One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls.
Wander around any graveyard long enough and you will find it, water stained and bulging with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it and a feeling when you reach it of abandonment.
It may be colder than the other gravestones too and the name on the stone is all to often impossible to read.
If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichen as to look like fungus itself.
If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals that is the Ghoul-Gate.
If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the Ghoul-Gate.
-Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book.
2 comments:
Never heard of the 'gouls' although I live in the Middle East.
Once a year, I visit four graveyards. I sometimes notice small acts of vandalism, but no ghoul grave, as far as I can remember.
Yes ..the word ghoul come from an Arabic word. It is a mythological demon said to rob graves and devour the corpses in them...Probably more associated with the genre of western gothic macabre horror.
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