Ten little tales for a late of a Halloween night

{Painting by an unidentified child, spotted in the window of a daycare on Foster Avenue in Chicago.}

As I wind up this widdershins walk around my October library, spooky volumes piled around me where they've been pulled from the shelves for a consultation with a strange story here, a creepy conte there, it seems fitting to make the last shovelful of earth thrown on the corpse of the month a list. So herewith are my current ten favorite creepy stories for Halloween. They're offered with some context and content, in no particular order, and with a bit of extra matter and a few also-rans. Hope you find some here you enjoy.

1 "The Hour after Westerly," by Robert M. Coates (1947)

It's fitting to start with this story, the least overtly creepy of the bunch, yet the one that, via James Hynes's recommendation years ago on his blog, reminded me of the chilly pleasures with which creepy stories had invested my childhood and thus brought them into my adult life. In the story, a man heads home from work, and . . . something happens. Time goes missing. We get a glimpse of what he may have experienced--and there are contours of it that are familiar from our own experience of memory and forgetting, but Coates's deliberate vagueness leaves much of it a mystery. As Ray Bradbury put it in his introduction to Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, which is the best place to find the story,

We are on the outer shell of a mystery, delicately touching at it, afraid to go away without finding the answer, yet afraid, perhaps more so, of the answer itself.

Bradbury is writing specifically about Coates's story, but his description could easily apply to any number of uncanny tales--that looking-between-your-fingers feeling is at the heart of the best ones.

2 "The Sadness of Detail," by Jonathan Carroll (1990)

I wrote about this one in 2010, after I encountered it in Poe's Children, an excellent anthology edited by Peter Straub. A tired woman takes a break in a Berlin cafe, only to have a stranger complain about her humming. Then:

I made an “excuse me” face and was about to turn around again when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a number of photographs he had spread out on the table in front of him. Most of the pictures were of my family and me.

“Where did you get those?”

He reached behind him and, picking one up, handed it to me. Not looking at it, he said, “That is your son in nine years. He’s wearing a patch because he lost that eye in an automobile accident."

What would it take to make you believe you were being told the future? And once you believed, what would you be willing to do to shape it?

3 "Mr. Lupescu," by Anthony Boucher (1947)

This is the purest example of the twentieth-century magazine story in the bunch: short, straightforward, and packing a hell of a twist. It's so brief and potent you could almost memorize it as a party entertainment--and I guarantee you'd entertain if you did so. It's most readily available in the two-volume American Fantastic Tales anthology that Peter Straub edited for the Library of America a few years back (which, let's be clear, should already be on your shelves.)

4 "The Inner Room," by Robert Aickman (1968)

Aickman's stories are so firmly located in the uncanny that reading them almost feels physical at times, as if we're understanding their images and disjunctions at some level beyond that of culture or the mind, something more primitive. This story, which begins with a dollhouse with an unusual floorplan, takes a couple of unexpected, wonderfully chilling turns. You can find it in Aickman's collection The Wine-Dark Sea.

5 "The Specialist's Hat," by Kelly Link (1998)

Creepy old house with a dark history. Family that has recently suffered loss. Twins. A forest. A babysitter. An attic. Familiar elements, all good ingredients for a weird tale, but Link makes of them something wholly new, achieving a voice that somehow feels both mythic and contemporary. The child-like matter-of-factness with which the narrator relates each new, strange, disturbing development is unforgettably chilling. It's available in Link's Stranger Things Happen.

6 "The Rock," by Shirley Jackson (1951)

Any number of Shirley Jackson stories could have made this list, but "The Rock" is my favorite, for it offers a great example of Jackson's greatest virtue as a writer of short stories: a refusal to fully explain, trusting instead to the mood she's generated. This one finds a pair of sisters retreating to an "rather ordinary summer resort" with the unwell husband of one of them. The unwed sister almost instantly takes against the island, with its "dreadful reaching black rock and sharp incredible outlines against the sunset" and its lone guest house, feeling a "great despair and impulsive dislike." Yet she soon finds that the island has attractions, especially for a woman who is beginning to more feel like a third wheel every day, as her brother-in-law recovers. The last two paragraphs made my skin crawl. You can find the story in Jackson's Come Along with Me.

7 "The Whole Town's Sleeping," by Ray Bradbury (1950)

I make no argument that this is anywhere near Bradbury's best story. It's not even really his best creepy story. But I like having it on this list for what it is: a perfect example of how Bradbury took shared nostalgia for Depression-era small towns, for walkable downtowns and porch-sitting and pre-air-conditioning summer sounds floating in the windows, for movie palaces and boarding houses and neighborliness--and, rather than confronting us with the hideous secrets that underlay it (as people like Sherwood Anderson and David Lynch would do), he simply scared us with it as is. In this case, a young woman walks home from the movies, and to do so she has to cross the ravine (a feature of Bradbury's boyhood Waukegan that plays a part in a number of stories):

The ravine was deep, deep and black, black. And the world was gone, the world of safe people in bed. The locked doors, the town, the drugstore, the theater, the lights, everything was gone. Only the ravine existed and lived, black and huge about her.

It's a perfect example of the "makes-you-jump" genre, and it succeeds not because of any particular inventiveness or uncanny quality, but simply because Bradbury commits to stringing it out, lovingly investing its small-town cliches with summery life. You can find it as the lead story in Bradbury Stories, or in the 1961 Alfred Hitchcock anthology Stories for Late at Night, which also includes the next tale on this list.

8 "Lady's Man," by Ruth Chatterton (1961)

This is easily the gentlest story on this list. It's presented as fiction, but its casual lightness of narrative approach makes it feel like memoir, as if we're simply being told a true story of something inexplicable that happened to Ruth Chatterton once, "in the soft perfect stillness of a June night in England, just before World War II." That tone is just right for her tale of a country house weekend at Noel Coward's Goldenhurst in which a ghost makes an appearance. Is it a true, or even a "true" story? Chatterton gives no external sign--but Philip Hoare's biography of Coward does note that Goldenhurst was said to be haunted. Regardless, the story is charming and chilling in equal parts, Coward's "sweet, sardonic grin" and the habitues of his house excellent company for an autumn afternoon. It can be found right after "The Whole Town's Sleeping" in Stories for Late at Night.

