by Louise Welsh
Bones are central, too, in Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘High Walker and Bloody Bones’, published in 1935 but again, as a folk tale, difficult to accurately date. Hurston faithfully reproduces the words and speech patterns of the people who originally told her their stories. Hurston’s contemporaries sometimes criticised her for this technique, but it enables us to hear the voices of earlier storytellers across the ages, an effect which adds vitality and expression to a simple tale.
Ghost stories cross ethnicities, cultures and continents. This collection is predominately European, but includes stories from Africa, Japan, Scandinavia, America and from writers of Native American and African American heritage. Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s ‘Stigmata’ (1998) both draw on the slavery era in America.
Gomez’s Gilda is transformed into a vampire while enslaved on a plantation. The Gilda Stories (represented in this collection by ‘Off-Broadway: 1971’) follow the eponymous heroine across two hundred years. As a vampire of colour, her history is also the history of social and political attitudes towards people of colour in the United States. Gomez’s vampire has her own moral code; the people whose blood she drinks remain unharmed. Indeed the process enables Gilda to perceive their stories and to plant suggestions as to how their lives might be improved. The vampire’s ethics may seem in danger of removing all tension from the plot; until we remember the danger her ethnicity regularly places her in across centuries.
‘Our white nightgowns fly out from our legs, making us winged spirits.’ Perry’s ‘Stigmata’ depicts Ruth and Lizzie running through the night. Lizzie is a young African American woman coming of age in the 1960s, but this image would not be out of place in one of Mrs Radcliffe’s eighteenth century gothic novels. Lizzie has begun to experience strange episodes. Her skin is bruised and tender for no reason, she sees visions and ‘the line between dreaming and waking has become hard to see with the naked eye’. Is she in the grip of some psychosis, or are her enslaved African ancestors somehow reaching out to her across the centuries? This extract from a novel draws on classic ghost story iconography while also acknowledging the ongoing legacy of slavery.
Colonies and colonialism are fertile material for ghost stories. It is easier to imagine supernatural happenings taking place elsewhere, in a land where the gods are different and the customs mysterious. The sergeant-major who introduces the monkey’s paw in W.W. Jacob’s story presumably came across the evil charm while serving in India. He tells the old man that it is reputed to have ‘had a spell put on it by an old fakir’.
‘The other’ is often a source of anxiety – especially for colonists who suspect the indigenous population might one day take back what has been stolen from them. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘My Own True Ghost Story’ (1888) is set in India where he spent much of his life. It begins rather like a travelogue:
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveller passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried…
He adds, tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman’. The account takes the form of a reminiscence in which Kipling shows himself to be as susceptible to atmosphere as any khansamah. But he distinguishes himself from ‘the natives’, whose dishonesty is treated as childish and inevitable, by showing that his English good sense and persistence banishes the ‘ghosts’ who kept him awake all night.
Robert Morrison, ‘A Man From Glasgow’ (1944), is a long way from his rainy homeland. He meets Somerset Maugham’s narrator in Algeciras in Southern Spain, on his way home from Ecija where he has been managing some olive groves. Once again the indigenous population is considered undependable. ‘I couldn’t get a trustworthy man to be at Ecija so last year I went there myself.’ The summer proved hotter than anything he had experienced before. ‘That blasted sun beat down and the glare was so awful, you felt your eyes would shoot out of your head.’ Morrison reports that it was not long before he began to hear ghostly laughter coming from a deserted house on the other side of the grove.
‘A Man from Glasgow’ relies on a slow, creeping sense of dread for its effect. Maugham makes a point of stating that Robert Morrison seemed ‘perfectly sober’, but his face is marked by chronic alcoholism which, combined with the searing heat and isolation, may have sent the man temporarily mad. The atmosphere builds gradually as Morrison describes his increasing terror. The effect replicates similar sensations in the reader and encourages us to think that the Glaswegian may not be entirely wrong in his belief that something lays awake, waiting for him in the olive groves.
Kipling and Maugham both give their stories locations whose atmosphere helps build tension. Place is often crucial to the success of ghostly tales, and what is more ghostly than a haunted house? The illustrator in Tove Jansson’s homage to Edward Gorey, ‘Black-White’ (1971) finds he cannot produce the right shade of black while living in his wife’s beautifully designed modern home, ‘an enormous openwork of glass and unpainted wood’. Instead he decides to work in a tall, narrow, abandoned house that merges with a hill in the shadow of the pines. ‘No one can depict desolation who hasn’t inhabited desolation,’ he writes to his wife. ‘Things condemned have a terrible beauty.’
Not all ghost stories are set in gloomy locations. Extreme landscapes perk the senses and both Ambrose Bierce and Annie Proulx find inspiration for their respective stories – ‘The Stranger’ (1909) and ‘The Sagebrush Kid’ (2008) – in desert landscapes more usually associated with Westerns.
