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About Ghost
About Louise Welsh
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Table of Contents
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To my niece, Sophie Sinclair
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Introduction
Pliny the Younger
The Haunted House
Anon.
Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts
Brothers Grimm
The Singing Bone
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Captain Walton’s Final Letter
Sir Walter Scott
Wandering Willie’s Tale
James Hogg
The Mysterious Bride
Charlotte Brontë
Napoleon and the Spectre
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Minister’s Black Veil
Edgar Allan Poe
The Tell-Tale Heart
Charles Dickens
Christmas Ghosts
Wilkie Collins
A Terribly Strange Bed
Elizabeth Gaskell
The Old Nurse’s Story
Mark Twain
Cannibalism in the Cars
Sheridan Le Fanu
Madam Crowl’s Ghost
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bobok: From Somebody’s Diary
Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
The Very Image
Bram Stoker
Dracula’s Guest
Henry James
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes
Anton Chekhov
A Bad Business
Oscar Wilde
The Canterville Ghost
Thomas Hardy
The Withered Arm
Rudyard Kipling
My Own True Ghost Story
E. Nesbit
John Charrington’s Wedding
Robert Louis Stevenson
Thrawn Janet
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper
Jerome K. Jerome
The Dancing Partner
Robert W. Chambers
The Yellow Sign
W.W. Jacobs
The Monkey’s Paw
Jonas Lie
Elias and the Draug
Émile Zola
Angeline or The Haunted House
H.G. Wells
The Inexperienced Ghost
Mary Wilkins Freeman
The Wind in the Rose-Bush
Guy de Maupassant
A Tress of Hair
M.R. James
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’
Mary Austin
The Readjustment
Ambrose Bierce
The Stranger
Oliver Onions
The Rocker
F. Marion Crawford
The Doll’s Ghost
E.F. Benson
The Room in the Tower
Richard Middleton
On the Brighton Road
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
How it Happened
Arthur Machen
The Bowmen
Saki
The Open Window
Edith Wharton
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
H.P. Lovecraft
The Terrible Old Man
Richmal Crompton
The Ghost
May Sinclair
The Nature of the Evidence
D.H. Lawrence
The Rocking-Horse Winner
Virginia Woolf
A Haunted House
P.G. Wodehouse
Honeysuckle Cottage
Graham Greene
The Second Death
William Faulkner
A Rose for Emily
Franz Kafka
The Hunter Gracchus
Zora Neale Hurston
High Walker and Bloody Bones
Dylan Thomas
The Vest
W. Somerset Maugham
A Man from Glasgow
Elizabeth Bowen
The Demon Lover
Sir Alec Guinness
Money for Jam
Stevie Smith
Is There a Life Beyond the Gravy?
Ray Bradbury
Mars is Heaven
Shirley Jackson
The Tooth
Flann O’Brien
Two in One
Yukio Mishima
Swaddling Clothes
Rosemary Timperley
Harry
Muriel Spark
The Girl I Left Behind Me
Elizabeth Taylor
Poor Girl
Richard Brautigan
Memory of a Girl
Tove Jansson
Black-White
Stephen King
The Mangler
J.G. Ballard
The Dead Astronaut
Robert Nye
Randal
Ruth Rendell
The Vinegar Mother
William Trevor
The Death of Peggy Meehan
Louise Erdrich
Fleur
Tim O’Brien
The Lives of the Dead
Jewelle Gomez
Off-Broadway: 1971
Angela Carter
Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Gourmet
Tananarive Due
Prologue, 1963
Joyce Carol Oates
Nobody Knows My Name
Hilary Mantel
Terminus
Kelly Link
The Specialist’s Hat
Phyllis Alesia Perry
Stigmata
Ali Smith
The Hanging Girl
Kate Atkinson
Temporal Anomaly
Haruki Murakami
The Mirror
Lydia Davis
The Strangers
Annie Proulx
The Sagebrush Kid
Jackie Kay
The White Cot
Ben Okri
Belonging
Adam Marek
Dinner of the Dead Alumni
Michael Marshall Smith
Sad, Dark Thing
Joanne Rush
Guests
Helen Simpson
The Festival of the Immortals
Fay Weldon
Grandpa’s Ghost
James Robertson
Ghost
Acknowledgements
Extended Copyright
About Ghost
Reviews
About Louise Welsh
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Introduction
…The time has been
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end. But now they rise again
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
We love and miss our dead, but few of us would like them to return.
‘For God’s sake don’t let it in,’ cries the old man in W.W. Jacob’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (1895), when the mangled son he has wished back to life comes knocking at the cottage door. Resurrection is a tricky business. It goes against the laws of nature and we would rather graves remain undisturbed, tombs locked and bolted.
Every civilisation has its ghosts. I imagine my ancient ancestors, clustered together around a smoky fire in some dank cave, casting nervous looks into the darkness beyond. One of them picks up a stick and pokes it into the flames, and then she begins to weave a story. A tale of ghosties, ghoulies, bogles and spunkies; substituted bairns and the disappeared who return aeons later, as young as they were, but strangely changed.