9 "The Sea Was Wet As Sea Could Be," by Gahan Wilson (1967)

These days, Gahan Wilson, in his eighties, is a cartoonist for, among other places, the New Yorker. But he made his career at Playboy in its midcentury heyday, and his thick-lined, pop-eyed, gape-mouthed monstrosities are as distinct as the creations of any cartoonist working. Until this story, however, I hadn't known he wrote fiction; it's so good that one of my upcoming library tasks is determining whether he wrote more. It paints a picture of early 1960s urban sophisticated success--of Playboy's readership, in other words--and filters it through a disappointed, sour, self-loathing, alcoholic haze that will be familiar to readers of Cheever, O'Hara, or any number of other writers:

We should have been lovers or monks in such a place, but we were only a crowd of bored and boring drunks. You were always drunk when you were with Carl. Good old, mean old Carl was the greatest little drink pourer in the world. He used drinks like other types of sadists used whips. He kept beating you with them until you dropped or sobbed or went mad, and he enjoyed every step of the process.

When their party on an isolated beach draws the attention of two wanderers who are bizarrely but convincingly reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Walrus and Carpenter, the story takes a turn for the strange--before ending up in sheer horror. It's collected in The Weird, a massive--and almost uniformly excellent--anthology edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer.

10 "Desideratus," by Penelope Fitzgerald (2000)

Like Ray Bradbury's "The Whole Town Was Sleeping," Fitzgerald's story doesn't necessarily feature any supernatural elements, yet it is as creepy and uncanny as any other on this list. It tells of a young boy whose one prized possession is a gilt medal, of how he loses it ("Anything you carry about with you in your pocket you are bound to lose sooner or later."), and the eerie experience he has to undergo to get it back. It's as good as any story I know at marrying the material and physical to our latent belief--sometimes hope, sometimes fear--that something more inheres in all that matter. It can be found in Fitzgerald's Means of Escape.



{Painting from an unknown artist, spotted in window of a craft store on Foster Avenue in Chicago.}

A couple of additional tidbits, before I close out the month. First, some honorable mentions, stories that, on another day, might have made this list:

"It's a Good Life," by Jerome Bixby
"The Town Manager," by Thomas Ligotti
"The Great God Pan," by Arthur Machen
"After Dark in the Playing Fields," by M. R. James
"The Little Room," by Madeline Yale Wynn
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," by Washington Irving
"In a Dim Room," by Lord Dunsany

"The Mujina," by Lafcadio Hearn

And a special, overarching honorable mention for The Arrow Book of Ghost Stories (1960), which I read over and over as a child, until Joseph Jacobs's "The King o' the Cats," Walter R. Brooks's "Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons," and Barbee Oliver Carleton's "The Wonderful Cat of Cobbie Bean" were burned into my brain. If my love of weird tales is anyone's fault, it's that of the anonymous editor of that collection.

I'll leave you with one last story, one of the true classics, told by a master. It's a scene from Peter Bogdanovich's first film, Targets: "The Appointment in Samarra," told by Boris Karloff.



Happy Halloween!

Kipling rents a haunted house

One of the books I've been enjoying the past few Octobers is a huge collection of Kipling published by Pegasus: Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy. It's 750 pages of Kipling's strangest stories, some set in India (where, admittedly, exoticism does a fair amount of the work), some in England, and nearly all worth reading for that distinctive Kipling voice, the assured voice of a person who is on to a good story and knows you're going to stay through the end of it.

In the biographical sketch that closes the book, editor Stephen Jones shares a number of interesting tidbits, including a great line from Kipling about the influenza epidemic that was gripping London in 1892 when he got married:

The undertakers had run out of black horses, and the dead had to be content with brown ones. The living were mostly abed.

The most interesting bit, however, at least for our Octoberish purposes, is Jones's account of the house the Kiplings moved to in the spring of 1896 in Torquay:

Kipling admitted that the family's new home, "seemed almost too good to be true" and despite the building's bright rooms and the fresh sea air, he revealed that he and his wife experienced "the shape of a growing depression which enveloped us both--a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart, that each put down to the new, soft climate and, without telling the other, fought against for long weeks. It was the Feng-shui--the Spirit of the house itself--that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips."

They moved less than a year later, and in 1909, Kipling transformed the experience into fiction in the short story "The House Surgeon." In that story, Kipling's narrator meets the owner of a house that is suffering under "a little depression," and, skeptical, accepts and invitation to see for himself. It takes but minutes after he drops his suitcases for him to begin to understand:

It was just then that I was aware of a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an immense distance in the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain telegraphed that it was the forerunner of a swift-striding gloom which there was yet time to escape if I would force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping for life forces his body forward and away from the fall of a wall. But the gloom overtook me before I could take in the meaning of the message. I moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated.

Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, each causing their distinct and separate woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded length of time, until at last they blurred together, and I heard a click in my brain like the click in the ear when one descends in a diving bell, and I knew that the pressures were equalised within and without, and that, for the moment, the worst was at an end. But I knew also that at any moment the darkness might come down anew; and while I dwelt on this speculation precisely as a man torments a raging tooth with his tongue, it ebbed away into the little grey shadow on the brain of its first coming, and once more I heard my brain, which knew what would recur, telegraph to every quarter for help, release, or diversion.

Aside from the somewhat clunky levity of the line about the auctioneer, it's a gripping passage, conveying not only the despair of depression but the dread of knowing it is coming on.

In his memoir, Something of Myself for My Friends, Known and Unknown, Kipling quickly passes over the moment when he and his wife discovered their mutual dread of the house, which is disappointing: surely they were, to adapt a favorite line of Hilary Mantel, "rinsed with relief"?

He does, however, tell of a visit to the house thirty years later when they happened to be in the vicinity. The gardener and his wife, who lived in a cottage on the property were, creepily enough, "quite unchanged," and so was the house, which carried

the same brooding Spirit of deep, deep Despondency in the open, lit rooms.

Hauntedness is, of course, one of the things one worries about when buying a new house, even if one doesn't actually believe in ghosts. What, after all, would be worse than to just get settled, all the labor and expense and paperwork behind you, with good riddance to them and their attendant headaches, only to find . . . well, what? Something distinctly . . . off? Something, if not quite sinister, then at least definitely dark. Unwelcoming. Displeased at your arrival. Not sure it wants you to stay.

