I once wrote a ghost story called ‘The Wayfarer’, which was read on Radio Four in a series marking the centenary of the founding of the Caravan Club. The ghost – that of an Edwardian pioneer of caravanning – eats lemon cake and drinks tea, but this was a mistake on my part.
What Do Ghosts Wear?
I might have made a faux pas here as well. My friend David, the ghost story connoisseur, and I once made a short film of a ghost story we’d concocted. Out ghost would wear working class street clothes, including a track suit top. I was in charge of the props, and on the second day of shooting, I forgot to bring the ghost’s clothes. I said to David, ‘Not to worry, I’ll just go to Oxfam and buy a similar sort of top to the one we used yesterday’, at which he said (very mildly in the circumstances), ‘So this will be the first ever ghost with a change of clothes?’
But I think that ghosts might change clothes…
Those SPR stalwarts who argued that ghosts were telepathic transmissions dealt breezily with the question of clothes. The agent who transfers the apparition (the sender of the telepathic message) does so in order that it should be recognised by the percipient. The ‘normal appearance’ of the figure is projected. If any such apparition makes more than one appearance, the clothes don’t necessarily have to be the same on both occasions, as long as they are within the range of the ‘normal appearance’ of the figure as known to the percipient.
Of course the traditional ghost wore, or indeed was, a white sheet. In contemporary productions of Macbeth, Banquo’s ghost wore a white sheet. In Hamlet, Horatio recalls the prelude to the assassination of Julius Caesar: ‘The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead/Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets’. The sheet is taken to be a shroud. In ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ by M.R. James, the ghost is a possessed bed sheet, and has a horrible ‘face of crumpled linen’. (In Jonathan Miller’s film of the story, the effect is beautifully captured and accompanied by a sort of blaring sea monster noise).
In the above-mentioned book by Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: Or Life and Death, Lodge recorded that, during one séance conversation with his dead son, the boy was asked what sort of clothes people wore on the other side. The medium’s unsophisticated and child-like female spirit control – through whom Raymond was speaking – stumbled over the answer: ‘They are all man-u-factured’ she/ he said. The message from Raymond went on: ‘Can you fancy me in white robes? …[A fellow] may make his mind to wear his own clothes a little while, but he will soon be dressing like the natives.’
Are Ghosts Seen By More than One Person at a Time?
Yes. In the jargon of Phantasms of the Living these sightings are categorised under ‘multiple percipients’. From my reading of collections of true ghost stories, I would say that about thirty per cent of apparitions are seen by more than one person, and these are usually given pride of place at the start of the book. If, in sophisticated fictional ghost stories, the ghost is seen by only one person, that’s an indication that the sighting is subjective; that the ghost is psychological. In The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James, the troubled governess at a lonely country house is haunted by visions of her predecessor, Miss Jessel. When she sees Miss Jessel standing on the opposite side of a lake, she tries to make her fellow-servant, Mrs Grose, see her too: ‘She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest woman, look - !’ But she does not succeed.
In true ghost stories, the numbers of percipients range upwards until we reach the point of mass-hallucination, at which we come back to the question of psychology. The best known instance is the Angel of Mons. The retreat from Mons in Belgium in August 1914 was the first indication that Britain would not win the war quickly. The full horror of what had started was beginning to become apparent, and this was a scenario traumatic enough to produce a ghost or ghosts. An Angel, protecting the British troops, was said to have appeared above the battlefield.