Endlessly adaptable, ghost stories can cross genres. Science fiction is also inclined to allegories and encounters with frightening beings from different worlds, so it is unsurprising that the forms frequently overlap. In Ray Bradbury’s ‘Mars is Heaven’ (1948) the crew of a rocket ship land safely on the red planet, where they are amazed to encounter their dead loved ones. The experience is so wonderful that, to their cost, the astronauts neglect to interrogate possible reasons for the phenomenon.
J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1976) has no supernatural aspect to its plot, but Judith, Philip and the relic hunters of Cape Kennedy are haunted by the returning dead. The ghostly form of Robert Hamilton has been orbiting the earth, in his burnt out capsule, for more than fifteen years. Now he is coming home and Judith is determined to receive his remains. Her obsession leads to her receiving more than she expected.
‘I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.’ The creature in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is made from recycled body parts dug up from a graveyard in the dead of night. The central premise of the novel is that the monster is alive, but he is an unnatural being that, by the end of the book, is locked into a terrible cycle of hunting and haunting with his creator Dr Frankenstein: ‘…the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.’
It is tempting to imagine ghosts as always being alone, but in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘Bobok’ (1873) the bodies buried in the graveyard are engaged in a spirited conversation, full of the petty snobberies that characterised them in life. Adam Marek’s ‘Dinner of the Dead Alumni’ (2010) and Helen Simpson’s ‘The Festival of the Immortals’ (2013) also depict ghosts as part of a busy throng. ‘The streets of Cambridge are crawling with dead alumni’ as Marek’s ghosts take part in a reunion. Simpson’s ghosts are possibly even more dis
tinguished, though subject to prurient questions. They are dead, out-of-copyright writers, taking part in an unusual literary festival. Charlotte Brontë will read from Villette, her sister Emily is scheduled to take part in a session entitled ‘TB and Me’ and Shakespeare has half promised to give a creative writing workshop. The afterlife may not be as desolate as some fear.
*
I have arranged my selection in order of year of publication. Inevitably there were some stories I wanted desperately to include, but which had to be excluded for reasons of copyright or length. They included E.T.A. Hoffman’s ‘The Sandman’, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Karen Blixen’s ‘The Supper at Elsinore’. Each of these texts is readily available. If you have not read them before then you are in for a series of disturbing treats.
I began this introduction by stating that few of us want the dead to return. That is untrue. Sometimes it is what we want most of all. Ghost stories disturb, entertain and enlighten us about the world we live in. They also occasionally grant us a glimpse of those who have gone before. As Tim O’Brien writes in ‘The Lives of the Dead’ (1989) ‘in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.’
Happy hauntings.
Louise Welsh
Glasgow
July 2015
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
Pliny the Younger
Gaius Plinius (c.AD 61–c.113) was born in Como in northern Italy to a wealthy landowner, Lucius Caecilius, and Plinia Marcella, sister of Pliny the Elder. His father died young and he was adopted by his uncle. Pliny the Younger is best known for his letters (Epistulae), nine books of which were published between AD 99 and 109. He practised law and later entered the senate where he became Praetor in AD 93 and Consul in AD 100.
There was at Athens a mansion, spacious and commodious, but of evil repute and dangerous to health. In the dead of night there was a noise as of iron, and, if you listened more closely, a clanking of chains was heard, first of all from a distance, and afterwards hard by. Presently a spectre used to appear, an ancient man sinking with emaciation and squalor, with a long beard and bristly hair, wearing shackles on his legs and fetters on his hands, and shaking them.
Hence the inmates, by reason of their fears, passed miserable and horrible nights in sleeplessness. This want of sleep was followed by disease, and, their terrors increasing, by death. For in the daytime as well, though the apparition had departed, yet a reminiscence of it flitted before their eyes, and their dread outlived its cause.
The mansion was accordingly deserted and, condemned to solitude, was entirely abandoned to the dreadful ghost. However, it was advertised, on the chance of some one, ignorant of the fearful curse attached to it, being willing to buy or to rent it.
Athenodorus the philosopher came to Athens and read the advertisement. When he had been informed of the terms, which were so low as to appear suspicious, he made inquiries, and learned the whole of the particulars. Yet none the less on that account, nay, all the more readily, did he rent the house.
As evening began to draw on, he ordered a sofa to be set for himself in the front part of the house, and called for his notebooks, writing implements, and a light. All his servants he dismissed to the interior apartments, and for himself applied his soul, eyes, and hand to composition, that his mind might not, from want of occupation, picture to itself the phantoms of which he had heard, or any empty terrors.
At the commencement there was the universal silence of night. Soon the shaking of irons and the clanking of chains was heard, yet he never raised his eyes nor slackened his pen, but hardened his soul and deadened his ears by its help. The noise grey and approached: now it seemed to be heard at the door, and next inside the door.