Fortunately, I can report that after nearly five months in our new home, The Curiosity, it has revealed no spirits, no miasmas, no creeping dreads. (Not, mind you, that that's intended as a challenge. Curiosity, there's certainly no need to bestir yourself on our part.)

"Things were, alas! worse than I had feared," or, With M. R. James as our guide, we enter October country

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Roger Clarke's A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof (2012) isn't quite the book its title would suggest: though the book opens with some accounts (suitably hair-raising) of ghost-hunting, Clarke quickly dives into the past, nimbly running through accounts of famous historical ghosts and hauntings, some quite familiar, others a bit faded by time. That's not a fault, mind you: it's almost exactly what I want in a book about purportedly true hauntings: stories of poltergeists that seem almost certainly to have been the work of mischievous children or ill-treated servants; nine-days' wonders that find that the last few of those nine days require a ghost's activities to be amped up a bit; and wonderfully credulous contemporary accounts, breathlessly related.

Clarke also finds space to discuss antiquarian and ghost story master M. R. James, a subject of which we never tire at I've Been Reading Lately. James's telling of ghost stories on Christmas Eve at Kings College is familiar to any fan, but it's nonetheless a pleasure to find a firsthand description of the atmosphere, like this one from Oliffe Richmond:

We sat and waited in the candlelight, perhaps someone played a few bars at the piano, and desisted, for good reason. . . . Monty emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand at last, and blew out all the candles but one. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light.

Was James's delay in entering a tactic for building suspense, or was he writing to and past deadline? I don't remember it coming up in Michael Cox's biography of James, but a New Statesman article from last winter suggests it was the latter. Properly donnish, even when at play.

Clarke follows that scene with an account from James himself of a seemingly supernatural experience in his own childhood that was triggered by reading a story by Sheridan Le Fanu, who would become the most obvious influence on James's own stories:

The words were quite enough to set my own fancy on a bleak track. inevitably I looked and with apprehension, to the Plantation Gate. As was but right it was shut, and nobody was on the path that led to it or from it . . . there was in it a square hole giving access to the fastening; and through that hole I could see--and it struck me like a blow on the diaphragm--something white or partly white. Now this I could not bear, and with an access of something like courage--only it was more like desperation, like determining that I must know the worst--I did steal down and, quite uselessly, of course, taking cover behind bushes as I went, I made progress until I was within range of the gate and hole. things were, alas! worse than I had feared. Through that hole a face was looking my way. It was not monstrous, not pale, fleshless, spectral. Malevolent I thought and think it was; at any rate the eyes were large and open and fixed. it was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows. . . . Do not press me with questions at to how I bore myself when it became necessary to see my family again.

Like all good ghost stories, it leaves you wanting to know more. How did he tear himself away? Did the thing see him as he saw it?

The leaves are turning. Night is drawing in. Time for ghosts.

Haunting monks and Pepys

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Earlier this month, I drew on the tales of the unnamed monk of Byland Abbey, who collected ghost stories from the surrounding countryside. I imagined the monk, alone in his cell on the quiet, wintry moors, spooking himself as he took pen in hand--so I was pleased to gather some more context for my imaginings last week from Carl Watkins's The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead (2013):

The open country of the Vale of York lies to the south of this place but the moors rise steeply above it to the north. Although modest in height, they attract early winter snows, which make them a world unto themselves when the valley below is green. To medieval eyes this landscape was not beautiful but terrifying. Long before the abbey was built, the Venerable Bede thought these "steep and remote hills" more suitable for "dens of robbers and haunts of wild beasts than for men." Generations later, Bede's successors agreed. The monks who colonised the moors in the twelfth century entered "a place of horror and vast solitude," but they did so by choice, alighting on the place precisely because this was wild country, where minds could be bent to God free from distraction.

The exposure and isolation proved too much even for monks, however, and the abbey was eventually moved from the moor to the slightly more sheltered and accessible vale. But my imaginings of the spooky confines of an isolated abbey seem to have been on the mark nonetheless, at least by the fifteenth century, when the nameless monk began to collect his stories:

The heyday of the monasteries was in the past then. Outbreaks of plague and other epidemic disease had whittled away numbers at Byland and fewer recruits came forward to take their places. By 1400, a dozen or so monks were rattling around the cloisters. It was a good place to tell ghost stories and, as the abbey emptied of monks, the land round about was full of spirits.

And the monk had good reason to write down the stories he heard from the people of the surrounding country:

Stories about apparitions could not lightly be set aside and, since the chronicle of Byland warned that things not written down "slip away and wither as the sin of forgetfulness triumphs," there was reason to commit them to writing.

So the monk wrote, and so we know of a tailor named Mr. Snowball who fought a ghostly raven; and of James Tankerlay, a bad priest who walked after death and "blew out the eye" of his mistress; and of the fact that, as Watkins writes,

A soul detained [in Purgatory] suffered for its sins but could and should be helped through prayer and masses undertaken in its name. To write it off, to forget it, was a terrible thing. It was a sin. It was to rob the soul of the prayers that were its right. When a ghost walked, the living must harken to it. They must conjure it, let it speak, discover what it wanted, for it was likely to be suffering and in need of aid and deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Ghosts, however, change as we change, which makes the thumbnail history offered by Roger Clarke in his A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof (2012) particularly useful:

Medieval ghosts were reanimated corpses or holy apparitions; Jacobean ghosts, demons pretending to be human.

Post-Restoration ghosts returned to correct injustices, right wrongs and supply information about lost documents and valuables. Regency ghosts were gothic. In Victorian times, ghosts were to be questioned in seances, and ghost-seeing became far more associated with women. Late Victorians embraced paranormality, seeing the ghostly as a manifestation of as yet understood laws of nature. The 1930s found the poltergeist.

And today? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's more vague:

In one study in 1999, a group of Manchester women thought that hauntings were more to do with malign presences--in other words, a bad feeling--rather than the soul of someone who is dead making themself known.

Ghosts are no longer souls. Ghosts are now an emotion field.

As for me--still a skeptical enthusiast despite having, I'm told, seen a ghost when I was a boy--well, I think it right to end the month with Pepys. The diarist, Watkins tells us, was

an affirmed sceptic about wandering spirits. But he still relished a good story about them. And his scepticism, under the right conditions, might be a fragile thing. Several times he whiled away a dark evening talking with friends about ghosts.

