Hello,

What do you think were the ghost pirates from the book of the same title? Ghosts? Beings from another world? Something else?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 3 Sep 19 | 10:20AM by Minicthulhu.

Minicthulhu Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hello,
>
> What do you think were the ghost pirates from the
> book of the same title? Ghosts? Beings from
> another world? Something else?


Well ... I think Hodgson has deliberately made it so that this question is impossible to really answer.

The narrator's guess, IIRC, is that they are beings from a sort of parallel plane of existence ... another world, I guess you could say. I think Hodgson intends this guess to be correct.

But I don't think it necessarily follows from this that they are not "ghosts". How would you define "ghost", anyway?

As Platypus raises, this isn't a question that needs to be answered, though the mystery and its endless possibilities are definitely part of the fun.

Who knows, they could easily be ghosts in the typical sense that they're disembodied souls of the dead AND also residents of some other world. The way they mirror the sailors like disembodied shadows could support the ghost idea, and this wouldn't be the only time a weird author suggested Hell being another fold of dimensional reality. If I remember correctly, Hodgson even hinted at a sort of Heaven among the mind-bending cosmic folds of The House on the Borderland.

On a semi-related note, this isn't how I imagined them, but I enjoy Sidney Sime's illustration of the ghost pirates.

[monsterbrains.blogspot.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 4 Sep 19 | 09:43AM by Yluos.

Yluos, thank you very much for that link. Lots of wonderful artwork on that blog.