Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (89 page)

My brother was already on his knees, white and shaking, and was trying to bring around my uncle who lay as he had fallen with his head against the wall, completely stunned. Suddenly, he too sat up and looked around at us, then, realizing the situation and seeing the servants in the room, he staggered to his feet and would have us all be gone. I shall not set down here the terms of his command, but they were most urgent, and, seeing he was himself again, we had all nearly left the room when he called me back, and, clutching my arm: “An experiment,” he said, speaking very fast and low; “a scientific experiment, you know, went wrong, Johnny, and your brother
Charles and I might have been killed. Think of that! But all’s right now and it’s not worth making a fuss about. Don’t get tattling with the servants about it and making mischief. Now go about your business; you needn’t be afraid we shall try any more dangerous experiments.” And he smiled in a ghastly fashion, with a glance at Charles who was still shaking like an aspen and clutching the table.

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It was when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge that the only psychic experience of my life (for so out of deference to the taste of the day I must call it) befell me. I have been asked to detail it for the benefit of the Society, and I will proceed without further delay to do so.

I shall have to go some way back in order to give you the complete chain of events which led up to the main incident of my story. You probably know—in fact I am sure you know—something of the general outline. This much you have probably heard: that a house and park in Northamptonshire were left to me some time ago by a person quite unconnected with me or family, whom I had succeeded in obliging in some way; and that though a year and a half has elapsed since the bequest came to me, the place still remains unoccupied and, indeed, unless matters alter considerably, I see every likelihood of its remaining in that condition.

The old gentleman who left me the property in question was a Mr. William Stedman, well known in his day as a book collector and student. His hobby was the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—in this department of literature he stood high: but beyond editing a book for the Roxburghe Club, of which he was a member, and writing frequently to
Notes and Queries
, he never produced anything, and his magnum opus,
Studies in English Drama
, lies still in MS among his papers at Merfield House. Of his early life I can tell little or nothing. He was a younger son, and had succeeded to the property on the death of his brother’s wife, who followed her husband within a very short time. This couple, short as had been their tenure of Merfield, 7 years only, obviously had made a much greater
impression on their neighbors in the village than the student recluse who succeeded them. He was “close,” said the bailiff who remembered them, and she was forward, and between them—

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O William Frog, upon the log

How sweet your accents ring

An airy tune beneath the moon

Remote you sit and sing

All through the rushes, and in the bushes

Odd creatures slip in the dark

And dusky owls with feathery cowls

Go sweeping about the park

You hear on the breeze from behind the trees

The Ampton clock begin

And when it is still, how thin and shrill

The bell of the Hall chimes in

Then the horses stir and the sleepy cats purr

And something moves in the fern

And did you not see in the hollow oak tree

Two eyes begin to burn?

You heard a foot pass, it trailed over the grass

You shivered, it came so near

And was it the head of a man long dead

That raised itself out of the mere?

Then a call came clear from over the mere

And died in the night beyond

And the moor hens woke and you heard a croak

From the swan on the Judgment pond

Four black things with eyes of flame

In the hour before the dawn

And their dry throats cluck for they long to suck

The blood of a sleeping fawn

But all around from the trees and the ground

The elves and the owls creep on

And the black things shrink and we rather think

That their chance of a meal is gone

There blows a dull breath over Troston Heath

And cocks are crowing afar

And a pool of blood in the old Broom wood

Looks up at the morning star.

V
ERY NEARLY ALL
the ghost stories of old times claim to be true narratives of remarkable occurrences. At the outset I must make it clear that with these—be they ancient, medieval or post-medieval—I have nothing to do, any more than I have with those chronicled in our own days. I am concerned with a branch of fiction; not a large branch, if you look at the rest of the tree, but one which has been astonishingly fertile in the last thirty years. The avowedly fictitious ghost story is my subject, and that being understood I can proceed.

In the year 1854 George Borrow narrated to an audience of Welshmen, “in the tavern of Gutter Vawr, in the county of Glamorgan,” what he asserted to be “decidedly the best ghost story in the world.” You may read this story either in English, in Knapp’s notes to
Wild Wales
, or in Spanish, in a recent edition with excellent pictures (
Las Aventuras de Pánfilo
). The source is Lope de Vega’s
El Peregrino en so patria
published in 1604. You will find it a remarkably interesting specimen of a tale of terror written in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but I shall be surprised if you agree with Borrow’s estimate of it. It is nothing but an account of a series of nightmares experienced by a wanderer who lodges for a night in a “hospital,” which had been deserted because of hauntings. The ghosts come in crowds and play tricks with the victim’s bed. They quarrel over cards, they squirt water at the man, they throw torches about the room. Finally they steal his clothes and disappear; but next morning the clothes are where he put them when he went to bed. In fact they are rather goblins than ghosts.

Still, here you have a story written with the sole object of inspiring a pleasing terror in the reader; and as I think, that is the true aim of the ghost story.