Watkins goes on to mention a time that Pepys stayed in a reputedly haunted house and managed to spook himself. A bit of digging locates the incident on April 8 and 9, 1661. In his diary entry for the 8th, Pepys tells of traveling to the Hill House at Chatham, where:

Here we supped very merry, and late to bed; Sir William telling me that old Edgeborrow, his predecessor, did die and walk in my chamber, did make me some what afeard, but not so much as for mirth’s sake I did seem. So to bed in the treasurer’s chamber.

Mirthful exaggeration or not, his sleep was not untroubled, as he reveals in the next day's entry:

And lay and slept well till 3 in the morning, and then waking, and by the light of the moon I saw my pillow (which overnight I flung from me) stand upright, but not bethinking myself what it might be, I was a little afeard.

Nonetheless, Pepys, that most earthbound, most familiar, most untroubled of men, is not bothered for long, as "sleep overcame all."

As October closes, howling wind and spitting rain and swirls of blowing leaves and all, would that we all could lay our ghosts so easily.

The pleasures of the midcentury professional genre story

{Photos by rocketlass.}

You who sit in your houses of nights, you who sit in the theatres, you who are gay at dances and parties--all you who are enclosed by four walls--you have no conception of what goes on outside in the dark. In the lonesome places. And there are so many of them, all over--in the country, in the small towns, in the cities. If you were out in the evenings, in the night, you would know about them, you would pass them and wonder, perhaps, and if you were a small boy you might be frightened . . . frightened the way Johnny Newell and I were frightened, the way thousands of small boys from one end of the country to the other are being frightened when they have to go out alone at night, past lonesome places, dark and lightless, sombre and haunted. . . .

That's from August Derleth's "The Lonesome Place," a brief, effective little scary story from 1948 that I read this week. One of the reasons I enjoy my October reading is that it's almost the only time all year that I read any examples of stories like "The Lonesome Place"--what I think of as the midcentury professional genre story. If you've ever read any of the Robert Arthur–––edited Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, you know what I mean: twenty pages or less, written in straightforward, declarative prose that quickly sets a scene and a problem (and, often, a distinct first-person voice), then delivers a satisfying twist at the end. These are the kind of short stories that Ray Bradbury wrote, the kind that inspired the early work of writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, and that they very quickly turned to writing themselves. And they're the stories that mostly disappeared when the magazine fiction market dried up.

While I'm sure there was a lot of dross in the pages of those magazines, the winnowing of time means that when you do encounter one of those stories today, it's usually a good one--otherwise it wouldn't be in the anthology or single-author collection you've picked up. And the good ones are so good. There's satisfaction in the simple professionalism of it all, the idea of the writer sitting down to turn out a compact story that hits certain markers (a crime, or a ghost, or a sci-fi surprise), and simply doing it, month after month. There's no messing around, no extraneous nonsense. These are stories written to fill a need, and they do that: they while away a half an hour and leave you with a surprise you'll remember later.

October always finds me reading anthologies of ghost stories and weird tales, so I end up filing away a number of new favorites. I started this month a bit off target subject-wise (no ghosts), but right on in terms of feel, with Jerome Bixby's Space by the Tale. Bixby is best known for "It's a Good Life," a terrifying little story about a boy with mental powers that became the basis of one of the most memorable Twilight Zone episodes. Space by the Tale is Bixby writing mostly in a sci-fi vein, and while none of the stories contained within it is as memorable as "It's a Good Life", they're nonetheless satisfying, offering the basic pleasure of the sci-fi short story: watching an inventive idea spun out to its logical (if unexpected) conclusion. If you enjoyed the recent NYRB Classics reissue of Robert Sheckley's stories, Store of the Worlds, you should dig up some Bixby.

{Side note: I'm beginning to think that Charles Yu may be the heir to the Sheckley/Bixby tradition--and in some sense, to the midcentury professional genre story, period. Whereas Sheckley's stories are almost all about hubris, about our tendency to convince ourselves that we know everything and the bad places that leads us, Yu's sci-fi stories (both his novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and his collection of short fiction, Sorry Please Thank You) are about the opposite: being paralyzed, physically and emotionally, by the knowledge that our knowledge is incomplete, that our actions have unknown consequences, that anything we decide to do will probably be wrong. They're what happens to Atomic Age tales in the post-confidence present, and they're wonderful.}

Two new anthologies have also provided a lot of satisfactions in this genre. The first is suited for October: American Supernatural Tales, edited by S. T. Joshi for the new Penguin Horror line. It covers a broad span of time, but its midcentury American selections are very good--August Derleth, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Richard Matheson all offer sterling examples of the genre. The second you should get and set aside for November, in the wake of the ghosts and ghouls: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, a new anthology edited by Sarah Weinman that collects stories from women writing crime stories whose transgressions are seen from a distinctly female perspective. Few people know crime fiction as well as Sarah does, and she's picked some great stories from Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and a lot of less familiar names.

I'll leave you with a passage from another great example of the genre that's included in American Supernatural Tales, Robert Bloch's "Black Bargain":

That night, walking home, I looked down the dark street with new interest. The black houses bulked like a barrier behind which lurked fantastic mysteries. Row upon row, not houses any more, but dark dungeons of dreams. In what house did my stranger hide? In what room was he intoning to what strange gods?

Once again I sensed the presence of wonder in the world of lurking strangeness behind the scenes of drugstore and high-rise civilization. Black books still were read, and wild-eyed strangers walked and muttered, candles burned into the night, and a missing alley cat might mean a chosen sacrifice.

That's what the midcentury professional genre story does at its best: twitches the curtains in the oh-so-quiet windows of the houses on our oh-so-ordinary street, and gets us thinking again--could it be . . . just maybe . . . what if?

Sergio De La Pava writes of ghosts

I'm re-reading Sergio De La Pava's second novel, Personae, in advance of seeing him this weekend--and this afternoon I was surprised to find that it hadn't, after all, derailed my annual October ghost hunt. To wit, from the bleakly comic play that makes up the middle third of the novel:

CLARISSA But what could be more consoling than a ghost? Proof, as it is, of human transcendence and meaning?