He looked round, beheld and recognised the figure he had been told of. It was standing and signalling to him with its finger, as though inviting him. He, in reply, made a sign with his hand that it should wait a moment, and applied himself afresh to his tablets and pen. Upon this the figure kept rattling its chains over his head as he wrote.
On looking round again, he saw it making the same signal as before, and without delay took up a light and followed it. It moved with a slow step, as though oppressed by its chains, and, after turning into the courtyard of the house, vanished suddenly and left his company.
On being thus left to himself, he marked the spot with some grass and leaves which he plucked. Next day he applied to the magistrates, and urged them to have the spot in question dug up. There were found there some bones attached to and intermingled with fetters; the body to which they had belonged, rotted away by time and the soil, had abandoned them thus naked and corroded to the chains. They were collected and interred at the public expense, and the house was ever afterwards free from the spirit, which had obtained due sepulture.
The above story I believe on the strength of those who affirm it. What follows I am myself in a position to affirm to others. I have a freedman, who is not without some knowledge of letters. A younger brother of his was sleeping with him in the same bed. The latter dreamed he saw some one sitting on the couch, who approached a pair of scissors to his head, and even cut the hair from the crown of it. When day dawned he was found to be cropped round the crown, and his locks were discovered lying about. A very short time afterwards a fresh occurrence of the same kind confirmed the truth of the former one. A lad of mine was sleeping, in company with several others, in the pages’ apartment. There came through the windows (so he tells the story) two figures in white tunics, who cut his hair as he lay, and departed the way they came. In his case, too, daylight exhibited him shorn, and his locks scattered around. Nothing remarkable followed, except, perhaps, this, that I was not brought under accusation, as I should have been, if Domitian (in whose reign these events happened) had lived longer. For in his desk was found an information against me which had been presented by Carus; from which circumstance it may be conjectured – inasmuch as it is the custom of accused persons to let their hair grow – that the cutting off of my slaves’ hair was a sign of the danger which threatened me being averted.
I beg, then, that you will apply your great learning to this subject. The matter is one which deserves long and deep consideration on your part; nor am I, for my part, undeserving of having the fruits of your wisdom imparted to me. You may even argue on both sides (as your way is), provided you argue more forcibly on one side than the other, so as not to dismiss me in suspense and anxiety, when the very cause of my consulting you has been to have my doubts ended.
DANIEL CROWLEY AND THE GHOSTS
Anon.
I have no idea who wrote ‘Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts’. My instinct is that this story was the product of many voices and imaginations, developed and embellished over numerous tellings until eventually someone committed it to paper.
There lived a man in Cork whose name was Daniel Crowley. He was a coffin-maker by trade, and had a deal of coffins laid by, so that his apprentice might sell them when himself was not at home.
A messenger came to Daniel Crowley’s shop one day and told him that there was a man dead at the end of the town, and to send up a coffin for him, or to make one.
Daniel Crowley took down a coffin, put it on a donkey cart, drove to the wake house, went in and told the people of the house that the coffin was there for them. The corpse was laid out on a table in a room next to the kitchen. Five or six women were keeping watch around it; many people were in the kitchen. Daniel Crowley was asked to sit down and commence to shorten the night: that is, to tell stories, amuse himself and others. A tumbler of punch was brought, and he promised to do the best he could.
He began to tell stories and shorten the night. A second glass of punch was brought to him, and he went on telling tales. There was a man at the wake who sang a song: after him another was found, and then another. Then the people asked Daniel Crowley to sing, and he did. The song that he sang was of another nation. He sang about the good people, the fairies. The song
pleased the company, they desired him to sing again, and he did not refuse.
Daniel Crowley pleased the company so much with his two songs that a woman who had three daughters wanted to make a match for one of them, and get Daniel Crowley as a husband for her. Crowley was a bachelor, well on in years, and had never thought of marrying.
The mother spoke of the match to a woman sitting next to her. The woman shook her head, but the mother said: “If he takes one of my daughters I’ll be glad, for he has money laid by. Do you go and speak to him, but say nothing of me at first.”
The woman went to Daniel Crowley then, and told him that she had a fine, beautiful girl in view, and that now was his time to get a good wife; he’d never have such a chance again.
Crowley rose up in great anger. “There isn’t a woman wearing clothes that I’d marry,” said he. “There isn’t a woman born that could bring me to make two halves of my loaf for her.”
The mother was insulted now and forgot herself. She began to abuse Crowley.
“Bad luck to you, you hairy little scoundrel,” said she, “you might be a grandfather to my child. You are not fit to clean the shoes on her feet. You have only dead people for company day and night; ’tis by them you make your living.”
“Oh, then,” said Daniel Crowley, “I’d prefer the dead to the living any day if all the living were like you. Besides, I have nothing against the dead. I am getting employment by them and not by the living, for ’tis the dead that want coffins.”
“Bad luck to you, ’tis with the dead you ought to be and not with the living; ’twould be fitter for you to go out of this altogether and go to your dead people.”