Ghoul Brittania Read online

  While tramping across the countryside, or poking about in a church, they stumble upon medieval artefacts, and are too dismissive of their magic and mystery, instead taking a narrowly rationalist approach to them. They are the kind of men who will walk under ladders, just to see what will happen. They trust too much to their intellects or, like Bluebeard’s wife, they are impertinently curious. In ‘Count Magus’ (1904), Dr Anderson’s ‘curiosity exceeded his wisdom’. In ‘Rats’ (1919), Mr Thompson books himself into an inn near the Suffolk coast. A locked room in his corridor, noticed during a break from reading, puts him ‘in a mood of indefensible curiosity’. Thompson is ‘reduced to inarticulacy’ by what he discovers.

  James’s men are usually not killed by the spirit or demon they unearth, but they are chastened. They will know to leave well alone next time. His protagonists are so like himself, at least by class and profession, that a degree of self-chastisement might be seen in the stories.

  M.R. James read his ghost stories to the Eton College scout troupe, or to the choir boys at King’s before Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve – for both of which you’d certainly need CRB clearance today – and he spoke of them as mere entertainments. He was often asked whether he believed in ghosts, to which he replied: ‘I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.’ But the sheer, horripilating creepiness of his tales suggests that they came from deep within him. In ‘Casting the Runes’ (the story on which the film Night of the Demon is based), the hero, Dunning, has tangled with Karswell, a sinister expert on diabolic literature. Dunning hears a sound from his study during the night. Getting up to investigate, he encounters nothing but a sudden gust of warm air. He goes back to bed, and reaches for a book kept under his pillow. His hand ‘…did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’

  In 1927, in the introduction to a collection called Ghosts and Marvels, James deigned to set out ‘the qualities which have been observed to accompany success’ in ghost stories. The two most valuable elements were ‘atmosphere’ and a ‘nicely managed crescendo’. He wanted to see the characters going about their ordinary business, ‘undisturbed by forebodings… and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.’ He also suggested leaving ‘a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable.’

  Dickens excelled at atmosphere, Le Fanu at anticipation. James could do both. But they all played by the same rules, and from their writings, and others besides, I have distilled what I consider to be the elements of ghostliness. Buttressed by quotations from my Big Three, these give me the headings for the next three parts of this book, which are:

  – ‘It’s humbug still!’ or The Sceptical Point of View

  – ‘It had not been light all day’: Atmosphere.

  – ‘The lighting up of the theatre’ and ‘the infernal illusion’, or The Crescendo and the Manifestation.

  PART TWO

  ‘It’s humbug still!’ or The Sceptical Point of View

  Ghost stories in the modern sense – a description of some anomalous event designed to create a pleasurable shiver – did not exist in medieval times because, to the medieval mind, the whole of life was a ghost story. Except theirs weren’t ghosts as we would understand them.

  Karen Maitland is the author of two recent, bestselling medieval thrillers: ‘The Company of Liars’ and ‘The Owl Killers’ (and if she were about to relate a ghost sighting, I’d also mention that she is in fact Dr Karen Maitland, since she has a Ph.D in psycholinguistics).

  At a literary event, where we ought to have been discussing other things, she told me that ‘the medieval belief system didn’t include disembodied ghosts. Instead a body, or any part of it, could be animated, and it would speak or sing, usually in riddles. It would often tell who its murderer had been. In order to find out information, priests would raise the dead. Necromancy was part of the Christian religion, but if it was carried out by a lay person then it was witchcraft.’

  An account of one such feat of licensed communication with the dead appears in ‘The Prioress’s Tale’ from The Cantebury Tales. It is carried out by an Abbott on the body of a young boy murdered by the Jews in the ghetto of ‘a Christian town’ in Asia. The boy draws attention to his killing by singing praises to God after his death. This is a re-telling of the English legend of Little Sir Hugh of Lincoln, which arose from the disappearance of a boy in that town. The local Jews were blamed for his murder, and nineteen of them were executed over it. In Neville Coghill’s translation of The Prioress’s Tale, the Abbot proclaims:

  ‘Dear child, I conjure thee

  By virtue of the Holy Trinity

  To say how singing is permitted thee

  Although they throat is cut, or seems to be.’