ADAM Credit not its words, though, as death terminates all responsibility to the living and their notion of truth.

Which is an interesting thought. Our instinct is to assume that the dead speak the truth--after all, what now inhibits them? And why would they appear if not fired by an urgent need to communicate--a need that we naturally don't associate with dissemblance? Yet why not? What, as De La Pava's characters point out, could possibly tie a ghost to us so securely that it would adhere to our notion of truth and responsibility? Why would not a person who spread mischief and malice continue to do so after death?

Later, a character asks,

Is there a greater gap we feel than between living and dead? Take an orderly century's progression through life, from bulbous infant to vital adult until ravaged ersatz corpse. The subject may marvel at what he sees in the mirror, the family may gather in secret wish for the release that comes with resolution, but when the wholly expected comes it still shocks in its finality, doesn't it? That so much can instantly devolve into a nullity.

That gap again. Try bridging it but how? Memory's a poor substitute for presence and though I may chant their names into eternity their eyes won't alight, their lips won't curl.

Then am I damned to be both reflective chanter and sole recipient?

Thus we turn, century after century, to ghosts--but not to ghosts as that undeniable gap might create them, wholly different from us, inexplicable and untrustworthy, but rather as pallid reflections of ourselves, comforting even as they frighten. A message from beyond means not only that there's a beyond, but that our here and now is important enough to still matter there. It's a seductive idea as the nights lengthen and the chill sets in, the year draws in with nary an assurance that we'll get another.

A monk hears a different sort of confession

At the start of October, I shared a story that I found in Andrew Joynes's Medieval Ghost Stories, a collection of retellings of accounts found in a number of medieval sources. The one I shared, "The Howling Ghost," from the collection of a Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Byland, reminded me of M. R. James--and it turns out that there's a reason: Joynes reveals in his headnote to that group of stories that James was one of the antiquaries who transcribed the Latin versions of the tales.

Joynes also goes into a bit more detail about the whole collection:

At the end of the fourteenth century, a monk at the Cistercian abbey of Byland in Yorkshire wrote down a series of stories concerning ghosts and spirits which he had been told by local people, and set them in the villages and ales of the countryside around his monastery. The stories were written on a few blank pages in a collection of manuscripts dating from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the anonymous monk must have intended them to be used as exempla in the tradition of Caesarius of Heisterbach.

The monk may have had heavenly intentions, but, as Joynes points out, that didn't keep him from attending to the stories' more earth-bound details:

The monk of Byland seems to have been more concerned to record the eerie, grotesque, and fantastic details of ghostly occurrences than to draw moral conclusions from his stories. In that sense, these fragments of popular legend, written down by the person to whom they were recounted in the neighbourhood where the various spirits supposedly appeared, bear a basic resemblance to the modern notion of a ghost story as an entertaining narrative which can be both frightening and enjoyable.

I just love the image that conjures up: a quiet monk talking with the people of the area, and perhaps the occasional traveler, hearing their stories, asking questions, and then in the wan light of a northern winter afternoon painstakingly writing them out as part of the essential record of the region.

And that night, come the starry winter darkness, amid the silence of the abbey's seclusion, perhaps he found that that writing them down proved to be no banishing force, as they returned to trouble his sleep. "It is said that downy cobwebs hung in strands from her right hand . . . "

Dr. Johnson tells a ghost story

I've written before that it's hard to imagine a much better writer to choose for an encounter with a ghost than Samuel Johnson. He has the appropriate mix of openness to experience and inherent skepticism, as well as an unusual (and gratifying) blend of empiricism and belief in the world beyond. (Who can forget his explosive response to the question of what he meant when he spoke of his fears of being among the damned? "Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.")

There are a handful of references to ghosts and contemporaneous ghost stories scattered throughout Boswell's Life, though most of them involve Johnson dismissing an account as lacking sufficient evidence. Skepticism on this front really does seem to have been his mode: though it is barely mentioned in Boswell's book, Johnson was part of the commission that determined that the famous Cock Lane Ghost was a fraud, and he played a role in publicizing that fact afterwards.



{Photos by rocketlass.}

There is one ghost story in Boswell's book, however, that is both more extended and treated with more credulity, and thus seems worth sharing in this ghostly month. Boswell, seeing Hogarth's engraving Modern Midnight Conversation, asks Johnson what he knows of Parson Ford, "who makes a conspicuous figure in the riotous groupe," then mentions that he thought he'd heard that the Parson's ghost had once been spotted. "Sir, it was believed," replies Johnson. He continues:

A waiter at the Hummums, in which house Ford died, had been absent for some time, and returned, not knowing that Ford was dead. Going down to the cellar, according to the story, he met him; going down again, he met him a second time. When he came up, he asked some of the people of the house what Ford could be doing there. They told him Ford was dead. The waiter took a fever, in which he lay for some time. When he recovered, he said he had a message to deliver to some women from Ford; but he was not to tell what, or to whom. He walked out; he was followed; but somewhere about St. Paul's they lost him. He came back, and said he had delivered the message, and the women exclaimed, "Then we are all undone!"

I'll admit to not being entirely sure how to interpret the women's reaction. Are they assuming that the delivery of a secret message to a secret--female--recipient means that Parson Ford had a hitherto unknown illicit life, and thus they are "undone" in a moral sense? Or are they simply reacting to seeming proof of supernatural forces at work?

Johnson, obviously intrigued by this story, goes into the evidence for its veracity:

Dr. Pellet, who was not a credulous man, inquired into the truth of this story, and, he said, the evidence was irresistible. My wife went to the Hummums; (it is a place where people get themselves cupped.) I believe she went with intention to hear about this story of Ford. At first they were unwilling to tell her; but, after they had talked to her, she came away satisfied that it was true. To be sure the man had a fever; and this vision may have been the beginning of it. But if the message to the women, and their behaviour upon it, were true as related, there was something supernatural. That rests upon his word, and there it remains.

Is that Johnson's wife, Tetty, out investigating? It certainly seems like it--and the spunk the story suggests makes a nice counterpoint to the lingering sense we still get of Tetty as an unpleasant invalid.

So chalk one up for the ghosts, sayeth Dr. Johnson. Oh, what I'd give for a whole book of Johnson's analyses of tales of hauntings--imagine teaming him up with John Aubrey's (too credulous) ear for rumor!