It is thought that this vision was created retrospectively, so to speak, following the publication of a story by Arthur Machen in the Evening News on September 29th 1914. This depicted the ghosts of the bowmen of Agincourt arriving on the Western Front to fire arrows at the German lines that killed without leaving wounds. In his book, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes that Machen described these bowmen, who appeared between the two armies, as:
a long line of shapes, with a ‘shining’ about them. It was the shining that did it: within a week Machen’s fictional bowmen had been transformed into real angels, and what he had written as palpable fiction was credited as fact. Machen was embarrassed and distressed by the misapprehension, but he was assured, especially by the clergy, that he was wrong…
It is interesting that Machen should have been embarrassed at the way his story was taken literally. He was a Welsh mystic with Druidic tendencies, very much the theatrical occultist; he had long white hair and wore cloaks. His story, ‘The Great God Pan’ (1890), about a brain operation gone wrong, is a classic of horror that had a lasting effect on Stephen King. ‘The Bowmen’ is echoed in another of his stories, ‘Munitions of War’ (1915), in which a reporter travels by train through fog towards the beautiful old town of Westpool to see how it is facing ‘the stress of war’. He finds that the place has ‘a shy, barred-up air’. It is apparently demoralised, doing nothing for the war effort. He wakes in the middle of the night, and looks out of his hotel window towards the Middle Quay, where he sees a vast enterprise going on, involving the loading of ‘great ships, faint and huge in the frosty mists’ by men speaking to one another in old-fashioned slang. He overhears one of them announce, while bantering with a fellow worker, ‘I fell at Trafalgar!’
Can There Be Ghosts of Inanimate Objects?
Yes. We just have to think of Macbeth and ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me…’ And we have seen the problem that phantom coaches caused to the believers in ghosts as telepathic messages. They have also got ghost trains to reckon with and at least one bus, according to a report in the ‘Morning Post’ of June 16th 1934…
At an inquest, held in Paddington on June 15th 1934, into the death in a motor accident of Ian James Beaton of Dollis Hill, witnesses described the scene of the accident – the junction of St Mark’s Road and Cambridge Gardens – as dangerous because of a ghost double-decker. It had been heard at night, roaring towards the junction ‘long after the regular bus service had stopped’. The bus was described as brightly illuminated, which goes for many of the inanimate objects that have manifested. They tend to be smaller than buses, and of the order of radiant chandeliers, candles, fireworks, balls or jewels.
But the best inanimate ghost that I have read of is that of a house, and for this we must re-visit Apparitions and Haunted Houses by Sir Ernest Bennett. The account was sent to him by Miss Ruth Wynne of Rougham Rectory, Bury St Edmunds. One ‘dull, damp’ afternoon in October 1926, she was walking through fields with ‘her pupil’, aged fourteen, on the way to have a look at the church in the neighbouring village of Bradfield St George. They did not know the area and, emerging from the fields, they came to some high trees. They both saw beyond the trees a part of the roof of a stucco house and Miss Wynne recalls seeing ‘some windows of Georgian design’. They went on to the church and came back by a different way.
The two did not take the same route until next spring. Again it was a dull afternoon, but with good visibility. As they emerged from the fields, the pair simultaneously cried, ‘Where’s the wall?’ The trees were there, but beyond lay nothing but ‘a wilderness of tumbled earth’. They thought the house and wall must have been pulled down, but closer inspection showed ponds on the site that had obviously been there a long time. Enquiries among the villagers revealed no knowledge of a house ever having stood on the spot. Miss Ruth Wynne concludes her account by asserting that she is now ‘what you might call psychic and this is the only experience of the kind I have ever had’. Her pupil, she added, was ‘neither imaginative not suggestible’, and was sufficiently good friends with her
to disagree firmly with her if she wished to do so.
I find this story moving and strange: the two females walking abroad, seeking out experiences of life that the mistress might explain to the pupil…and yet they are reduced to equality by this impenetrable enigma.
FIVE CLINCHERS
Any ghost story, whether real or fictional, needs at least one clinching, transcendent moment. It might occur during the build-up or – better still – as a feature of the final manifestation. Alternatively, this hallmark of ghostliness is earned by no single detail, but by the overall effect of the story. I was about to write that there must be an element of subjectivity about what constitutes a ‘clincher’, but away with such politesse. I believe that most of us know one when we come across it, because the hairs on the back of our neck do lift. (Or they do whatever Kipling said they do).
Here at any rate are six that worked for me.