The endurance and plasticity
of ghost stories remind us that we are drawn from the same stock as our ancestors and people of other nations and other cultures. Love, fear and mortality are common to us all. They are also at the heart of ghostly tales.
‘A great number of people nowadays are beginning broadly to insinuate that there are no such things as ghosts, or spiritual beings visible to mortal sight,’ James Hogg asserts in ‘The Mysterious Bride’ (1830). I am among the naysayers. I do not believe in ghosts, but it is still possible to be disquieted by things we do not believe in. The libraries of disturbing tales I read while assembling this collection of one hundred haunting stories have resulted in bad dreams and broken nights. My selection begins circa 113 AD with Pliny the Younger’s ‘Haunted House’ and finishes in 2014 with James Robertson’s ‘The Ghost’. It includes spine-chillers from Edith Wharton, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nathaniel Hawthorne; weird tales from H.P. Lovecraft, J.G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury. No collection of ghost stories would be complete without the walking dead, and so vampires are represented by Jewelle Gomez and Bram Stoker. Some ghosts are less frightening than others. Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse and Richmal Crompton are amongst those who invite us to laugh at our superstitions.
A few of the stories I have chosen are not stories at all. Kazuo Ishiguro has contributed a film script, Robert Burns a narrative poem, Mary Shelley a fragment of a novel. The collection contains classics of the genre from M.R. James, Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. It also includes lesser known and recently published tales.
*
Ghost stories express fears that go beyond a glimpse of a ghoul draped in a white sheet. Many, such as the death of a child, are common to all peoples, all eras.
Toshiko, in Yukio Mishima’s ‘Swaddling Clothes’ (1955) worries too much. She looks, ‘more like a transparent picture than a creature of flesh and blood’. When we meet her she is upset by the contempt a doctor showed for her maid’s unexpected and illegitimate child, born earlier that evening on the living room floor. What kind of future will a child swaddled in old newspapers have? Guilt can open the door to strange spectres and Toshiko discovers the answer to her question sooner than expected.
In Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), a ghost child tries to lure a living one out into the snow. Some phantoms are angry, but this dead child is lonely. Like Rosemary Timperley’s ‘Harry’(1955), it seeks a playmate to keep it company. We do not want to think of the dead as being left adrift, but we dread the idea that they might return to take us with them.
Governess tales were a popular nineteenth century genre. Neither gentry nor servant, governesses occupied a liminal space in the household. Like ghosts they existed on the threshold of different worlds. Lonely, sexually frustrated and at risk to flights of fancy, their impressions were not necessarily to be trusted, even by themselves. Female servants’ precarious place in the world also made them vulnerable to other dangers, as the unfortunate Florence discovers in Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘Poor Girl’ (1958), a story that owes a debt to Henry James’s masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw (1898).
Newly engaged lady’s maid Alice Hartley is wise to the pitfalls of her position, in ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’ (1914) by Edith Wharton. When her employee’s husband looks her up and down she tells us:
I knew what the look meant, from having experienced it once or twice in my former places… The typhoid had served me well enough in one way: it kept that kind of gentleman at arm’s-length.
A reminder of the fate that might yet await Alice flits along the corridors of the servants’ quarters by night, the ghost of her predecessor.
It is notable how many of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers included in Ghost were supporters of the women’s suffrage movement and other feminist and equal rights campaigns. Governesses and lady’s maids were not the only people to be constricted and marginalised. Other classes had their trials too.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) is narrated by a woman who is confined to bed and mentally unravelling. The story was inspired by treatment Gilman received for postpartum depression. Her doctor advised her to, ‘Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time… Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.’ The cure turned out to be worse than the illness and Gilman eventually healed herself by quitting domesticity altogether.
The twenty-first century offers many of us a range of choices that would have been unimaginable to our forebears, but it seems that freedoms do not banish ghosts. The alternative lives we might have led can also inspire hauntings. In Jackie Kay’s ‘The White Cot’ (2009) Dionne is on holiday with her girlfriend Sam. ‘That wallpaper would drive me mad,’ she says, in a nod to ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, but it is not the furnishings that are playing with her mind.
Madness is a recurring theme in ghost stories and gothic tales: ‘…nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’ asks Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843). The story resonates with nerves strung tight to snapping point. Ghost stories place us on slip-changing sands where we are uncertain of our footing. A mad narrator is, of course, an unreliable narrator. But you do not have to be mad to be unreliable. Hilton is only seven years old in Tananarive Due’s ‘Prologue, 1963’ (1995). Children have limited experience and vast imaginations, so we are not necessarily inclined to believe Hilton when he tells us that his Nana is a dead woman. The old lady walks, talks and gets on with her household duties but her flesh is, ‘as cold as just-drawn well water. As cold as December’.