I'll close with a line from a story found in Otto Penzler's great anthology The Big Book of Ghost Stories, Joseph Shearing's "They Found My Grave." The story itself has nothing to do with Dr. Johnson--it's about seances and table-turnings in the late Victorian era--but this description of the most prominent of the spirits conjured at the sittings struck me as quite Johnsonian:

"Oh," smiled Mr. Lemoine, rising to indicate that the sitting was at an end. "He is a common type, a snob. When he was alive he boasted about his distinctions, visits to court, and so on; now he is dead he boasts of having seen God, being in Heaven, and the marvels of his grave."

A merciless analysis of character, a hint of ironic amusement, an eye for the power of vanity--doesn't that sound like the good Doctor?

Defoe on apparitions

These days Daniel Defoe is remembered almost solely for Robinson Crusoe--oh, Journal of the Plague Year is in print, which, centuries after its publication, any of us would surely accept as a legacy, but it's read primarily by specialists and students. (Though I recommend it--it's fun!) But he made his living by his pen for decades (with the occasional bonus paycheck for spying; 'twas a good era for spying), and while he's not inexhaustible the way, say, Dr. Johnson or Hazlitt are, his body of work nonetheless offers plenty of pleasures for the browser.

Which is why it perhaps shouldn't surprise us to learn that he is solid on the topic of ghosts, as I learned on a recent visit to Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology, whose modest but satisfying bookshop features a limited edition hardcover of a 1999 reprint of Defoe's 1729 compilation The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed (An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions). There's something rewarding on almost every page. Here, let's play a bit of sortes defoeiana--page 223:

Thus if the invisible Spirits give a due alarm, they do their part; if they jog us and awaken us in a deep sleep, and pull us again and again, and give us notice that something is coming, that some Danger is at the Door; if we will sleep on 'till it comes, if we will go on, happen what happen may, the kind Spirit has done its Duty, discharg'd its Office, and if we fall into the Mischief, the fault is our own, we can by no means blame the insufficiency of the Notice, and say, to what purpose is it? feeling we had due and timely warning, but would not take the hint; we had due notice of the danger, and would not step out of the way to avoid it; the fault is wholly our own.

Two important notes to help you enjoy that passage to the utmost:

1 Remember that in the facsimile of the 1729 edition, every "s" that isn't capitalized or ending a word looks more like a cursive f.

2 Stop for a moment to think about just how uncannily like Javier Marias's inimitable style the back-and-forth run-on of that narrative self-argument sounds.

Anyway, today what I've happened on is the tale of an apparition sent, it seems, to warn James IV of Scotland not to continue to make war on England. The entreaty failed; the outcome was the Battle of Flodden, which cost James his life and Scotland its last real hope of independence. Defoe writes that James was at his palace in Linlithgow when an "antient" man with "Hair the Colour of Amber, (some Accounts would represent it as a Glory painted round a head by the Limners)" forced his way through the crowd, and

came close up to the King, and, without any Bow or Reverence made to his Person, told him with a low Voice, but such as the King could hear very distinctly, That he was sent to him to warn him, not to proceed in the War which he had undertaken at the Sollicitation of the Priests, and in Favour of the French; and that if he did go on with it he should not prosper. He added also, that he should abstain from his Lewd and Unchristian Practices with wicked Women, for that if he did not, it would issue in his Destruction.

Having deliver'd his Message, he immediately vanish'd, for tho' his pressing up to the King had put the whole Assembly in disorder, and that everyone's Eye was fix'd upon him, while he was delivering his Message to the King; yet not one could see him any more, or perceive his going back from the King; which put them all into the utmost Confusion.

After reiterating that the people and the king were convinced that the speaker was an angel because they didn't see or feel him making his way out after delivering his message--which is entertaining because of the way it calls in physical evidence to support a claim for the supernatural--Defoe laments that James ignored the warning, pressing ahead with his army to the Tweed, the traditional boundary between the kingdoms.

But the angel wasn't through with James, Defoe tells us. As the king sat drinking wine "very plentifully" in a hall in Jedburgh, he was accosted by the messenger yet again,

tho' not in the Form which it appear'd in Lithgo; but with less regards or respect to the Prince, and in an imperious Tone told him, he was commanded to warn him not to proceed in that War, which if he did, he should lose not the Battel only, but his Crown and Kingdom: and that after this, without staying for any Answer, like the Hand to King Ahasuerus, it went to the Chimney, and wrote in the Stone over it, or that which we call the Mantle-piece, the following Distich,

Laeta sit illa dies, Nescitur Origo secundi
Sit labor an requies, sic transit gloria Mundi.

I was raised, like Shakespeare, with little Latin and less Greek, so I'm forced to turn to Google Translate for help on the Ahasuerus-style mantlepiece warning:

Proud to be that day, do not know the origin of the second
Let there be toil or rest, so passes the glory of the world.

I'm going to guess that "do not know the origin of the second" really means something like "does not think of the life to come."

Alas, the warning was not heeded: as Defoe writes,

that he marcht on, fought the English at Flodden-Field, and there lost his Army, all his former Glory, and his Life, is also recorded; I need say no more of it.

Defoe goes on to speculate a bit about the spirit's origins, building his speculation on his accumulated store of tales of apparitions:

Had it been a Heavenly Vision, 'tis more than probably it would have laid hold of the King's Hand, as the Apparition of Angels did to Lot, and as it were dragg'd him away, and said You shall not go forward, that you may not be defeated and slain, both you and your Army.

After offering a few reasonably convincing arguments as to why the spirit couldn't be the devil (the devil loves war and death and thus wouldn't send an emissary to prevent them), Defoe essentially throws up his hands: It's a spirit, probably of someone deceased with some sort of stake in the outcome, and we can't know more.

As a fan of Dorothy Dunnett, and particularly of her House of Niccolo series, I can't help but come up with a different answer. The eight books of the House of Niccolo series end in 1483, five years before James IV took the throne. But throughout the series Niccolo spends substantial time and energy on James's father and his dangerously wild siblings and family, trying to instill in him the wisdom and control required of a good king. Is it so hard to imagine that Niccolo, though essentially retired from meddling in affairs of state, saw the disaster of Flodden approaching and came up with one of his typically convoluted schemes in hopes of preventing it?

