is the terror of the voyageurs. This eerie tract culminates in the ascending "Haute de Terre," as the French call it—the dividing ridge between the waters running eastward to Hudson Bay and those running westward and descending to meet the Nelson River, on its headlong way to ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... not contradict her. He sighed heavily and they both fell again into a cheerless silence. The moon rose with a strange, eerie swiftness over the wall of mountain before them, and its wavering reflection sprang at once to life in the swirling waters of the black hole in the Necronsett on the other side of the meadow. The old woman's ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... streets, where night had already fallen in the shadow of clammy walls. Strange and eerie was the path between wet trees, when we had left the town behind. The lamplighter with his tall wand alight seemed like some unearthly messenger come to conduct ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... sun westers, faint and slow; The eastern distance glimmers gray; An eerie haze comes creeping low Across the little, lonely bay; And from the sky-line far away About the quiet heaven are spread Mysterious hints of dying day, Thin, delicate ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... history of Gaul depends. Upon the Margeride, which is one of their uttermost ridges, du Guesclin was wounded to death. One may see the huge stones piled up on the place where he fell. In the heart of those mountains, at Puy, religion has effects that are eerie; it uses odd high peaks for shrines—needles of rock; and a long way off all round is a circle of hills of a black-blue in the distance, and they and the rivers have magical names—the river Red Cap and Chaise Dieu, "God's Chair." In these mountains Julius Caesar ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... over the glowing ground, the black monsters grimacing and scowling at him as he passed. What a nice eerie place this would be thought he for witches, wizards, and all Satan's gentry, of every shape and hue, to hold their high revels in. And he actually began to shout ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... to be allowed chocolates," she murmured, "or hot peppermints, just to keep up their spirits. Ugh! How weird and eerie it all is! There isn't a sound anywhere. It's not an enlivening performance to keep watch, I ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... land, But, an eerie tale to tell, Ay at the end of seven years We pay a tiend to hell; I am sae fair and fu' o flesh I'm feared ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... was climbing up the treacherous slope when the airlock door opened, and someone stood outlined in the bright circle of light that cut into the inky blackness. An amplified voice filled the valley and ricocheted back off the walls of the mountains, casting eerie echoes down on the lone man ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... water, as were the walls and roof, so far as we could see them, for it was very wide and lofty. It did not run straight, but curved about in the thickness of the cliff. At the first turn the Pongo soldiers set up a low and eerie chant which they continued during its whole length, that according to my pacings was something over three hundred yards. On we wound, the torches making stars of light in the intense blackness, till at length ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... and he helped her, keeping his arm about her shoulders. She found herself lying on a ledge of rock high up in the slanting wall of a deep and narrow cave. She knew the place well, and had always avoided it with instinctive aversion. It was horribly eerie. The rocky walls were wet with the ooze and slime of the ages. There was a trickle of ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... It was eerie work, even for the passengers, who remained in blissful ignorance of the danger of their situation. By rights the ship should have been in dock before breakfast; they had planned the night before that an early dawn should see them awake ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... seem a very interesting and important fact. The bones of the Cave bear and other gigantic animals have been formed here; but the principal tenants of these antique vaults are now the bats, forming huge black clusters in the roof. There is something eerie in their cries, but they are more alarmed than alarming; the lights disturbing them ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Jacob's-staff and marched on with a long stride, bearing straight down upon the rocks. The whole cortege started anew—the genuflecting chain-bearers, the dodging, scrambling, running spectators. On one of the strange stunted leafless trees a colony of vagrant crows had perched, eerie enough to seem the denizens of those weird forests; they broke into raucous laughter—Haw! haw! haw!—rising to a wild commotion of harsh, derisive discord as the men once more gave vent to loud, excited cries. For the surveyor, stalking ahead, had passed beyond the great tables of the ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... shudderingly recoil. Accordingly, a heroine who is haunted, beset, and finally driven crazy by the dread of the fatal inheritance being in her blood seems set apart from the fluctuations and hesitations of maidenly passion. There is something unhealthy, eerie, in the story Mr. Bates has made and in the situation he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... in the dark thinking of the dream. Had there been a dream—or had it only been like the other things one dreamed about? Sometimes an eerie fearfulness beset her vaguely. If there were letters each day! But letters belonged to a time when rivers of blood did not run through the world. She sat up in bed and clasped her hands round her knees gazing into the blackness which ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "this thing begins to look eerie to me. How about that piece of paper that I sent to you with the warning about the curse of Mansiche and the Gold of the Gods. What if there should be something in it? I'd rather not be a victim of this curare, if it's all ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... restlessness which had possessed him during the last twenty-four hours once more drove him to activity. And although commonsense and reason both pulled one way, an eerie sense of superstition whispered in his ear the ominous words, "If, ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... do not grieve Near where the royal victims fell No Man's Land is an eerie sight No more old England will they see Not long did we lie on the torn, red field of pain Not since Wren's Dome has whispered with man's prayer Not with her ruined silver spires Now is the midnight of the nations: dark Now lamp-lit gardens in the blue dusk shine Now slowly sinks the ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... hollow hum that works upon the listener till the nerve of the soul is drawn out, as it were, to its very farthest stretch. It was quite dark by this time; only the yellow flicker of the wind-blown flame of the lamp made uncertain lights and shadows round the place where we were sitting, and an eerie influence fell on us all, almost mesmeric in effect. I did not need the awestruck whispers round me to tell me what it was. But