I do love old books. They don't make them like that any more. I love the smell, the thick
silky quality of the paper, the rough-cut, uneven edges, the gilt-embossed covers, the blackness
of the print, and the tactile sense of so many other hands which have held it
and turned the pages... A few years ago, wandering the labyrinthine passageways
of our local second hand bookshop, I came across this 1899 edition of
Andrew Lang’s The Book of Dreams and Ghosts. Even
if I’d never heard of Andrew Lang I couldn’t have resisted that title. I bought it for a couple of pounds.
What it is, is pretty much what it says on the cover. A 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’. Many are
contemporary accounts sent to Andrew Lang by various friends. Some are historical, but even the ones from old Icelandic sagas
were intended to be read as factual accounts.
Lang was interested in recording and
investigating what might loosely be termed supernatural phenomena, and in 1911 he
was President of the Society for Psychical Research, but he was neither a believer nor a sceptic; of course his other interests
lay in folklore, anthropology and fairy tales.
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.
There is a great difference between a supposedly ‘true’ ghost story and
a fictional one. I once lived in a small
Yorkshire village full of very old houses (the
one I myself lived in dated in part from the late seventeenth century). Our neighbours in the even older whitewashed
farmhouse down by the beck had a Red Lady who sometimes looked out of one of
the small upstairs windows. And they were used to hearing footsteps
cross the floor overhead, when no one should be there. But that was it: there was no story attached. Further down the road there was a ford across the beck, and a medieval
‘clapper bridge’ made of two huge stone slabs known as ‘Monks Bridge’,
probably because Fountains Abbey used to own much of the land. The cottage
nearby was said to be haunted. Coming on
foot up the unlit road one dark chilly night at about two o’clock in the morning, I was disconcerted to
see someone lingering near the bridge, wearing a hooded garment which I took to
be a cagoule. As I passed, the hooded person – whoever it was – slowly and very
silently moved away from me down towards the ford and the rushing water. 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 there is an attempt to provide some
kind of Gothic rationale involving hidden treasure, wicked lords, seduced
nuns, suicides and murders. These are rarely convincing. ‘Real’ ghost stories
(and nearly everybody knows one) are open-ended oddities, and quite frequently
the person involved does not realise anything strange is happening until
afterwards.
Here’s an example from Lang’s book:
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.
Here a number of details (the ‘dark and hectic’ features of the
dead man; the curiously-laced boots), are presented as corroborative evidence. If
the boy could describe the boots so minutely – well, he must have seen
something! This sort of ghost story is 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. M.R. James is very, very good at convincing his readers that his ghosts are real, and one of the ways he does it is to build in these inconsequential details ("the red cloth just by his left elbow") that underwrite the supernatural invasion. Here his scholarly hero Dennistoun is murmuring peacefully (for the moment) to himself, as he studies Canon Alberic's scrapbook:
“Dear me! I wish that landlady
would learn to laugh in a more cheering manner; it makes one feel as if there
was someone dead in the house. Half a pipe more, did you say? I think perhaps
you are right. I wonder what that
crucifix is that the young woman insisted on giving me? Last century, I suppose. Yes, probably. It is rather a nuisance of a thing to have
round one’s neck – just too heavy. ...I think I might give it a clean up before
I put it away.”
He had taken the crucifix off and
laid it on the table, when his attention was caught by an object lying on the
red cloth just by his left elbow. Two or
three ideas of what it might be flitted though his brain with their own
incalculable quickness.
“A penwiper? No, no such thing in the house. A rat? No, too
black. A large spider? I trust to goodness not – no. Good God! a hand like the hand in that picture!”
Few ‘true’ ghost stories are as good as the strange tale of
Margaret Richard, reported in a book called ‘The Appearance of Evil:
Apparitions of Spirits in Wales’ by Edmund Jones, an eighteenth century Welsh
minister who compiled narratives of supernatural encounters in an attempt to prove
the existence of both God and the Devil. Margaret’s sweetheart got her pregnant
and then jilted her at the altar, sending word he was too sick to come. Furious, Margaret fell on her knees and prayed
he should have no rest in this world or the next. He must really have been
sick, though, for shortly afterwards he died and his ghost kept appearing to
Margaret until finally she took his hand and forgave him. He vanished and never troubled her again, but
here’s the creepy bit: ‘His hand did not feel like the hand of a man, but like
moist moss.’