Weather can turn our thoughts to the supernatural as Robert Burns’s ‘Tam O’Shanter’ (1791) discovers when ‘roaring fou’ he at last makes his way home across the Ayrshire countryside in the dead of a stormy night.
The wind blew as ‘twad blawn its last;
The rattling show’rs rose on the blast;
The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d;
Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellowed:
That night, a child might understand,
The deil had business on his hand.
Tam has been supping ale all day with his friend Souter Johnny, and a drunk man is many more times likely to come across devil worshiping witches in Alloway Kirkyard than a sober man. But his horse’s missing tail is evidence that her master’s unlikely story may be true.
Tam O’Shanter is a trial to his wife Kate, but he’s a cheerful, sociable drunk who we root for against the witches. The drunken man in Dylan Thomas’s ‘The Vest’ (1939) is of another stamp. He is the danger we should run from, a man who might bring death into the cheeriest of public houses.
In ‘The Tooth’ (1948) by Shirley Jackson it is pain that alters Clara Spencer’s perceptions and shifts her into a parallel world, where beguiling Jim is waiting to take care of her. Is it just ‘the dope’ that has made the world surreal: ‘All that codeine and the whiskey, and nothing to eat all day’? Is Clara hallucinating or is she truly away with the fairies? Ghost stories invite us to question existence itself. Perhaps death is the most altering experience of all; or perhaps it makes very little difference to our impressions.
‘It’s better to know you’re dead,’ says Tiny in Stevie Smith’s ‘Is There a Life Beyond the Gravy?’ (1947) ‘‘‘We’re all dead” cried the children in a loud shrill chorus… “we’ve been dead for ages.”… “We rather like it,”’ Tiny adds. But adjusting to their new state is not always easy for the newly departed and some of them, such as Emma Jeffries in Mary Austin’s ‘The Readjustment’ (1909) and Marianne in Kate Atkinson’s ‘Temporal Anomaly’ (2002), feel a compulsion to linger in the land of the living. Marianne has carelessly caused the fatal car crash every driver fears. Her skull is fractured, her hair matted with blood and what might be brain matter, but she is not yet ready for the grave: ‘She felt fucking awful but she didn’t feel dead
.’
Death is not the only taboo ghost stories give us permission to explore. This is a genre where nothing is off-limits. Robert Nye’s ‘Randal’ (1976) contains quiet intimations of incest, and madness. Mark Twain’s ‘Cannibalism in the Cars’ (1868) features a reminiscence about eating human flesh. Jewelle Gomez’s ‘The Gilda Stories’ (1991) star a lesbian vampire and Louise Eldrich’s ‘Fleur’ (1986) is subjected to sexual violence. Joanne Rush’s ‘Guests’ (2013) includes victims of the Bosnian war who begin to congregate in a lonely young woman’s apartment: ‘‘‘Motherfucking Chetnik!” “Sisterfucking Turk!’’’
Sex can also be considered taboo. E. Nesbit’s ‘John Charrington’s Wedding’ (1891) and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) both involve fiancés who return from the dead. ‘Alive or dead, I mean to be married on Thursday!’ John Charrington vows. Nesbit’s tale, with its unspoken shades of necrophilia, expresses some of the nervous dread a Victorian bride might have felt as her wedding night approached. May Foster loves John Charrington but, much as she will mourn him, she does not want to be the bride of a corpse.
Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’, first published at the end of World War II, suggests that for some women, the telegram informing them that their lover was ‘missing presumed dead’ came as a relief. ‘You need do nothing but wait,’ Kathleen’s fiancé tells her before he leaves for war, ‘“I shall be with you… sooner or later” …She could not have plighted a more sinister troth.’
Love and lust are powerful forces and both young men refuse to lie easy without their true love. Of course in sex, as in everything else, personal tastes apply. In ‘The Nature of the Evidence’ (1923) by May Sinclair, Marston’s beautiful young wife Rosamond returns from the dead after he has married sexy vamp Pauline. Marston ends up in a rather thrilling tug of love, but after a night in the library with the phantasm there is no doubt which woman he prefers.
Ghost stories remain in the literary lexicon regardless of changes in fashions. The form is both fundamental and flexible and pertains as much to life as it does to death.
‘My death ship lost its way, a wrong turn of the wheel, a moment’s absence of mind on the pilot’s part, the distraction of my lovely native country, I cannot tell what it was…’ Franz Kafka’s ‘The Hunter Gracchus’, written in 1917, but not published until 1931, could belong to a much earlier, or a much later age. There is no sense of fear in the story. It is permeated instead by an atmosphere of loneliness familiar to anyone who has ever lost their way in life.
‘The Singing Bone’ is included in the Grimm brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales. The collection of folk tales was published in 1812, but it is impossible to date the individual stories. ‘The Singing Bone’ may be ancient, but its theme – the use of human remains to help track down a killer – continues to feature in twenty-first century murder mysteries.