oh! I felt, as I never felt before, the reality of the presence of unseen ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... neared the place, I heard the strangest sound coming from the rocks. It was a deep muffled groaning, so eerie and unearthly that for the moment I stood and shivered. Then I remembered my river of yesterday. It must be above this place that it descended into the earth, and in the hush of dawn the sound was naturally louder. No wonder old Coetzee ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... wi' eerie bark; Cryin' I'm creepy, cauld, an' green; Come doon, come doon, he's lyin' stark, Come doon an' ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Then yon desolate eerie morasses, The haunts of the snipe and the hern - (I shall question the two upper classes On aquatiles, when we return) - Why, I see on them absolute masses Of filix ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... an index of its higher living forms, for this is the chosen home of the Swans and Wild Geese; many of the Ducks, the Ptarmigan, the Laplongspur and Snowbunting. The blue lakes echo with the wailing of the Gulls and the eerie magic calling of the Loons. Colonies of Lemmings, Voles, or Groundsquirrels are found on every sunny slope; the Wolverine and the White Wolf find this a land of plenty, for on every side, as I stood on that high hill, were to be seen ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... eerie to be alone in the National Gallery in the dead of the night with a tiny electric lamp in one's buttonhole and a sponge of alcohol and turpentine in one's hand. While he worked the little Madonna's eyes rested upon him ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... from off the hill; An eerie wind doth holloa; And near and near by surges drear The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... tour of the room, peering into nooks and corners in a stealthy, silent way that was most eerie to watch. Miss Chase bore it until at last he went towards Nesta's bed with that cat-like, sinister gait. The horror of his approaching the helpless sleeper at the other side of the room was too much ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... tropical foliage, and garb it fittingly for approaching night. The grass beside the Government tents showed grey in the gathering dusk, while a blue haze of smoke, creeping upward, gently veiled the sheltering trees. But for the modulated chatter of servants, the stillness was eerie. The flat, low-lying fields, having yielded their corn to the harvester, were barren and without sign of life, for the cultivators had departed to their homesteads, and the ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... immense banyan tree, half an acre in extent, that made in the innermost heart of the jungle a denser jungle of its own. From out of its black depths came the voice of a man singing in a cracked, eerie voice. ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... strange and eerie, you know; I don't understand how it is—do you? But a philosopher said it, so I really suppose ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... one night I rowed my boat in the darkness more than a mile, to find no one. Watching for deer from a treetop one day, in broad sunlight, and looking over a mountain range, along the crest of which were pointed firs and long level ridges of rock in irregular alternation, the eerie feeling suddenly came over me, and the mountain-top seemed a city with spires and walls, and I heard bands of music, and then hunting-horns coming down with the wind, and there was a perfect illusion of the sound of a hunting party ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... moon, and a fresh breeze swept through the wood, waking eerie sounds and sharp rustlings among the trees. Once or twice George started, imagining that somebody was creeping through the bushes behind him, but he was glad of the confused sounds, because they would cover his movements when the time for action came. His companion, a teamster ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... Letton agreed, his eerie gray eyes blazing out from the voluminous folds of the huge Mueller with which he was swathing his neck to the ears. "Their minds run in ruts. It is the unexpected that upsets their stereotyped calculations—any new combination, any strange factor, any fresh variant. And you will ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... hour mentioned in the dinner invitation arrives, strikes, and floats down the mists to the eerie catacombs of the Past. The hostess knows that the cook, with arms akimbo, is breathing rebellion, but tries to blot out the awful vision by an ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... eerie stillness seemed to settle on the garden. From the side of the terrace, TT's green ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... echoed doubtfully. A very small illumination was in its eerie effect almost worse ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... left and dived toward a neighboring cloud. A cloud, while seeming from below to have both form and substance, is in reality but little different from a dense ground fog. It is enveloping, misty, eerie, and cuts off all visible contact with the world. If it covers a large air area, then the pilot may face some nice problems in correct and stable navigation, but if it is only a patch, he drives straight along his course, knowing that he will plunge ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... I think on the happy days I spent wi' you, my dearie, And now what lands between us lie, How can I be but eerie! ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... in the drawing-room as I spoke. Suddenly I gave a start as my eye drifted to the mantelpiece. 'What an extraordinary coincidence!' I exclaimed. A strange eerie feeling came over me. Marion's lost photo had been restored ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... thirty feet across, some seventy, some two hundred. The sides were perpendicular, and were cut and channeled by the weather into most curious caves and columns and battlements and spires. Here and there ledges ran along the faces of the cliffs and eerie protrusions jutted out from the corners. Grave pine-trees rose loftily among the strange creations of water and wind set in a desert of snow-white sand. It was a beautiful and fantastic place and ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... stream, which is rather heard than seen, seems to be fretting in vain efforts to escape from its dark and gloomy prison." In the gorge itself the current was restrained, and boats could cross from bank to bank without difficulty. It was an eerie feeling to glide over the sunless water shut in by the stupendous sidewalls of rock. At a sandy spit to the west of the gorge we landed and put things in order. And here I stood and watched the junks disappear down the river one after the other, and ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... which gave so gloomy a cast to Amalia's features. From the interior of the house a broad beam of light fell upon the guests. Otherwise the glimmer in the sky sufficed them. The dark crests of the trees limited the outlook; Casanova was reminded of the eerie garden in which, late one evening many years before, he had awaited the coming ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler |
