Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener” come across as comparatively mild, almost cozy. Haunted houses and ancient family curses, as well as demons, revenants, and “dwellers on the threshold,” now seem like so much narrative furniture—and solid, Victorian furniture at that, guaranteeing comfort and security. In truth, older ghost stories remain so enjoyable at least partly because they are, quite simply, well-made stories, strong on plot and atmosphere. As adults, we read them as we once listened, enthralled, while our mother or father told us about Snow White and the Evil Queen or Odysseus in the cave of the cyclops.
Last winter in these pages I surveyed many of the genre’s women authors. This time I concentrate on two dozen of the most famous ghost stories by men, restricting myself to work published in England between the mid-19th century and roughly 1930. Because I’ve already written about them elsewhere, I leave out the three just-mentioned giants of the field, James, Le Fanu, and Blackwood. In general, my spoiler-free comments try to describe each story in such a way that you’ll actually want to read it. Most of my chosen titles, which appear in roughly chronological order, show up regularly in standard anthologies—and links to free versions of many of them can be found in the web version of this article, at weeklystandard.com.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton,“The Haunted and the Haunters”
Today Bulwer-Lytton is remembered mainly for the opening phrase of his novel Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Yet this versatile author produced significant fiction of all kinds, including occult thrillers (Zanoni and A Strange Story) and a pioneering scientific romance (The Coming Race). “The Haunted and the Haunters” is probably the most celebrated haunted-house story of the 19th century.
The unnamed narrator, of an adventurous temperament, discovers a house in London, the owner of which tells him, “I never had one lodger who stayed more than three days.” Naturally, our hero sets up camp in one of its rooms and is duly assailed by various phantasmagoric entities:
Having survived till morning, this confirmed rationalist reasons that the night’s horrors were “conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another.” Tearing apart an inner room of the house, he soon discovers alchemical instruments and writings, as well as a miniature portrait of an Elizabethan grandee, who strikingly resembles a mysterious Mr. Richards, known to be living in India. Soon thereafter, Mr. Richards comes to visit London—and I’ll say no more about this excellent story.
Charles Dickens, “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man”
We don’t usually think of Dickens as a writer of ghost stories—other than A Christmas Carol. Yet the great novelist possessed a strongly Gothic imagination, and nearly all his plots contain elements that verge on, or even cross into, the supernatural.
In this famous story, the narrator—apparently Dickens himself—is enjoying an evening walk along some train tracks when he spots a railroad signalman. Clearly jittery about something, the signalman eventually explains that he has repeatedly glimpsed a figure near the railway tunnel making frantic gestures, then vanishing when approached. Soon afterwards, he adds, a locomotive crashed; following the figure’s second appearance, a train passenger died suddenly. Is this a bogey heralding imminent disaster and death on the rail lines? And why does it only appear to the signalman?
Arthur Quiller-Couch, “The Roll-Call of the Reef”
Arthur Quiller-Couch—commonly referred to as “Q”—is probably best known today as the editor of the first Oxford Book of English Verse. He is also the true source of some notable artistic advice: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
While Q turned out several memorable tales, “The Roll-Call of the Reef” is his masterpiece. It begins with discussion of an old trumpet and drum, which have been coupled together using a lock that can only be opened by setting the tumblers to a particular, and now unknown, six-letter word. Many years earlier, it seems, two separate shipwrecks occurred on the same day off the Cornish coast. After being nearly drowned, the trumpeter for a ship bearing a squad of horse soldiers and the drummer boy for the other vessel’s infantrymen discover that their horrific experience has created a bond between them. Before long, the two are regularly rowing themselves out into the bay so that they can play their instruments over the watery graves of their lost comrades.
I shall say no more, except to add that “The Roll-Call of the Reef” isn’t just a wonderful ghost story, it is among the most beautiful and moving stories I’ve ever read.
R. Murray Gilchrist, “The Basilisk”
Gilchrist’s ghost stories reflect the fin-de-siècle penchant for highly decorated, slightly archaic prose. His byzantine diction and syntax easily transport the reader into the hallucinatory, though Gilchrist can also be deliciously world-weary, as when Marina, in “The Basilisk,” puts off her over-inquisitive lover by saying, “Ask me nothing. . . . Life itself is too joyless to be more embittered by explanations.”