No one could have made that up! is the first reaction to
this kind of thing. But of course the
ability to do just that is one of the prerequisites for writing a successful fictional
ghost story. If Edmund Jones had not been a minister, he had the
imaginative and descriptive power to have become an excellent ghost story
writer. Here he lies half-awake in
a dank Monmouthshire bedroom ‘partly underground and known to be an unfriendly
place’, being assailed by Satan:
After I had slept some time and
awaked, the enemy violently came upon me. I heard him say in my ear: ‘Here the
devil comes in his strength.’ (And that was true.) He made a noise by my face,
such as is made when a man opens his mouth wide and draws in his breath, as if he
would swallow something. He also made a sound over me like that of dry leather
and, by my left ear, a sound something like the squeaking of a pig. The clothes
moved under me and my flesh trembled, and the terror was so great that I
sweated under the great diabolical influence.
He must at least, if you will excuse me, have been one hell of a
preacher.
The least strained of traditional explanations for hauntings
is that the troubled spirit cannot rest until some wrong it did or suffered in life has
been put right. Here’s another account
from Andrew Lang’s book, verbatim from a seventeenth century pamphlet 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 restless spirit was considered of dubious origin –
suspicions soon gratified by events. The
ghost was joined by that of his second wife, after which the neighbourhood was plagued
with poltergeist activities which nowadays might 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.
Hmm. However, Fey’s master and neighbours pitied him as a
victim of the simple malevolence of the devil, so 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 bed-hangings, which Thurid had long coveted. It has to be one of the best and most
matter-of-fact accounts ever of ghost-as-reanimated-corpse – a phenomen
which Iceland does particularly well – and ends on another splendidly
Icelandic note when the hosts of the dead are finally driven away by a legal
decision in a court of law. Though obviously ‘written up’ by the author of the
saga, this retains much of the loose-ended mystery of the oral tradition. We never find out any more about Thorgunna,
or quite why the violation of the taboo laid on her bed-hangings should have had
such drastic consequences.
For me, the very best literary ghost stories are those which
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 is never
entirely satisfying. They are very hard things to write, especially if you want to avoid Victorian pastiche. I recommend Alison Lurie's collection of short stories 'Women and Ghosts', Robert Westall's 'The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral' (Westall was very good at ghosts), Candy Gourlay's 'Shine', and Michelle Paver's brilliant and chilling novella 'Dark Matter'. To end with, here’s a ‘true’ ghost story told to me in the good old classic fashion by a friend, 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 little chateau – no doubt one of those elegant
small eighteenth century houses with shuttered windows and walled grounds that are
scattered around the French countryside.
This one was somewhere north of Paris,
and 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 a number of 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. And
there was a small powder room off the main chamber, which might once have used
as a nursery. But, mainly, you never got
a good night’s sleep there. You lay
awake listening to noises. As if something
was shuffling about, or dragging something across the floor. That was all.
But she didn’t like it.
And so when an American friend called Meredith came visiting
from the States and a visit to the chateau was proposed and she was given the Chambre des Mouches, no one in the
family said anything. Because the house
was full and no other bedroom was available, and really, the whole thing was
probably nonsense… but there was a certain interest around the breakfast table
next morning when Meredith came downstairs.
“How did you sleep?” they asked. Meredith hesitated. “Oh, I was comfortable enough – but I didn’t
sleep too well because of that darned cuckoo clock. It went off every hour, bing bong, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, and
kept waking me up.”
“But Meredith,” said my friend, as an indrawn breath went
around the table, “there isn’t any cuckoo
clock.”
Picture credits
Book of Dreams and Ghosts - Katherine Langrish
Illustration from Canon Alberic's Scrapbook - James McBride
Housefly - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Housefly_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_18050.jpg