  (The child discloses to the Abbot that he can speak after death by virtue of a grain placed on his tongue by the Virgin Mary).

  ‘The Prioress’s Tale’ reads as pure anti-Semitism today, but according to Karen Maitland, Chaucer’s intention may have been to satirise the Abbot for his necromancy, a practice not to the taste of all Christians of the time.

  The other ‘ghost story’ from The Canterbury Tales is ‘The Nun Priest’s Tale’ from which concerns a series of prophetic dreams. One might call that a story of the supernatural, but no such concept existed in Chaucer’s time. The term is a product of the Age of Reason. It signifies some special, unaccountable force operating outside the laws of nature, and this is what ghosts had become by the eighteenth century. They were by now mysterious anomalies perceived at the margins of experience. Accordingly, they assumed a less definite form. They became disembodied, transparent, ethereal.

  Given the imponderable, wispy nature of the modern ghost, the narrator of the modern ghost story generally presents himself as sceptical, not prone to fantastical imaginings. If he saw the ghost, the listener is meant to think, then it really must have appeared. So the narrator presents his bona fides: if he does happen to hold a Cycling Proficiency Certificate, or if he got an A-Star in GCSE maths, he will say so.

  THE PRESENTING OF CREDENTIALS: FIVE EXAMPLES

  1. ‘This thing is so rare in all its circumstances, and on so good authority, that my reading and conversation has not given me anything like it. It is fit to gratify the most ingenious and serious inquirer. Mrs Bargrave is the person to whom Mrs Veal appeared after her death; she is my intimate friend, and I can avouch for her reputation for these last fifteen or sixteen years…’ So begins what has been called, by virtue of its cool and sceptical tone, the first modern ghost story (and yes, its title is meant to be written in lower case): ‘A true relation of the apparition of one Mrs Veal the next day after her death to one Mrs Bargrave at Canterbury the 8th of September, 1705’, by Daniel Defoe.

  2. ‘Thirty years ago, an elderly man to whom I paid quarterly a small annuity charged on some property of mine, came on the quarter-day to receive it. He was a dry, sad, quiet man, who had known better days, and had always maintained an unexceptionable character. No better character could be imagined for a ghost story.’ From ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu. (Or see, from the beginning of ‘The Authentic Narrative of a Ghost of a Hand’, by the same author: ‘I’m sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious.’)

  3. ‘My reader is to make the most that can reasonably be made of my feeling jaded, having a depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being “slightly dyspeptic”. I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer to my request for it.’ From ‘To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt’ (also known as ‘The Trial for Murder’), by Charles Dickens, published in 1865. Dickens practically gives his narrator a signed certificate of san
ity. This is almost bullying the reader; tantamount to saying: ‘If you don’t believe the following, you must be mad.’

  4. ‘…and I feel bound to tell you, Mr Otis, that the ghost has been seen by several living members of my family, as well as by the rector of the parish, the Revd August Dampier, who is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.’ Lord Canterville, speaking in ‘The Canterville Ghost’ by Oscar Wilde (1887). This is a joke ghost story, admittedly.

  5. ‘I am not mad.’ The start of ‘Sealskin Trousers’ by Eric Linklater, published in 1947.

  When our friends tell us their true stories, they use similar devices: ‘I’ve no time for ghosts normally, but there was this one occasion…’ It’s more fun like that. Nobody wants to listen someone who begins, ‘And the sixteenth time I saw a ghost…’ or to read a ghost story narrated by a character who, like the Satanist in ‘My Black Mirror’ by Wilkie Collins (1856), gleefully declares: ‘I have not one morsel of rationality about me.’ (While that story is an effective mood piece it goes nowhere and lacks tension).