Marina, we learn, “dwelt with a retinue of aged servants, fantastic women and men half imbecile, who salaamed before her with eastern humility. . . . Had she given them life they could not have obeyed with more reverence.” Following a strange and sleepless night, the alluring young woman informs the besotted narrator that she has decided to “lie in your arms and pant against you before another midnight.” (“Pant” is sheer genius.) But before this hour of bliss, the two must first perform some dangerous rite: “I have come to bid you fare with me to the place where the spell may be loosed, and happiness bought.” The journey takes the couple to a temple beside a loathsome marsh, where the lover is left blindfolded until . . . If you didn’t know otherwise, you might guess “The Basilisk” to be an erotic allegory written by Poe at his most feverish.
Robert Hichens, “How Love Came to Professor Guildea”
Ask any aficionado to list the 10 greatest masterpieces of the classic ghost story genre and you can be sure that this story will be on the list.
The narrator, Father Murchison, grows friendly with the distinguished Professor Guildea, who normally doesn’t give or want any kind of affection; in fact, he hates it. One autumn evening this distinguished scholar glimpses somebody or something in the park across the street from his house. Leaving his front door open, he investigates but finds nothing. Nonetheless, from then on Guildea grows convinced that his house has been invaded by an unseen presence.
One night the professor and the priest secretly watch, incredulously, as a pet parrot begins to coo and respond to invisible fondling. Soon the truth emerges: Whether male or female, an unseen entity has grown infatuated with Guildea. The lovesick Thing follows the scholar wherever he goes, never wants to be apart from him, actually starts to rub up against his body. “This gentleness, this abominable solicitude, this brainless worship of an idiot, persistent, sickly, horribly physical, I cannot endure,” cries Guildea. “It nestles to me. It leans against me. I feel its touch, like the touch of a feather, trembling about my heart, as if it sought to number my pulsations, to find out the inmost secrets of my impulses and desires. No privacy is left to me.”
Is Guildea’s tormentor real or a product of his imagination? Is Hichens’s story a misogynistic allegory of married life? Read it and see what you think.
Oscar Wilde, “The Canterville Ghost” and Richard Middleton, “The Ghost Ship”
Can ghost stories be comic? M. R. James thought they shouldn’t be, insisting on “a pleasing terror.” Still, there are a handful of very funny ghost stories, headed by this pair from Oscar Wilde and his contemporary Richard Middleton.
In “The Canterville Ghost,” Wilde satirizes most of the conventions of the 19th-century Gothic tale. An American family named Otis arrives at a supposedly haunted English manor:
Utterly fearless, the Otis family simply ignores the manor’s ghost and its attempts to frighten them. They apply “Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent” to clean up the recurrent bloodstains on the rug. The spectral Sir Simon, increasingly frustrated by these unimaginative Americans, disdainfully concludes that they “were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena.”
In the course of the story, Wilde mentions various Gothic melodramas and shilling shockers. All these are made-up—I think—but they now sound like lost works by Edward Gorey: “Red Reuben, or the Strangled Babe,” “Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor,” “Reckless Rupert, or the Headless Earl,” “Jonas the Graveless, or the Corpse-Snatcher of Chertsey Barn.”
A friend of Richard Middleton described him as a “shaggy Peter Pan with a briar pipe.” Sadly, the writer’s suicide note—he poisoned himself at age 29—actually echoes that eternal boy’s view of dying: “Good-bye! Harry,” it begins, “I’m going adventuring again.”
Before his death, Middleton—who belonged to a literary club called the New Bohemians and championed the work of Émile Zola, George Gissing, and Kenneth Grahame—produced several fine stories, among them “On the Brighton Road,” in which a tramp meets a young man who isn’t quite what he seems, and this comic gem, “The Ghost Ship.”
In the little village of Fairfield the residents enjoy regular, friendly intercourse with the town’s large population of spirits. One night a spectral pirate ship is blown inland and crash-lands in a nearby turnip field. Soon all of Fairfield’s young male ghosts, to the despair of the town’s ghostly lasses, are spending every night in wild carousal with Captain Roberts. The narrator and the town’s parson decide to visit Roberts in his cabin:
The next night a gale strikes the village. As the narrator makes his way to the local pub, he notes—in a wonderful simile—that “the wind was so strong that I danced along on tip-toe like a girl at the fair.” After the tempest clears, life with the dead isn’t quite the same in Fairfield.
F. G. Loring, “The Tomb of Sarah”
The term “ghost story” can be loosely applied to all sorts of older supernatural fiction. While M. R. James’s “ghost stories of an antiquary” sometimes present sheeted horrors, they more often feature demons, necromancers, and various unseemly creatures.
Still, “The Tomb of Sarah” might well be the simplest and best short vampire story of Victorian Britain—the longer masterpieces being, of course, Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). When an old church is being renovated, the engineer in charge realizes that one sarcophagus needs to be moved. But he hesitates because of its curious inscription: “Sarah. 1630. For the sake of the dead and the welfare of the living, let this sepulture remain untouched and its occupant undisturbed.” Now what could that mean?
