[j. d. worthington]

You know, this reminds me of what is, if I remember correctly, supposed to be the shortest ghost story: "Sitting alone in his house one night, the man felt a hand on his shoulder." (Or some variant thereof.)

Now, that pretty much says it all. That is terror... to be sitting alone (not thinking you're alone, but be alone) and to feel a hand on your shoulder. For that moment, at least, terror is the result. The next moment it may be resolved into any number of things: if you see a disembodied hand, it may remain terror; if you see a rotting corpse attached to the hand, or a gore-spattered corpse, it would likely be horror; if you realize it's not a hand, but an animal or somesuch, it may turn to hilarity. But for that moment, it is terror. It's that moment between, when you're dealing with the unknown, the suspected, where the imagination is working at its height, that makes it so powerful.

Or, to quote Anne Radcliffe:"'They must be men of very cold imaginations ... with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakspeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one ; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?'"