  It should be mentioned that the writer, in making his main character sceptical, is having his cake and eating it. On the one hand, the character’s scepticism makes the story more credible; but at the same time, the writer usually disapproves of this scepticism, and will make the character pay for it. As Le Fanu writes in ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, ‘The sceptic is destined to receive a lesson’. The writer is on the side of the ghosts after all. If he is a ghost story specialist he makes his entire living from them, so why wouldn’t he be? Each avowal of scepticism provokes fate and increases tension. And sometimes the effect is underlined by the protagonist’s dismissal of warnings from people who may be unsophisticated but do possess local knowledge.

  THREE YOKELS WHO TURNED OUT TO BE RIGHT

  1. In the much-anthologised story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (1902) by W.W. Jacobs, the bluff sergeant major, back from twenty years in India, visits the slightly more genteel White family (husband, wife and son) in their cottage one evening. He produces from his pocket a withered monkey’s paw. ‘It had a spell put on it by a fakir,’ he announces, ‘He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.’ He then pitches it into the fire, but Mr White fishes it out, curious about the wishes. ‘Better let it burn,’ says the sergeant major. ‘If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens.’ ‘The idea of our listening to such nonsense!’ says Mrs White when he’s gone. By this time, however, Mr White has made his wishes, only slightly perturbed by the way the piano gave a sudden crash, and the paw seemed to twist in his hand as he did so.

  2. In ‘Dracula’s Guest’, by Bram Stoker (1914), the narrator forsakes the comforts of his hotel, the Quatre Saisons in Munich, in favour of a walk in the countryside, this even though it is Walpurgis Nacht, when the demons walk. Presently, he and his German coachman, Johann, come to a junction where the narrator is minded to walk down a certain lane…

  ‘“Tell me,” I said, “about this place where the road leads,” and I pointed down.’ Johann crosses himself and mutters, “It is unholy.”’ Pressed further, he jabbers something about a graveyard, from which sounds are heard at night. Finally, in an agony of desperation, he cries “Walpurgis Nacht!” and points at the coach urging the narrator to get in.

  But all the narrator’s English blood rises at this: ‘“You are afraid, Johann – you are afraid. Go home; I shall return alone; the walk will do me good.”’

  A little while later, standing in the middle of a thunderstorm which has appeared from nowhere, and looking at a huge marble sepulchre that is marked with the legend ‘The Dead Travel Fast’, and which has an iron spike driven clean through it, the narrator ‘began to wish for the first time that I had listened to Johann’s advice.’

  3. In ‘The Judge’s House’ (1914), also by Bram Stoker, Malcolm Malcolmson, a mathematics student, decides to rent a ‘rambling, heavy-built house in the Jacobean style’ in order to prepare for an examination. It is ‘unusually small’ (and yet still massive), and surrounded by a high brick wall. When the wife of the local inn-keeper hears of this plan, she exclaims, ‘Not in the judge’s house!’ and grows pale. She would not take ‘all the money in Drinkwater’s Bank’ (whatever that is) to stay in the house herself. ‘If you were my boy – and you’ll excuse me for saying it – you wouldn’t sleep there a night, not if I had to go there myself and pull the big alarm bell that’s on that roof!’

  Malcolmson is amused, but also touched by her concern: ‘A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious “somethings”, and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow of his having any corner of his mind for mysteries of this kind.’

  But this is not the last we will hear of that alarm bell on the roof.

  ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

  It is almost a ghostly thrill in itself to encounter a clever and plausible person willing to give ghosts the benefit of the doubt. I would put my father into that category. (He passed his Eleven Plus, can do mental arithmetic faster than anyone I’ve known, and rose high in the financial side of British Railways, North Eastern Region). He was – and is – a man with a cynical front, who used to say that those of my friends who appeared over-whimsical or dreamy were ‘a bit soft’. And yet he himself was named John after a ghost.