1. Some Homunculi
In Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost story, ‘The Familiar’ (1872), Captain Barton, a retired seaman, is tracked by a man who looks like a sailor he once knew and treated badly – only smaller. He consults a doctor, asking: ‘Is there any disease, in all the range of human maladies, which would have the effect of perceptibly contracting the stature, and the whole frame – causing the man to shrink in all his proportions, and yet to preserve the exact resemblance to himself in every particular – with the one exception, his height and bulk…?’
It is a brilliant formula for a manifestation: a man who looks as he did in life, but smaller. The homunculus, the compressed human form, has always frightened me, which is why the ending of Nicolas Roeg’s film, Don’t Look Now, has cost me so many hours of sleep. I don’t like Mr Punch either. I once knew a Punch and Judy man. He was a big bloke, and he liked a drink. He’d say to me that his shows were ‘not suitable for children’ and he was only half joking. The climax of one of M.R. James’s best ghost stories, ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’ (1919), features a dreamed account of a Punch and Judy show that begins, apparently in a darkened interior, with the single toll of a huge bell. When Mr Punch hits his victims with his stick, there is ‘the sound of bone giving way’.
After the final murder, as the stage grows darker, ‘Punch came out and sat on the footboard and fanned himself and looked at his shoes, which were bloody, and hung his head on one side, and sniggered in so deadly a fashion that I saw some of those beside me cover their faces…’
It is the violent power that is packed into the small frame that makes the homunculus frightening. Ventriloquists’ dummies are frightening because they are small and hard. At least, the ones made out of wood or plastic are hard. The floppy figures are more benign, as are their controllers. I once attended a ventriloquist’s convention, and the vents with the hard figures would intimidate those with the soft ones. The other reason ventriloquists’ dummies are frightening is that they speak in voices not their own, like the sybils of Ancient Egypt, or the mediums of the nineteenth century. The most frightening sequence in the portmanteau ghost film, Dead of Night (1945), is the one in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who is possessed by his dummy, and it has been said that this was inspired by a story of 1931 by Gerald Kersh, ‘The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy’. In this, the dummy teaches its master ventriloquism. An onlooker notes that there was ‘something disgustingly avid in the stare of its bulging blue eyes, the lids of which clicked as it winked.’
Real life ventriloquists do not go out of their way to distance their craft from necromancy. When I was a boy, a friend of mine had an Archie Andrews Annual. Archie Andrews was a wooden schoolboy operated by Peter Brough in – conveniently for Brough who was not a very good vent technically – a radio series. I remember, as an eight year old, being appalled by a supposedly amusing story in the annual, in which Archie Andrews spilled out of Peter Brough’s suitcase at an airport and was seen by a passing woman who just could not be persuaded that he wasn’t the corpse of a little boy!
2. The Welsh Egg
Here is the second story told to my friend David by Ada, whose story about the ironing ghost has already appeared. I like it because of the apparent production of proof of a ghost, just as, in ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’, Steenie Steenson comes away from the encounter with the ghost of Sir Robert Gauntlet holding a receipt in his hand.
My grandfather was Welsh, from Blaenau Ffestiniog. He emigrated to America in his teens and became a Congregationalist minister. He died in 1969 and my nephew, Bryn, saw him in New York in 1981…
My aunt Mary was putting Bryn to bed for a nap; he was four years old at the time. She went to get him and when he woke up, he said, ‘I want an egg – the same type of egg that grandfather likes.’ My aunt was astonished because he’d never known either of his grandfathers. She asked him, ‘What kind of egg?’ and he said what sounded like…now let me get this right phonetically…‘Oo-ee weddy verwi’. That’s the Welsh for soft boiled egg – the spelling would be: wy wedi’i ferwi. My aunt did know some Welsh – which Bryn certainly didn’t – and she asked him, ‘How do you know about that?’ He said, ‘Grandfather told me when I was asleep.’