W. W. Jacobs, “Jerry Bundler,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Toll-House,” and “The Well”
In the two decades before the First World War, W. W. Jacobs was England’s most popular humorist. His style, when not overdoing the dialect, is still charming, his dialogue being particularly excellent. You really do feel in the hands of a master storyteller.
Many of Jacobs’s comic stories are tall tales, and it’s but a short step from the tall tale to the ghost story. “Jerry Bundler,” in fact, virtually combines the two. As for “The Monkey’s Paw,” even if you’ve never read it, you already know its plot: There isn’t a more famous or more terrifying short story in English than this one about a talisman that grants three wishes.
Still, Jacobs wrote several other ghost stories well worth reading. “The Toll-House”—in which four friends pass the night in a haunted house—conveys with almost Dosto-yevskian power both psychological disorientation and mounting terror. In “The Well,” Jacobs presents his version of “the biter bit.” When a sternly ethical young woman accidentally drops a family heirloom down an old well, her fiancé must descend into its brackish depths to retrieve it. There is, of course, something else in the water besides a diamond bracelet.
Oliver Onions, “The Beckoning Fair One”
Does any ghost story carry a more evocative title than “The Beckoning Fair One”? Written in a leisurely, almost Henry Jamesian style, this psychological conte cruel brilliantly depicts its narrator’s growing physical lassitude and mental confusion. You could almost think of it as an Edwardian version of Stephen King’s The Shining.
The writer Paul Oleron, at work on what promises to be his magnum opus, decides to move into a new house. His friend Elsie—obviously in love with Oleron—nonetheless complains that the place seems to sap the energy out of him. Moreover, on each of her own visits, something dire happens: She tears her hand on a nail, she falls on the stairs when one of the steps suddenly gives way. Gradually Oleron himself recognizes that, yes, “something did persist in the house; it had a tenant other than himself.”
Oleron never quite sees that tenant but he does hear “the sound of a woman brushing her hair.” More and more, the writer finds himself enthralled by this invisible presence, so much so that he grows loath to go outside even to buy food. At the same time, he decides that he now hates his novel’s heroine, clearly based on Elsie, whom he has, what’s more, begun to find coarse, fat, and interfering. What is real? What is delusion? Because “mists and confusions had begun to enwrap him,” Oleron can no longer tell the difference. The story’s climax is shocking.
Perceval Landon, “Thurnley Abbey”
We usually think of graphic horror—gross, splattery, physical horror—as particularly modern and cinematic. But the Victorians on occasion could pull out all the stops, as in this startling tale by Perceval Landon, virtually the only thing he is remembered for. In it Mr. Colvin awakes on his first night at Thurnley Abbey:
Rather than say anything more about the plot, let me add just one further, chilling detail: The thing is, or at least was, a woman.
E. F. Benson’s “Spook Stories”
Today the prolific E. F. Benson is best known for his comic fiction, especially his novels about that imperious social arbiter Emmeline Lucas, better known as Lucia. As fine as these are, Benson may be even better as a writer of what he called “spook stories.”
These vary enormously in their subject matter and themes. In “The Bus Conductor,” the protagonist experiences a vivid nightmare in which a black hearse waits outside his door and its “conductor” murmurs the all-too-suggestive phrase “Just room for one inside, sir.” “Caterpillars” is a nightmarish allegorization of cancer. In “The Horror Horn” a mountaineer encounters an abominable snow-woman. The painter of “At the Farmhouse” decides to free himself from his alcoholic and slatternly wife, only to be haunted by a vision of the young beauty she had once been. Something almost Lovecraftian comes out of the sea in “Negotium Perambulans.”
Still, my own favorite of Benson’s many ghost stories is his first, “The Room in the Tower.” The unnamed narrator for years suffers a recurring nightmare in which he visits a country house where a garden party is taking place. He observes a graveyard next door and his hostess, a distinctly unsettling Mrs. Stone, invariably says, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.” Eventually, of course, a day arrives when the dream starts to come true. The narrator finds himself at the familiar garden party, the fateful words are pronounced, and he finally discovers exactly what awaits him up in the room in the tower.
The James Gang
So admired were M. R. James’s ghost stories that other dons and clerics sometimes tried to emulate them. For instance, Arthur Gray—the master of Cambridge’s Jesus College—began publishing stories under the pen name “Ingulphus.” These were collected under the title Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye. The book opens with “The Everlasting Club,” whose members include not just the living but the dead. The stories, needless to say, aren’t tedious at all.