The Haunted L

Creative writing instructors in Chicago learn quickly that you need to lay down at least one ground rule right off the bat: no stories set on the L. If you don't . . . good god, the stories you'll get of Highly Significant encounters between sensitive twenty-year-olds and representatives of the Other--emotionally charged scenes of cross-racial understanding (or misunderstanding), encounters with the aged or the homeless or the mad, unprompted confessions from the unappreciated wife of a coked-up commodities trader. A young Midwesterner with pretensions to creativity usually finds his first encounter with the forced proximity of the L so bracing that he dive-bombs right at the nearest mountain of cliches, and the casualties tend to be legion.

In fact, until tonight I would have said it's not possible to write a good story about the L, period. Then--as I made my way through Otto Penzler's consistently rewarding Black Lizard anthology The Big Book of Ghost Stories, I encountered Robert Weinberg's "The Midnight El" (1994), which is so good I'll forgive not only the setting, but also his (all too common) misspelling of L.

Like most ghost stories, it depends significantly on surprise, so I won't share too much beyond the premise. Chicago-based psychic detective Robert Taine, a character about whom Weinberg wrote regularly, sets out late one winter night to catch the Midnight El, a perhaps mythical ghost train that picks up dead souls. It starts its run at exactly midnight every night, from the station nearest the most deaths that day. Taine is after the wife of a client, a woman whom he--like his client--is convinced shouldn't be dead. It won't hurt the story if I tell you that the train does arrive, and Taine, having employed a potion, slips aboard, where he finds a conductor who totes an anachronistic pocket watch of unusual powers. Taine appeals to the conductor:

"The Greeks considered Charon the most honorable of the gods," said Taine, sensing his host's inner conflict. "Of course, that was thousands of years ago."

"Spare me the dramatics," said the conductor. A bitter smile crossed his lips.

Who has earned the right to a bitter smile more thoroughly than Charon? I'll admit to not knowing that he was regarded as highly honorable, though it makes sense: for life and afterlife to remain in balance, the ferryman must be ready to accept his due payment, but be proof against bribery or histrionics.

Ultimately, it's the honor of the conductor on which the story turns, used by Weinberg to bring about a resolution that feels appropriately myth-based and ancient, even as the story's trappings are the screeching and rumble of the L. It's a great ghost story, well worth seeking out.

The most unbelievable aspect--in a story built around a train car full of the dead? That the L arrives right on time and operates properly throughout its run. In reality it would be ten minutes late and then run express, leaving legions of reanimated corpses fuddled on the platform to horrify the early commuters the next morning.

October is here!

{Photo by rocketlass.}

It doesn't feel like autumn. It's too warm. The leaves remain too green, as does the grass. The air is damp, but the rain this week has felt more nourishing than punishing, with nary a hint of end-of-life remonstrance. Nature may be in retreat, but she has yet to strike her banners and acknowledge the rout.

But . . . when I was running in the lakefront park this morning at five, the darkness was near total, broken only by the merest sliver of moon, the lake beneath barely grudging it a shimmering reflection. Had I met myself coming, or spied myself going, the encounter wouldn't have seemed out of place. October, with all its concomitant spirits, is here.

For the seventh year, then, I'll turn this shop over to the ghostly for October. Today, a quick visit with a surely long-laid ghost, found in Andrew Joynes's Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies (2001). Many of the tale Joynes recounts have their roots in religion: tales of saints and saintliness, or of pagan tradition forced into the Procrustean bed of Christian belief. But Joynes tells a number that are more straightforwardly uncanny, tales from which no teaching can be extracted, no moral adduced. The following, adapted from the fourteenth-century tales of the Monk of Byland, in Yorkshire, is one:

This is an account of how another spirit followed William of Bradford crying out "how how how" on three successive occasions. And at about midnight on the fourth night he was returning on the road to the new town of Ampleforth when he heard a terrible voice shrieking a long way behind him, as though it was on a hill. A short time afterwards it shrieked again, but closer to him, and on the third occasion he heard it calling at the crossroads ahead of him. Eventually he made out the shape of a pale horse. His dog growled briefly but then retreated and hid itself behind its master's legs, whereupon, in the name of the lord and by virtue of the blood of Jesus Christ, William forbade the spirit to harm him and obstruct him on his journey. When these words had been spoken, it fell back and took on the appearance of a square piece of canvas with corners which flapped and rolled about. All of which might lead one to believe it was a spirit in dreadful need of recognition and help.

Or might lead one to conclude that one was reading an M. R. James tale, no? Small surprise that the M. R. James Newsletter says that Joynes's books is "strongly recommended."

Speaking of James, he will of course be appearing soon, as will his many confreres. Don't bother checking your locks, folks. Our friends this month need neither burglar's tools nor keys to get to where they can be reading this over your shoulder right now!

The perpetual past-ness of good ghost stories

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In his introduction to last year's Oxford edition of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories, editor Darryl Jones quotes from James's introduction to a 1924 anthology, Ghosts and Marvels, describing it as the "nearest James ever came to a statement of theoretical principles about his chosen form." Wrote James,

Well, then: two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and a nicely-managed crescendo.

That's fine so far as it goes, though hardly an advance on Poe. It's the next portion that I find of interest: Jones explains that James thinks

The ghost story also properly belongs in the past--not necessarily the distant past; but it is important that its setting and concerns be at least a generation out of date, in a world which pre-dates technological modernity:

The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date: the motor, the telephone, the aeroplane, the newest slang, are all in place there. For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. "Thirty years ago," "Not long before the war," are very proper openings.

Writing in 1924, James clearly conceived of his chosen form--conceived of himself--as fundamentally Victorian . . . or at best Edwardian.

I've been thinking about those lines off and on all month. Is James right? Do ghost stories, told best, belong perpetually thirty years ago? Or was that argument specific to his era, the difference between pre-war and postwar, the long sensecence of the old ways versus the birth of the modern?

