I love this story partly because it's such a good one to tell aloud - and also because the hero is one of those impudently brave tailors who turn up so often in fairy tales and folk tales. I think tales about tailors must have been so popular because the little, crooked-legged, short-sighted tailor was, like Mr Bilbo Baggins, such an incongruous hero: a little, ordinary chap who could best giants, bulls, boars and unicorns - and in this tale, a terrible revenant of the Norse type - a draug or animated corpse.
From: Highland Fairy Legends, collected from oral tradition by the Rev James MacDougall (1910)
A tailor once, living on the farm of Fincharn, near the
south end of Loch Awe, having denied the existence of ghosts, was challenged by
his neighbours to prove his sincerity by going at the dead hour of midnight to
the burying place at Kilnure and bringing back with him the skull lying in the
window of the old church that gives its name to the place. The tailor replied
that he would give them a stronger proof even than that, by sewing a pair of
trousers in the church between bed-time and cock-crow that very night.
They took him at his word and, as soon as ten o’clock came,
the tailor entered the old church, seated himself on a flat grave-stone resting
on four pillars, and, after placing a lighted candle beside him, he began his
tedious task. The first hour passed quietly enough while he was sewing away and
keeping up his heart singing and whistling the cheeriest airs he could think
of. Twelve o’clock also passed, and yet he neither saw nor heard anything to alarm
him in the least.
But sometime after twelve he heard a noise coming from a
gravestone which was between him and the door, and on casting a side-look in
that direction he thought he saw the earth heave under it. The sight at first
made him wonder, but he soon came to the conclusion that it was caused by the
unsteady light of the candle in the dark. So, with a hitch and a shrug, he
returned to his work and sewed and sang as cheerily as ever.
Soon after this a hollow voice, coming from under the same
stone, said: “See the great, mouldy hand, and it so hungry looking, tailor.”
But the tailor replied: “I see that, and I will sew this,” and he sang and sewed
away as before.
After another while the same great hollow voice said, in a
louder tone: “See the great, mouldy skull, and it so hungry looking, tailor.”
But the tailor again answered, “I see that, and I will sew this,” and he sewed
faster and sang louder than ever.
A third time the voice spoke, and said in a louder and more
unearthly tone: “See the great, mouldy shoulder, and it so hungry looking,
tailor.”But the tailor replied as
usual, “I see that, and I will sew this,” and he plied the needle quicker and
lengthened his stitches.
This went on for some time, the dead man showing next his
haunch and finally his foot.Then he
said in a fearful voice: “See the great, mouldy foot, and it so hungry looking,
tailor.” Once more the tailor bravely answered: “I see that, and I will sew
this.” But he knew that the time for him to fly had come. So, with two or three
long stitches and a hard knot at the end, he finished his task, blew out the
candle, and ran out at the door, the dead man following him and striking a blow
aimed at him against one of the jambs, which long bore the impression of a hand
and fingers.
Fortunately the cocks of Fincharn now began to crow, the
dead man returned to his grave, and the tailor went home triumphant.
Art: Ruins of a Gothic Chapel by Moonlight, by Felix Kreutzer, 1835 - 1876
I’m not afraid of the dark. It’s
streetlights I don’t like, especially those glaring orange sodium lights. Have
you noticed how strange they make people look, on the street at night? How
their faces go pale and bloodless, and their clothes turn a dark, dirty grey, no
matter what colour they really are?Have
you noticed how hard it is even to see people properly – because the
streetlights make them the same no-colour as everything else - as if they aren’t really there
at all, just moving shadows?
There’s
no such thing as colour. All those bright reds and blues and greens we see in
daytime are only wavelengths.What shows
up under the orange streetlights is just as real as what you see in daylight. Maybe more real.
So begins my story "DARK", in this new anthology well-received by Amanda Craig in the Times last Saturday as 'a haunting, well-written collection of spooky short stories edited by Catherine Butler'. As you're reading this, I'm heading down to Brighton for the World Fantasy Convention. In the meantime, if you feel like some Hallowe'en tales, here's a look at the contents page.
My favourite may just be Frances Hardinge's beautifully creepy take on the Snow Queen - but then there's Susan Cooper's terrifying costume party, and Frances Thomas's eerie water spirit, and Liz Williams' poignant mix of Egyptian myth and dank English countryside - and Cathy Butler's very odd dog story, and Rhiannon's retelling of the Persephone myth - and - well, see for yourselves.
My friend Fiona Dunbar's lively and exciting children's adventure stories leap boundaries and span genres: for example her brilliant ‘Silk Sisters’ trilogy, which mixes genome research and nano-technology with, believe it or not, fashion, and wittily poses the question: what if you really are what you wear?
Now here comes Raven Hearts, the fourth in her series about the irrepressible Kitty Slade, whose ability to see ghosts
(a talent called phantorama, inherited from her dead Greek mother) leads her into all sorts of adventures. Kitty is a determined and attractive heroine, who takes her uncomfortable gift firmly in her stride. The first in the series, Divine Freaks, featured a dodgy London landlord, a
scalpel-wielding ghost in the school biology lab, a back-street
taxidermist, shrunken heads, and a fraudulent antiques business. In the sequel, Fire and Roses Kitty deals with a poltergeist, and encounters the ghost of a member of the Hellfire Club (you can find Fiona's post about her research for this book here); while the third book,Venus Rocks, is set in Cornwall and includes a ghost ship and evil Cornish sprites called spriggans. From which you'll gather that a strong sense of place is one of the keynotes of these books.
So I was more than excited to read Raven Hearts, especially as it's set in Yorkshire on Ilkley Moor, where I spent much of my own childhood scrambling about wishing I could have adventures like Enid Blyton's Famous Five, although if I'd found as much excitement as Kitty does, I would undoubtedly have chickened out and decided reading about adventures was better than experiencing them, after all.
The Cow and Calf Rocks
Arriving in her family's camper van 'The Hippo' at a campsite near Ilkley Moor, Kitty rapidly becomes aware that all is not well. People have gone missing on the moor, which is rumoured to be haunted by a spectral black dog called the Barghest. (A nice Yorkshire folklore touch, that: Brontë devotees may remember Jane Eyre imagining the Barghest just before she meets Mr Rochester for the first time...) At the famous Cow and Calf Rocks Kitty meets a ghostly woman searching for her lost son. She hears childrens' voices chanting an eerie song (and yes, it's 'Ilkla Moor Baht'At', which when you think about is apretty gruesome little ditty: 'the worms'll coom an' ate thee oop', etc.) She's haunted by ravens. And when she meets a highly unreliable spirit called Lupa, Kitty really does find herself in deadly danger...
I learned something while reading this book. I grew up knowing about the prehistoric Swastika Stone, the Roman baths at White Wells, and the massive Cow and Calf Rocks. But how come I'd never heard of the stone circle called the Twelve Apostles? Fiona Dunbar uses these settings deftly to create a sense of mystery; the story moves at a cracking pace, and by the time Kitty is cycling alone over the moor as dark falls and the moon rises, the stage is perfectly set for the appearance of something awful...
The Kitty Slade books are expertly pitched for the 9 + reader who wants something scary and exciting, but not TOO scary. One of the things I like most about them is that her heroine has back-up. Kitty can rely on her brother and sister
for help, while her Greek grandmother Maro is a reassuring if
eccentric presence. This helps steady the reader’s nerves through some
of the more hair-raising passages. If you have a nine-to-thirteen year old in your life with a taste for mystery, ghosts, adventure and a (light) touch of horror, believe me, they're going to really, really enjoy this series.
There is a vast range of ghosts in children’s fiction. I’m going to leave out all the comic ones, on the assumption that a comic ghost story is hardly a ghost story at all. Even Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ doesn’t become spooky until the end – when the comedy vanishes into pathos. Such stories, one presumes, work mainly to stop young children being frightened of ghosts – rather as the brilliant Ahlberg ‘Funnybones’ picturebook series helped prevent my kids being frightened of skeletons: (“In a dark dark room in a dark dark house on a dark dark street – three skeletons lived…”)
That ghost stories can be spooky without being truly frightening is proved by the beautiful Green Knowe series by Lucy Boston, the first of which, ‘The Children of Green Knowe’ was published by Faber and Faber in 1954. I grew up with these books, buying the last, ‘The Stones of Green Knowe’ as a teenager in the late 1970’s. A lonely little boy, Tolly, goes to stay with his grandmother Mrs Oldknowe in her ancient house (modelled on the author’s own beloved twelfth century manor house at Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire) and slowly comes to meet the other children who have lived in the house down the centuries. Lucy Boston wrote pure, elegant prose, with a light but sure touch. Here, Tolly and his grandmother have finished decorating their Christmas tree:
As they rested there, tired and dreamy and content, he thought he heard the rocking horse gently moving, but the sound came from Mrs Oldknowe’s room… A woman’s voice began to sing very softly a cradle song that Tolly had learned and dearly loved:
“Lully lulla, thou little tiny child,
By by Lully lullay…”
“Who is it?” he whispered.
“It’s the grandmother rocking the cradle,” said Mrs Oldknowe, and her eyes were full of tears.
“Why are you crying, Granny? It’s lovely.”
“It is lovely, only it is such a long time ago. I don’t know why that should be sad, but it sometimes seems so.”
The singing began again. It was queer to hear the baby’s sleepy whimper only in the next room, now, and so long ago.
Scary things do happen in the Green Knowe stories, but always with a background of reassurance that goodness is greater than evil. Tolly never time-travels – he meets the ghosts in his own ‘now’, although at the very end of the series the Norman boy Roger, whose father built the house, does briefly travel forward into his future: our twentieth century. The theme of the books is that of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets: ‘Time past and time present/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.’ Lucy Boston’s books echo with the voices of children: ‘hidden excitedly, containing laughter’.
Penelope, the heroine of Alison Uttley’s classic ‘A Traveller in Time’ (Faber 1939) is another shy, quiet, imaginative child, who sees ghosts or visions of the past almost without trying. On being sent to fetch a rug,
“Upstairs I went again, but when I got to the landing I looked at the closed doors and did not know which was Aunt Tissie’s, for there was something strange and unfamiliar about them. I hesitated and opened a door, and then stopped short, for in the room before me, down a couple of steps, were four ladies playing a game with ivory counters. They sat round a table and a bright fire was burning in an open hearth. They were young and pretty, except an older woman whose expression was cold and forbidding… All this I saw in the moment I stood transfixed at the door. Then a little spaniel rushed across the room and they turned and stared at me with startled eyes. They were as amazed as I, and sprang to their feet, yet there was never a sound…
“I beg your pardon,” I muttered, and quickly I shut the door, my heart pounding and my hands trembling.
Penelope soon grows as intimate with the 16th century inhabitants of the old Derbyshire farmhouse ‘Thackers’ as with its 20th century inhabitants. She becomes an anxious yet powerless witness to the ill-fated Babington plot to free Mary Queen of Scots; and the book is also a poignant love story.
All of these are ghost stories which explore the transience of time, rather than the finality of death. They are typically sensitive and beautiful: eerie rather than scary. And perhaps it's a theme that children on the cusp of growing up are particularly fascinated by: the realisation that old people were once young, and that children like themselves will one day be old
Another time-slip ghost story, with a slightly harder edge and bags of atmosphere, is ‘Playing Beatie Bow’ by the Australian writer Ruth Park, in which the prickly Abigail, resentful of her parents’ divorce and being made to move to a high-rise area of Sydney, witnesses children playing a creepy game:
‘Oh Mudda what’s that, what can it be?’
‘The wind in the chimney, that’s all, that’s all.’
There was a clatter of stones being dropped. Some of the younger children squawked and were hushed.
‘Oh Mudda what’s that, what’s that, can you see?’
‘It’s the cow in the byre, the horse in the stall.’
Natalie …put her hands over her eyes. ‘Don’t look, Abigail, it’s worse than awful things on TV!’
And the climax of the game comes with the cry: ‘It’s Beatie Bow…risen from the dead!’ Into this book too comes a desperate love story – for how can love span the centuries?
Like all of us, children - older ones especially - enjoy a good scare. Moving on from the beautiful and the poignant, we come to more malevolent ghosts. There’s an extremely sinister one in Katharine Briggs’ famous ‘Hobberdy Dick’ (1955) – the appearance of a ghostly child, informed by the evil spirit of the woman who killed it. One of the characters, Anne, wakes in the night:
She sat up in bed with a beating heart, aware of a wicked thing in the room. There seemed a faint light at the end of the bed; more she could not see, but the room was icily cold, and cruelty and remorse and pain pressed on her like a weight, so that she could not move.
Help comes, but at the cost of the death of the good woman who exorcises the spirit. This book is a brilliant exploration of the folklore and customs of the seventeenth century, by an expert who knew and loved the stories better than anyone else.
Peter Dickinson’s “Annerton Pit” (1977) is the story of a blind boy, Jake, whose grandfather, a ghost hunter/debunker, has disappeared near Annerton Mine, site of a dreadful mining disaster a hundred years ago. Entwined with an adventure story, is the creepy build-up of supernatural tension, as, trapped with his brother and grandfather at the bottom of the mine, Jake becomes aware of a strange presence in Annerton Pit:
There was another noise, even fainter than the sea. Jake couldn’t decide if it was real, or was only an effect of the fall – a low, continuous, throbbing hoot. Sometimes it seemed to be coming from further up the tunnel, sometimes from all around him, and sometimes from inside his head. Once he’d noticed it, it bothered him.
Low key, but spine chilling. Less is often more with a good ghost story.
Ann Halam, whose books for children range from fantasy to ghosts to sci-fi to horror, actually managed to break the rule I mentioned at the beginning of this piece by writing a totally brilliant ghost story for children which is funny as well as terrifying. “King Death’s Garden” (Orchard, 1986) is the story of the impossible and self-pitying Maurice, obsessed with his asthma and allergies and with the vain hope of attracting the attention of elegant Jasmin Kapoor. Maurice has refused to relocate with his parents to the Gulf, and is boarding with an elderly aunt until the end of term. He is of course another loner – and ends up spending far too much of his time in the Victorian cemetery beside his aunt’s house… Here he is, reading the tombstones:
The Best Mum and Dad in the World… Never a Cross Word….And in the morn the angel faces smile, That I have loved long since and lost awhile…Love’s last gift, remembrance…
Suddenly he realised that someone was watching him. It made him jump, because just then he was well off the path and actually standing on a grave. He was only putting back some plastic flowers that had pathetically fallen out of their urn, but he knew it wouldn’t look good. A big elderly man was standing by a bench just a few yards away. He was glaring like someone in authority – maybe a gardener.
And maybe not...
I’d recommend any book by Ann Halam, but another of hers’ with a creepy ghost is ‘The Nimrod Conspiracy’ (Orion 1999). Completely different, just as good. And I have to mention Robert Westall, whose taste ran to more Gothic ghosts and horror, always rooted in his beloved North East: ‘The Scarecrows’, ‘The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral’; ‘The Watch House.’ Definitely for older children, and not for the faint-hearted. And speaking of Gothic, how about Leon Garfield, whose novella 'Mister Corbett's Ghost' ought to be better known?
A windy night, and the old year dying of an ague. ... In the apothecary's shop in Gospel Oak, the boy Partridge looked up through the window to a moon that stared fitfully back through the reflections of big-bellied flasks, beakers and retorts. Very soon now he'd be off to his friends and his home to drink and cheer the death of the old year - and pray that the new one would be better. And maybe slip in a prayer for his master, Mister Corbett, the apothecary himself. Such a prayer!
"May you be like this year that's gone, sir, and take the same shivering ague! For your seasons weren't no better."
Having wished his master dead, poor Benjamin Partridge soon has cause to wish him alive again, as he has to accompany the poor phantom over Hampstead Heath - on a journey through guilt, terror and pity to eventual
redemption.
An exception to the rule that ghost stories for children always have solitary heroes or heroines is Catherine Sefton’s charming ‘The Back House Ghosts’ (Puffin, 1978). Ellen’s mother, who runs a seaside boarding house, accidentally overbooks. The enormous Mooney clan arrive (eleven children!) and, to make space, Ellen moves out into the ‘Back House’ – a disused cottage at the bottom of the garden. That night:
Ellen lay back in her lumpy bed. She liked the back house. She would make it live again.
She went to sleep watching the sky through the window. The stars were stabs of light against a dark blue cloth, and the moon was yellow and round…
***
When Ellen woke up in the morning, the first thing she saw was the window.
Through it she could see the back wall of Bon Vista, and the window of the back bedroom… and nothing else.
No sky.
Just the grey wall and the rose which grew across the window.
All the books I’ve discussed so far have been full length novels (although the Green Knowe books are fairly slim.) To write a really good novel-length ghost story is a fantastic achievement, because stringing out the tension for so long is really difficult. Most literary ghosts – for adults at least – tend to arrive in the form of short stories, and many of the children's writers I've talked about in this post also wrote brilliant - and often dark - short ghost stories. Philippa Pearce could weave terrifying tales about inanimate objects: an old wooden tallboy; a Christmas pudding ('A Christmas Pudding Improves With Keeping', from 'Who's Afraid, and Other Strange Stories' 1986). A master of the form was the late great Jan Mark. Perhaps her best collection is ‘In Black and White’ (Viking, 1991). Every story in this book is so wonderful, it’s hard to pick just one, but one of Jan’s own favourites was the story called ‘Nule’ - in which Martin’s little sister Libby makes a character out of the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. She calls it ‘Nule, and dresses it up with a pointed hat.
The hat definitely did something for Nule. When Martin came in later by the front door, he thought at first that it was a person standing at the foot of the stairs. He had to look twice…
Entering into the spirit of the thing, he helps Libby to dress it up more, with an old coat and gloves, and a pair of football boots at the bottom. Not a great idea, as it turns out…
(Illustration copyright Neil Reed, 1991)
There are ghosts in two of my own books: an Icelandic-style vengeful corpse in ‘Troll Blood’, and a harmless but still rather unnerving White Lady in ‘Dark Angels’ (US title: ‘The Shadow Hunt’.) As you can see I love ghosts – one day, maybe, I’ll try and write a novel length ghost story of my own. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with Peer and Hilde, beginning to wonder about an empty house on the shores of Vinland.
The sun had sunk below the hills, and the wooded slopes looked dark and mysterious. Down by the ship, the men had lit a fire on the shore. Around the flames, the evening turned a deeper blue.
“We should go and help,” said Hilde. “Look, they’re bringing things up already.” Someone was coming slowly up the path, as if stiff from weeks at sea. His face was indistinct in the dusk. He turned aside, heading for the other house. Hilde called out, “Hello! Is that one ours?”
Whoever it was made no reply, but turned in to the porch of the second house. Hilde shrugged. “He didn’t hear me. It must be that one.”
They walked across. Flat stones made a short path outside the door, which was shut. Peer lifted the latch. The Nis darted between his feet – and sprang back like a startled cat, all arched spine and splayed limbs. Peer saved himself by clutching at the doorpost.
“What are you doing?” he cried.
The Nis was creeping backwards, bristling. “Not nice,” it squeaked. “Not a nice house at all, Peer Ulfsson. The other one is better!” It shook itself and shot decisively away.
With an odd feeling under his ribs, Peer shoved the door wide open and looked in. He didn’t step over the threshold. Hilde craned over his shoulder.
It was just like the first house. Same long fire pit, same smoke holes, same dusty-looking benches and line of dim posts leading to a doorway at the far end.
This house was colder than the first. The air felt disturbed, as though someone had recently passed through.
"The Book of Dreams and Ghosts" was written by Andrew Lang, famous for his many-coloured collections of fairy stories – The Red, The Blue, The Green Fairy Book and the others, which I borrowed one after another from the Ilkley Public Library when I was a child.
This is different. I came across a copy of the 1899 edition – by the way, don’t you just love an old book? – the smell, the rough, thick quality of the paper, the uneven edges, the gilt-embossed covers, the blackness of the print, and the almost tactile sense that so many other hands have held it and turned the pages? Anyway, I came across the 1899 edition some time ago in one of the passageways of my labyrinthine local second hand bookshop, and bought it at once for a couple of pounds.
And what it is, is pretty much what it says on the cover. A loose collection of supernatural or ghostly anecdotes taken from all kinds of sources: the key element being that none of them were originally offered as fiction. They are all, for what it’s worth, ‘true stories’. Most are contemporary; some are historical, but even the ones from old Icelandic sagas were intended to be read as factual accounts.
Andrew Lang has no axe to grind, no drum to bang. ‘The author has frequently been asked, both publicly and privately: “Do you believe in ghosts?” One can only answer: “How do you define a ghost?” I do believe, with all students of human nature, in hallucinations of one, or of several, or even of all the senses. But as to whether such hallucinations, among the sane, are ever caused by psychical influences from the minds of others, alive or dead, not communicated through the ordinary channels of sense, my mind is in a balance of doubt. It is a question of evidence.’
It has long seemed to me that there is a great difference between a ‘real’ ghost story and a fictional one. I used to live in a small Yorkshire village full of very old houses (the one I myself lived in dated in part from the late seventeenth century). The even older whitewashed farmhouse across the road, down by the beck, had a Red Lady who was sometimes spotted looking out of one of the small upstairs windows, and the farmer’s wife was used to hearing footsteps cross the floor overhead, when no one should be there. But that was it. There was no story attached. It was a pure phenomenon. Further down the road was a medieval ‘clapper bridge’ made of two huge stone slabs: this was known as ‘Monks Bridge’ probably because Fountains Abbey used to own much of the land: the cottage nearby was said to be haunted. Coming up the unlit road on foot one dark drizzly night at about two o’clock in the morning, I was disconcerted to see someone lingering by the ford, wearing what I took to be a cagoule. As I passed, the person – whoever it was – slowly and silently wandered down towards the edge of the stream. I didn’t think ‘ghost’; I thought ‘oddball’, and hurried on. Later, I wondered… And my own aunt was well known in the family for seeing the dead, including her husband, who once – pipe in hand – politely drew back to allow her to pass through a door in her Leeds Victorian terrace, some months after he had died.
The point about these stories is that there is no point. They have no real beginning, no middle, no end, no structure. They aren’t stories at all – just anecdotes. You hear them, you are impatient or fascinated according to your nature – and then you shrug, because there is no way to take them any further. People love explanations, of course, so sometimes you get embellishments which attempt to provide some kind of rationale: these often involve hidden treasure, wicked lords, seduced nuns, suicides and murders – and are rarely convincing. ‘Real’ ghost stories (and nearly everybody knows one) are open-ended oddities, and frequently the person involved does not even realise anything strange is happening until afterwards.
Here’s one example from Lang’s book:
The Dead Shopman The brother of a friend of my own, a man of letters and wide erudition, was, as a boy, employed in a shop. The overseer was a dark, rather hectic-looking man, who died. Some months afterwards the boy was sent on an errand. He did his business, but, like a boy, returned by a longer and more interesting route. He stopped at a bookseller’s shop to stare at the books and pictures, and while doing so felt a kind of mental vagueness. It was just before his dinner hour and he may have been hungry. On resuming his way, he looked up and found the dead overseer beside him. He had no sense of surprise, and walked for some distance, conversing on ordinary topics with the appearance. He happened to notice such a minute detail as that the spectre’s boots were laced in an unusual way. At a crossing, something in the street attracted his attention; he looked away from his companion, and, on turning to resume their talk, saw no more of him.