  This came about as follows…

  As a girl, my father’s mother, lying in bed in Newcastle in mid-1916, had been visited by a vision of her brother, John, who had said, ‘You won’t see me again, so I’m coming to say goodbye.’ He was reported killed in action on the Western Front the next week. My father’s mother had shared a bed with her sister, and both had seen and heard the spirit, technically known as a ‘crisis apparition’ or ‘death wraith’. My paternal grandmother died more or less at the moment of my birth, so I never met her, but my father says that she was ‘nobody’s fool’, and if he’s anything to go by then she certainly wasn’t.

  My father used to point me towards the TV appearances of a man called Brian Inglis, who died in 1993 and was, like my father, interested in the supernatural. When I was a boy Inglis presented a programme with the fascinatingly dreary title, All Our Yesterdays. It showed newsreel clips of wars, political crises, and natural disasters from twenty-five years before, and Inglis, a reserved, donnish figure, commented elegantly upon them. He was an author – the profession I aspired to – and had been the editor of The Spectator, which I used to read for self-improvement in the reference section of York Library, so his qualifications could hardly have been higher in my eyes. Every time I watched him on tv, I thought, ‘This man believes in ghosts’, and it was a challenge to my own scepticism.

  My father told me that Inglis’s interest in the supernatural had begun by his reading of the precognitive dreams of J.W. Dunne. Dunne himself had an impressive CV, having designed the first military aircraft which actually got off the ground.…which was just as well, since his claim was that he dreamed things that then happened. In 1902, while serving in South Africa with the 6th Mounted Light Infantry, and sleeping in a small settlement that had just been heavily shelled by the Boers, he dreamed of a volcano erupting on an island, with major loss of life. He then saw himself – in his dream – on a neighbouring island pleading for assistance in French, and addressing ‘Monsieur le Maire’. Four weeks later he read in ‘The Daily Telegraph’: ‘Volcano Disaster in Martinique – Town Swept Away – An Avalanche of Flames’, and he realised that this event had occurred twenty-four hours after his dream. Moreover the council and mayor of the neighbouring island, St Lucia, spoke French patois.

  In 1977 and 1984, Inglis published two books, Natural and Supernatural and Science and Parascience, which told the story of the great battle between the believers and the sceptics that waged between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twenti
eth century. They were passed on to me by my father, and I recall that the critics accused Inglis of being too credulous. Certainly, he is generous towards the believers in the books. For instance, he mentions that both meteorites and lightning were once regarded as supernatural, and that one apparently supernatural phenomenon, mesmerism, gave rise to hypnotism, which has found its way into orthodox medicine.

  I mention Inglis because he was a conundrum to me. Given the nature of his beliefs he couldn’t be right; but his character so impressed me that he couldn’t be wrong either – at least not wholly. And even if he was partly right, then I would have to remake my whole world view. He was a symbol of the imponderability of the questions to do with the supernatural. When I was mulling these over, in the 1980’s, not many others were similarly occupied. But these questions had divided British society for the past century and more.

  THE SCEPTICS AND THE SPIRITUALISTS

  Before Spiritualism there was mesmerism. That was the first dividing line. We have seen that in the theories of the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, mesmerism could lead to clairvoyance by the opening of the ‘inner eye’, and in this way mesmerism became ghostly. A story called ‘The Haunters and The Haunted’, published in 1859 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, sometime Conservative cabinet minister, Peer of the Realm, friend of Dickens, and the most successful British writer of the mid-nineteenth century, is an attempt to show mesmerism – sometimes referred to by Bulwer-Lytton simply as ‘electricity’ – as the cause of ghosts. The visions seen in the haunted house of the story, located somewhere just north of Oxford Street, are projections from the mind of a malevolent mesmeric genius. But when that story was published, the psychological subtleties of mesmerism were being displaced by something more literal: the attempt to contact the dead through Spiritualism