Other members of the so-called James Gang include E. G. Swain (The Stoneground Ghost Tales), Amyas Northcote (In Ghostly Company), and A. N. L. Munby (The Alabaster Hand).
In his introduction to Nine Ghosts, R. H. Malden—dean of Wells Cathedral—notes that “it was my good fortune to know Dr. James for more than thirty years.” Unsurprisingly then, Malden’s stories aim to send shivers up your spine, not turn your stomach. In “Between Sunset and Moonrise” a young clergyman visits the peculiar Mrs. Vries who lives alone in a rural Fenland district. He discovers her reading the biblical account of the demon Asmodeus. She seems not to want him to leave—and when he finally does depart, he glances back at his strangely jumpy hostess in her doorway and “for one instant the play of shadow made it look as if there were another, taller, figure behind her.”
On his way home, the young vicar follows a “drove”—a primitive road—and as night falls, he begins to grow anxious. Fog uncannily masses itself on either side of the drove, leaving a straight tunnel into the distance, at the end of which he sees figures hurrying toward him:
I should say nothing about the fate of Mrs. Vries.
Walter de la Mare, “Seaton’s Aunt”
Like so many of Walter de la Mare’s strange stories, “Seaton’s Aunt” never quite tells you what is really going on.
The narrator, Withers, recounts three visits to the home of his classmate Arthur Seaton, first when they are boys, subsequently to celebrate Seaton’s engagement, and then a final time a few months later. On each of these visits Withers meets Seaton’s aunt, who strikes him as both exceedingly solicitous and curiously unsettling. Her nephew claims she’s in league with the devil, insisting that she hates youth and vitality, that the house is full of spirits, and that she never sleeps. Is Seaton’s aunt, then, some kind of vampire—or just an aging woman envious of the bloom and energy she has lost or never had? It’s even possible that Seaton could be wrongly vilifying and tormenting a kind, well-meaning relative.
Nonetheless, de la Mare repeatedly suggests something witchy about the old woman: “There was a silvery star pattern sprinkled on her black silk dress, and even from the ground I could see the immense coils of her hair and the rings on her left hand which was held fingering the small jet buttons of her bodice.” She devours her food with a gargantuan appetite. Her nephew insists that she’s a spider, that she “sucks you dry.” True or false? And what really happens at the story’s end?
A. M. Burrage, H. Russell Wakefield, and L. P. Hartley
Walter de la Mare would go on to write many eerie tales, but in the later 1920s and early 1930s at least three other British writers would emerge as comparable masters of the ghost story: A. M. Burrage, H. Russell Wakefield, and L. P. Hartley. Along with de la Mare, they would dominate the genre until the 1950s.
Burrage is my favorite. There’s a distinct gentleness, even a Hallmark card-like sentimentality, to several of his wonderfully told and paced stories. In “Playmates,” a little girl, neglected all her life, makes friends with seven shy, spectral children. In “The Sweeper,” an old lady invariably gives money to tramps—why? In “Smee” the players of a hide-and-seek game always seem to number one person too many.
Wakefield wrote every kind of supernatural tale. In “He Cometh and He Passeth By!” a necromancer based on Aleister Crowley uses magic to destroy his enemies. In “The Red Lodge” a riverside villa tempts its residents into death by drowning. “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” reveals the consequences of building on the site of ancient Druidic mysteries. In “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” the greatest chess player in the world faces an otherworldly opponent.
Finally, we come to L. P. Hartley, widely known for a single, now proverbial sentence: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” That comes from The Go-Between, which is, in its way, a novel about a haunted life. Hartley’s best-known supernatural collection, The Travelling Grave and Other Stories, largely draws on work from the 1920s and includes his punningly titled “A Visitor from Down Under” and the ominous “Three, or Four, for Dinner.” Some of his most macabre stories approach black humor. At the beginning of “Feet Foremost,” we learn that the spectral Lady Elinor must actually be carried into the house where, centuries earlier, she had been murdered. The vengeful revenant will only leave after causing the death of someone in the house—“According to one story, she doesn’t go out with the corpse, she goes out in it.”
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Although I’m sorry to have left out more than a half-dozen other writers, this list should be long enough to help readers to discover, or rediscover, the shivery pleasures of the classic English ghost story. After all, this is the right time of year for it: These dark, chilly evenings practically call for tales of phantoms and things that go bump in the night, which is why “tales of the unseen” regularly featured in the Christmas and winter issues of Victorian magazines. Happy hauntings!
Michael Dirda is the author, most recently, of Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.
