Are ghosts real?

Faithful Friend now proposes to Spirit Franchezzo that they should visit one more city in this strange land, so that he might see the man whose fate might have been his own, but for the constancy and love, which had so helped and sustained him. Their earthly histories were in some respects different, but there were some points of resemblance both in that and in their dispositions, which would make the sight of this man and the knowledge of his history useful to him while at a future time he might be able to help him.

Faithful Friend tells him―It is now more than ten years since this man passed from earth, and it is only lately that he has begun to wish to progress. I found him here on my former visit to this place and was able to assist him a little, and finally to enrol him as one of our brotherhood. 

I am now told that he is shortly to leave this sphere for a higher one.

Spirit Franchezzo assented to the proposed journey. 

After a short, but very rapid flight, they found themselves hovering over a wide lagoon on whose dark bosom floated a great city―its towers and palaces rising from the waters and through which reflected dark red lines that somehow made him feel they were streams of blood. Overhead there hung the same dark pall of cloud lighted by the patches of steel grey and fiery-red floating vapour, which he had noticed in the other city. 

The appearance of this place suggested that they must be about to enter the Venice of these lower spheres. 

On his saying so, Faithful Friend answered―Yes―and you will find here many celebrated men whose names were written in letters of fire and blood.

They now found themselves in the town and proceeded to pass through its principal canals and squares. 

They were there―the degraded counterparts of all those beautiful places made familiar by the brush of the artist. 

The canals seemed like dark crimson streams of blood, flowing from some vast shambles, washing and rippling up the marble steps of the palaces to leave there a thick foul stain. 

The very stones of the buildings and pavements seemed to ooze and drip blood. The air was thick with its red shade. 

Deep down below the crimson waters, Spirit Franchezzo saw the skeleton forms of the countless thousands who had met their deaths by assassination or more legalised forms of murder, and whose bodies had found sepulture beneath the dark waves. Below in the dungeons, which honeycombed the city, he saw many spirits crowded together, and like caged wild beasts, the ferocity of the cruel tiger in their gleaming eyes and the vindictive malice of the chained human tyrant was in every attitude of their crouching figures. Processions of city magistrates and their attendants, haughty nobles with their motley following of soldiers and slaves, merchants and priests, humble citizens and fishermen, men and women of all ranks and all times passed to and fro, and nearly all were alike degraded and repulsive-looking. And as they came and went, it seemed as if skeleton hands, phantom arms rose through the stones of the pavements from the dungeons beneath, striving to draw these others down to share their own misery.

There was a haunted, hunted look on many of their faces and black care seemed to sit behind them continually.

Far out in the waters of the lagoon spectral galleys floated, filled with slaves chained to their oars, but among them there were no longer the helpless victims of political intrigue or private revenge. 

These beings were the spirits of those who had been the hard taskmasters―the skilful plotters who had consigned many to this living death. 

Yet farther out at sea, Spirit Franchezzo could see the great ships, and nearer at hand in the ruined harbour, there were more spiritual counterparts of those piratical craft of the Adriatic, filled with the spirits of their piratical crews who had made plunder and rapine and war their delight, and who now spent their time battling with one another and making forays on others like themselves. Spectral-looking gondolas floated on the waterways of the city, filled with spirits bent on following still the occupations and pleasures of their former lives. 

In short, in this Venice, as in the other cities he had seen, there existed a life akin to that of earth save that from this place all the good and pure and true―all the real patriots and unselfish citizens were gone, and only the evil was left to prey on each other and act as avenging spirits to their companions in crime.