As far as I know, nearly two hundred years pass before you find the literary ghost story attempted again. Ghosts of course figure on the stage, but we must leave them out of consideration. Ghosts are the subject of quasi-scientific research in this country at the hands of Glanville, Beaumont and others; but these collectors are out to prove theories of the future life and the spiritual world. Improving treatises, with illustrative instances, are written on the Continent, as by Lavater. All these, if they do afford what our ancestors called amusement (Dr. Johnson decreed that
Coriolanius
was “amusing”), do so by a side-wind.
The Castle of Otranto
is perhaps the progenitor of the ghost story as a literary genre, and I fear that it is merely amusing in the modern sense.

Then we come to Mrs. Radcliffe, whose ghosts are far better of their kind, but with exasperating timidity are all explained away; and to Monk Lewis, who in the book which gives him his nickname is odious and horrible without being impressive. But Monk Lewis was responsible for better things than he could produce himself. It was under his auspices that Scott’s verse first saw the light: among the
Tales of Terror and Wonder
are not only some of his translations, but “Glenfinlas” and the “Eve of St. John,” which must always rank as fine ghost stories. The form into which he cast them was that of the ballads which he loved and collected, and we must not forget that the ballad is in the direct line of ancestry of the ghost story. Think of “Clerk Saunders,” “Young Benjie,” the “Wife of Usher’s Well.” I am tempted to enlarge on the
Tales of Terror
, for the most part supremely absurd, where Lewis holds the pen, and jigs along with such stanzas as:

All present then uttered a terrified shout;

All turned with disgust from the scene.

The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out,

And sported his eyes and his temples about,

While the specter addressed Imogene.

But proportion must be observed.

If I were writing generally of horrific books which include supernatural appearances, I should be obliged to include Maturin’s
Melmoth
, and doubtless imitations of it which I know nothing of. But
Melmoth
is a long—a cruelly long—book, and we must keep our eye on the short prose ghost story in the first place. If Scott is not the creator of this, it is to him that we owe two classical specimens—“Wandering Willie’s Tale” and the “Tapestried Chamber.” The former we know is an episode in a novel; anyone who searches the novels of succeeding years will certainly find (as we, alas, find in
Pickwick
and
Nicholas Nickleby
!) stories of this type foisted in; and possibly some of them may be good enough to deserve reprinting.

But the real happy hunting ground, the proper habitat of our game is the magazine, the annual, the periodical publication destined to amuse the family circle. They came up thick and fast, the magazines, in the thirties and forties, and many died young. I do not, having myself sampled the task, envy the devoted one who sets out to examine the files, but it is not rash to promise him a measure of success. He will find ghost stories; but of what sort? Charles Dickens will tell us. In a paper from
Household Words
, which will be found among “Christmas Stories” under the name of “A Christmas Tree” (I reckon it among the best of Dickens’s occasional writings), that great man takes occasion to run through the plots of the typical ghost stories of his time.

As he remarks, they are “reducible to a very few general types and classes; for ghosts have little originality, and ‘walk’ in a beaten track.” He gives us at some length the experience of the nobleman and the ghost of the beautiful young housekeeper who drowned herself in the park two hundred years before; and, more cursorily, the indelible bloodstain, the door that will not shut, the clock that strikes thirteen, the phantom coach, the compact to appear after death, the girl who meets her double, the cousin who is seen at the moment of his death far away in India, the maiden lady who “really did see the Orphan Boy.” With such things as these we are still familiar. But we have rather forgotten—and I for my part have seldom met—those with which he ends his survey:

“Legion is the name of the German castles where we sit up alone to meet the specter—where we are shown into a room made
comparatively cheerful for our reception” (more detail, excellent of its kind, follows), “and where, about the small hours of the night, we come into the knowledge of divers supernatural mysteries. Legion is the name of the haunted German students, in whose society we draw yet nearer to the fire, while the schoolboy in the corner opens his eyes wide and round, and flies off the footstool he has chosen for his seat, when the door accidentally blows open.”

As I have said, this German stratum of ghost stories is one of which I know little; but I am confident that the searcher of magazines will penetrate to it. Examples of the other types will accrue, especially when he reaches the era of Christmas Numbers, inaugurated by Dickens himself. His Christmas
Numbers
are not to be confused with his Christmas
Books
, though the latter led on to the former. Ghosts are not absent from these, but I do not call the
Christmas Carol
a ghost story proper; while I do assign that name to the stories of the Signalman and the Juryman (in “Mugby Junction” and “Dr. Marigold”).

These were written in 1865 and 1866, and nobody can deny that they conform to the modern idea of the ghost story. The setting and the personages are those of the writer’s own day; they have nothing antique about them. Now this mode is not absolutely essential to success, but it is characteristic of the majority of successful stories: the belted knight who meets the specter in the vaulted chamber and has to say “By my halidom,” or words to that effect, has little actuality about him. Anything, we feel, might have happened in the 15th century. No; the seer of ghosts must talk something like me, and be dressed, if not in my fashion, yet not too much like a man in a pageant, if he is to enlist my sympathy. Wardour Street has no business here.