3. Old Q---
After co-writing Phantasms of the Living, Frank Podmore went solo with another fascinating compendium: Apparitions and Thought Transference (1894), and one of the oddest and therefore most compelling of the accounts in the book is listed as ‘Number 123’ under the heading ‘Less Common Forms of Hallucination’. It is recounted by a ‘Mr J---’, a man ‘well known in the scientific world’, who had succeeded the late ‘Mr Q---’ as the librarian of ‘X Library’. By way of introduction it is pointed out that Mr J--- had never met or seen his predecessor at the library; he concedes that he may have overheard library assistants describing him, but he has ‘no recollection of this’.
Late one evening, Mr J--- was working in the library (which was in Bracknell in Berkshire) when he looked up to see a face looking round one of the bookcases. ‘I say looking round, but it had an odd appearance, as if the body were in the bookcase, as the face came so closely to the edge, and I could see no body.’ The face was pallid and hairless; he advanced towards it. ‘I saw an old man with high shoulders seem to rotate out of the end of the bookcase, and with his back towards me and with a shuffling gait walk rather quickly from the bookcase to the door of a small lavatory.’ Mr J--- followed the figure into the lavatory, and found it empty.
He later mentioned the sighting to a local vicar, who said, ‘Why, that’s old Q---.’ Q---, it turned out, had lost all his hair, including eyebrows, in a gunpowder accident; and he walked with a shuffle.
Frank Podmore rationalised this as a case of thought transference: ‘Mr J--- saw the figure of Mr Q--- in the library because some friend of Mr Q---’s was at that moment vividly picturing to himself the late librarian in his old haunts.’
The appealing thing about the story is that it is all of a piece: the slightly undignified elision of man and bookshelf matches the bathetic denouement in the lavatory – and the shuffling walk and the hairless head compliment the overall dowdiness. It has the coherence, in other words, of truth.
4. The Lusitania Prophecy
To begin with the facts: the Lusitania, which had been launched in 1906, was sunk off Ireland by a German U-boat on May 7th 1915. It was approaching Liverpool having sailed from New York. The targeting of a civilian vessel stimulated outrage against Germany, and was a factor in America’s entry into the Great War.
In Science and Parascience, Brian Inglis mentions that before the Great War there had been ‘countless portents of a coming Armageddon’, mostly ‘in vague general terms’, but one prediction (although it’s not quite that), made ‘before the international situation became really serious’, catches his eye. It was made by Dame Edith Lyttelton, who was a relation of the above-mentioned Prime Minister and SPR President, Arthur Balfour. Besides being involved in numerous philanthropic activities, Dame Edith was an SPR member herself and a practitioner of automa
tic writing, which means writing in a trance state while in touch with spirits.
On some date unrecorded, and after the launch of the ship but well before its loss, she transcribed the word ‘Lusitania’ followed by ‘Foam and fire – mest [sic] the funnel.’
What makes this particularly sinister is the horrible compression of the word ‘mest’, a combination perhaps of ‘mast’ and ‘messed’. It implies a desperate, ham-fisted attempt at communication, an attempt to re-master language by some entity labouring under the inconvenience of being dead.
A boiler exploded as the ship went down, incidentally, causing a funnel to collapse.
5. The Bideford Dream
This story was originally told to my friend David by a friend of his called Keith. When Keith heard that I was working on a book about ghosts, he kindly re-told it to me.
This happened thirty years ago on a Saturday, the first lovely day of spring. I was with my first girlfriend, Margaret, and we’d booked to stay at a guest house in Bideford on the coast of Devon. We went up from London in my old mini, a four hour trip from London. When we got to Bideford it was glorious, and I remember the room…Very bright and airy; good double bed, net curtains wafting at the sash windows, which were open a little way to let the breeze in. It had been a long drive, so we decided to have an afternoon sleep, and it’s important to bear in mind that I locked the door before we did so. I fell asleep straight away, and I dreamt that someone came into the room. He stood at the window for a while, and he watched me as I lay in bed although I wasn’t really aware of his face. It was one of those dreams where you can’t do anything, although I seemed to be fine with him being in the room. It was the noise of him closing the door in my dream that woke me up.
Ghoul Brittania Page 14