But on the whole, though skeletons do appear in later fiction, the rattle of bones is not heard as often as in Gothic times. Ghostly apparitions are more varied in form than in early times. The modern ghost does not require a whole skeleton for his purposes, but he can take a single bone and put the hardiest to flight with it. It is a dreadful thing to realize that a ghost can come in sections, which indefinitely multiplies its powers of haunting. F. Marion Crawford has a story of a diabolical skull, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts on record. A man has murdered his wife by pouring melted lead into her ear while she slept, in accordance with a suggestion from a casually told story of a guest. The dead woman's skull--the husband cut the head off for fear people would hear the lead rattle, and buried it in the garden--comes back to haunt the husband, with that deadly rattle of the lump of lead inside. The teeth bite him, the skull rolls up a hill to follow him, and finally kills him, then sets in to haunt the visitor who told the suggestive story.[89] Elsewhere as well Crawford shows us skulls that have uncanny powers of motion and emotion. In Wilkie Collins's _Haunted Hotel_ the specter is seen as a bodiless head floating near the ceiling of the room where the man was murdered and his body concealed. Thackeray[90] describes a ghost with its head on its lap, and of course every one will remember the headless horseman with his head carried on the pommel of his saddle that frightened poor Ichabod Crane out of his wits. [89] _The Screaming Skull._ [90] In _A Notch on the Axe_. We get a rabble of headless apparitions in _Brissot's Ghost_, one of the Anti-Jacobin parodies (ridiculing Richard Glover's ballad of Hosier's Ghost): Sudden up the staircase sounding Hideous yells and shrieks were heard; Then, each guest with fear confounding, A grim train of ghosts appeared; Each a head in anguish gasping (Himself a trunk deformed with gore) In his hand, terrific clasping, Stalked across the wine-stained floor.