Life & Wisdom Quote by Taylor Caldwell

Caldwell’s line works because it refuses the clean payoff you expect from a ghost story. “I have thought” is a double-lock on uncertainty: she’s not claiming the supernatural, she’s confessing to the mind’s habit of reaching for it. The sentence is built like a self-cross-examination. “On many occasions” sounds almost bureaucratic, as if hauntings belong to a recurring calendar event, which makes the intimacy of the claim feel oddly matter-of-fact. That flatness is the point. It suggests not theatrical terror but an ongoing, low-grade disturbance: memory that won’t stay put, grief that keeps taking shape.

Caldwell, a prolific popular novelist steeped in family saga, faith, and moral stakes, understood that “ghosts” don’t need ectoplasm to do their work. In the mid-century world she wrote for, hauntedness was often psychological before it was paranormal: war losses, dislocated lives, old loyalties that outlived the people who held them. The phrasing leaves room for all of that. If you’ve “thought” you saw a ghost, you’re admitting your senses can be recruited by longing or guilt, that the past can appear with the authority of the present.

The subtext is less “spirits exist” than “something persists.” By choosing a tentative register, Caldwell invites the reader to supply their own hauntings without forcing a doctrine. It’s a soft statement with a hard implication: there are experiences we can’t verify, only revisit, and their repetition is its own kind of evidence.