In this account a number of details that, in a literary story, would require something to be made of them (the ‘dark and hectic’ features of the dead man: the curiously laced boots) are presented as mere corroborative evidence. This sort of ghost story is still very much alive and well in the oral tradition. “A funny thing happened…” “A friend of mine told me…” We enjoy listening; at least I do – but the teller is excused the structure of the literary ghost story. Because what happened is ‘real’, no other framework is necessary.
The least strained of traditional explanations for hauntings is that the spirit cannot rest until some wrong it did or suffered in life has been put right. Here’s another account from Lang’s book, verbatim from a seventeenth century book with the pleasing title: Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloister Opened. Notice again the use of incidental details to lend verisimilitude:
About the month of November in the year 1682, in the parish of Spraiton, in the county of Devon, one Francis Fey (servant to Mr Philip Furze) being in a field near the dwelling place of his said master, there appeared to him the resemblance of an aged gentleman like his master’s father, with a pole or staff in his hand, resembling that he was wont to carry when living to kill the moles withal… The spectrum…bid him not to be afraid of him, but tell his master that several legacies which by his testament he had bequeathed were unpaid, naming ten shillings to one and ten shillings to another…
This being the sixteen hundreds, the restless spirit was considered of dubious origin – suspicions soon gratified by events. The ghost was joined by that of his second wife, and the neighbourhood was plagued with poltergeist activities which nowadays point to the aptly named Francis Fey himself as the source of the problems:
"Divers times the feet and legs of the young man have been so entangled about his neck that he has been loosed with great difficulty: sometimes they have been so twisted about the frames of chairs and stools that they have hardly been set at liberty."
But Fey’s master and neighbours pitied him as a victim of the simple malevolence of the devil, and no further explanation seemed to be required.
Lang’s book touches upon all kinds of occult anecdotes, from premonitory dreams (“mental telegraphy”) to the full blown and richly detailed ghost story of the ‘Hauntings At Fródá’ from Eyrbyggja Saga. Too long to retell here, the tale follows the disastrous series of events following the death of the strange Hebridean woman Thorgunna at the farm of Fródá on Snaefellness, when her hostess Thurid refuses to honour a deathbed promise to burn Thorgunna’s sumptuous bedhangings (which she had long coveted). It features one of the best and most matter-of-fact accounts ever of the ghost-as-reanimated-corpse – a phenomenon which Iceland does particularly well – and finishes on another splendidly Icelandic note (since that country is the real mother of parliaments) when the hosts of the dead are finally driven away by legal decision in a court of law.
This, though obviously ‘written up’ by the author of the saga, retains much of the loose-ended mystery of the oral tradition. We never find out much more about Thorgunna, or quite why the violation of the taboo laid on her bedhangings should have such drastic consequences.
I think maybe the very best literary ghost stories, such as those of MR James, manage to combine the best of both worlds – enough of a structure to provide a balanced, causal feel to the story, enough open-ended mystery to fascinate. A ghost story which is tied off too tightly isn’t really satisfying. They are very hard things to write well, and in my post for next week I’m going to talk about ghosts in children’s fiction. Oh, and here's a little competition. The four black and white illustrations in this post are from M.R. James' 'Ghost Stories of An Antiquary'. The first three people who can tell me, in correct order, which stories they match, will win a signed manuscript copy of my own ghost story "Danse Macabre".
To finish up with, here’s a ‘true’ ghost story which a friend told to me some years ago when I lived in France.
My friend was an American woman married to a Frenchman. They lived in a modern house in Fontainebleau, but her husband had elderly aunts who owned a chateau – one of those elegant small 18th century houses with shuttered windows and walled grounds that are scattered around the French countryside. This one was somewhere north of Paris, and from time to time the family would descend upon it for get-togethers at Christmas and Easter.
The bedrooms all had names, a charming custom – the Chambre Rouge, the Chambre Jaune, etc – but, said my friend, there was one bedroom everyone hoped they wouldn’t get, which latecomers would unavoidably be stuck with – the ‘Chambre des Mouches: ‘The Bedroom of the Flies.’
It wasn’t just, my friend said, that there always seemed to be flies in the room – big, sleepy, buzzy flies, crawling on the windows. One of the windows had been walled up, which was a little creepy. There was a small powder room off the main chamber, which may once have used as a nursery. But, mainly, you never got a good night’s sleep there. You lay awake and heard noises. As if something was moving about, or dragging across the floor. That was all. But she didn’t like it.
And so, when an American friend called Meredith was visiting from the States and a visit to the chateau was proposed, no one wanted to say anything when Meredith ended up getting the Chambre des Mouches. Because, really, it was probably all nonsense… but there was a certain interest around the breakfast table next morning when Meredith came downstairs.
“How did you sleep?”
Meredith hesitated. “I was comfortable enough, but I didn’t sleep so well. It was that darned cuckoo clock. It went off every hour, bing bong, cuckoo, cuckoo, and kept waking me up.”
“But Meredith,” said my friend gently, as an indrawn breath went around the table, “there isn’t any cuckoo clock.”
Since the last entry, I've been on a school visit. And talking to 200 Year 7s (twelve years old, approximately) has made me think further on the whole connectedness of folklore, story telling and story writing, so here's a postscript.
The children were a great, lively bunch, in a school that doesn't get many author visits. I do a lot of interactive stuff: some riddles, some drama - and I tell stories from the viking sagas, stories from medieval chronicles. By the time children are in Year 7, any visiting author has to prove him or herself worthy of being listened to. You cannot just waltz in and start talking about elves. Or I don't anyway. Even though my last book, 'Dark Angels' ('The Shadow Hunt' in the US) is all about elves. Because English twelve year olds think of elves as little green-stockinged things with red hats dancing around a Christmas tree and making toys. And why would they want to hear about that?
So I start off by talking about aliens and UFO's, instead, and about people who think they've been abducted by aliens and operated on and even had their brains removed (rather like Spock in the old Startrek episode) - and then I tell them a (genuine) story from the 13th century about someone being abducted by elves and having his brain removed - and I try to show them how people have been telling the same sorts of stories for hundreds and hundreds of years. And how some of these stories then end up becoming woven into the books I write.
A book itself is an alien thing to some of these children. An intimidating, unpleasurable thing, and reading itself a difficult struggle that gets you nowhere slowly and makes you feel a fool. Yet we all tell stories, all the time. I said to them, "I'll tell you this, I've never been into a school that didn't have a ghost story. When I was at school, we had a disused railway station just along the road, and there was supposed to be a severed hand that crawled around the platform in the broken glass. Nobody ever saw it, of course, but the story was there. All schools have ghosts."
Hands went up. "We have Bloody Mary in the toilets," two girls remarked. (Who is Bloody Mary, in this context? Who knows? She's obviously some frightening supernatural, half believed in, half delighted in...) A boy told me, 'There was a ghost at my mum's school - the ghost of a cleaner who got locked in."
And so I was saying, "There you are! These are the stories people tell because, though nobody knows who makes them up, they are fun to tell and fun to hear. And sometimes they do get put into books: but - and THIS is the important thing - they don't COME from books. They come from the real world and from real people."
Anybody can make up a story; anybody can tell one. It's a tragedy for children to feel disempowered and divorced from the process of storytelling, because it's one of the things we were all born to do. Why should the tales children tell have value when collected by adults and printed in the Journal of the Folklore Society, yet no value in the playground? I want children to know that the tales they tell each other are just as real, just as 'important' as the ones that get caught (by lurking academics) and shut up in books.
And if they know that, perhaps they'll lose their fear of reading them and writing them down.