Well, what's a blog for if not half-baked thoerizing? Though James's position offers nothing like a universal truth--the right writer can scare with almost anything, any time--I suspect it's still a useful way of thinking about scary stories in the near-century since he wrote it. My first inclination was to separate actual ghost stories from what I think of as the larger category of "October stories"--cull the creeps from the skin-crawlies, in essence. For ghosts, broadly defined, rather than any human manifestations of evil, were James's stock in trade. But then I thought of Ray Bradbury's perpetual 1930s--the story "The Whole Town Was Sleeping," for example, from 1950, but which tells of a slasher on the loose in a city where people still walk to the moviehouse, sit on their porches, take in boarders, chat with their neighbors. . . . Or John Collier's delicious little mousetraps, written throughout the first half of the century, but, like the stories of Wodehouse (a clear influence) located in a vague, semi-modern past. Then there are Stephen King's regular returns to a dark but also alluring 1950s. Perhaps James is on to a broader truth about how we want to take our scares?

This ties in, it's reasonable to assume, with two major threads in storytelling: the "once upon a time" compact, wherein we readers agree with the writer that if he'll tell a good story, we'll suspend disbelief, an operation more easily achieved the less we're forced to acknowledge the presence of our daily mundanity in the tale; and the fact that we first encounter stories as children, when we have the fewest intellectual and emotional defenses against them. There's a reason that writers from Tolstoy to King have obsessed over childhood--and it's not because it's some greeting card-style magic unicortopia. It's because we are still forming ourselves, and thus the world, still figuring out not only what is and what isn't, but what can and what can't be, what ought and what ought not. We are susceptible, and as adults the best way to draw us in is to remind us of that susceptibility. Make us children again, however briefly, and we're yours.

All of which leads me to a question: to keep up with James's ever-shifting window, should we now be falling for ghost stories about the early 1980s? Those years seem so plastic, so artificial, that they initially seem inhospitable to spirits.

But then you start to picture it: that party your parents threw that one hot summer night, where you and your sister were pressed into serving drinks--and told how adorable you were by James, or Jimmy, with his twitchy, red-flecked eyes, kissed on the cheek by mom's friend with the smears of glittery eyeliner. Dad's cousin got on all fours and barked like a dog and scratched at the orange shag with his leg; everyone laughed and laughed. Sheila dropped an ashtray on the kitchen floor, where it shattered, sending plumes of gray dust poofing and swirling through the room, and she said a bad word. Your sister plugged into Mom's Walkman and fell asleep early under the side table, headphones over her ears, music so loud you could hear it if you stood over there.

But you stayed awake, increasingly weary as the night drew in, like you could actually feel your bones. The conversations grew louder and more demonstrative, your mom and dad acting strange, funny and wrong at the same time. Then, feeling disoriented by the noise and smoke and music, even a little queasy, you glanced out the front window and saw on the lawn, almost glowing in the midst of the darkness, the guy in the camel-hair jacket, holding the hand of that little boy and staring, staring in at the party. And just looking at the two of them made you so sad it was like something was being taken from you, something you hadn't even known you had but now realized you desperately, tearfully wanted to keep.

Remember? All these years later, surely you remember. You have to remember, because no one else saw them; no one else would even listen when you tugged at their hands and tried to tell them. Even your sister refused to believe you the next day. But how could she? She didn't see them. She didn't have to stand there, transfixed, and read the man's lips.

"The day is broken," or, Interstices

In the midst of the delightful mess of slovenliness, failed stewardship, ennui, and self-lacerating humor that is Will Wiles’s new novel Care of Wooden Floors come this passage:

I put out the cats’ food while the kettle was boiling for my coffee. What did they do during the night? Whatever it was, it gave them an appetite, and they chugged down their chunks of brown flesh with gusto. What did they do in the sleeping city . . fuck and prowl, no doubt, glory in streets without trams and human feet. They were active, most active, in the dark and cold corners of the night.

Two pages later, Wiles writes,

Noon passed. The day was broken, cracked down the middle like a paperback’s spine.

The passages are unrelated, but together they brought to mind something the idea of the hidden places of day and night, of secret background maneuverings, of scene-setting and stage-managing, of a world assembled and performed by powers beyond our ken--but from which the mask can sometimes, especially in these October evenings, slip just enough to unmoor us.

It's an idea that I haven't been able to shake since seeing an absolutely stunning collection of strange photographs taken by Canadian artist Jon Rafman from what he's found in Google Street View. I've drawn a number of them below from a post at Demilked that introduced me to Rafman's work.



If these images give you the same sort of strange chills they do me, it's worth trekking to Rafman's site and wandering around a bit. He's made some truly amazing finds.



When I look at these, I feel as if I'm seeing things I'm not supposed to see--that I'm being given an inadvertent glimpse behind a curtain, a look into the workings of a machine that ordinarily operates so smoothly as to go unnoticed. They feel like elemental interstices, like the concept of the hinge that Grace Dane Mazur explores in her wonderful Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination. They call to mind the injunction against looking at the face of God, which is suffused here through all of his works--and reveals him, it's hard not to think, to be sinister, perhaps even evil.



It seems right, too, that so many of these photos should feature animals. Animals, we assume from childhood, have their own secrets, knowledge, understandings, agenda. They care not why the world is the way it is, nor are they surprised by its mutability; they move through it as natives, at home in a way that our self-consciousness will not allow. Out of our sight, who knows what they do and see?



All of which also calls to mind one of my very favorite spooky stories, Robert M. Coates's "The Hour After Westerly." I was introduced to it a few years ago by James Hynes, who, in a round-up of scary stories, wrote that it "is like opening a very familiar door and discovering that it leads someplace entirely new--a feeling that's both mysterious and melancholy."



It's a fairly simple story: a commuter on his way home starts to feel "an odd sense of dullness, or pressure," a fogginess that manifests as a feeling of being late--and that, when it lifts, leaves him with an unrecoverable hour. In its place is nothing but

an image as precise and as unrelated [to his drive home] as something one might see through a sudden parting of a fog--a group of small white houses grouped at an intersection, and a clock (was it on a steeple?) with the clock's hands pointing to ten minutes to six. there was a faint suggestion of a dirt road, too, but even as he tried to consider it, it floated off into nothingness.

It is a story more of mysteries than answers, suggestions than scares, but it's as spookily atmospheric and memorable as any October story I know. While we may scoff, reasonably, at ghosts and ghouls, we all, it suggests, should perhaps fear the unfathomability of time and space--we all just might be at risk of inadvertently, invisibly, slipping between the seams, taking a wrong turning, seeing what we're not supposed to see, being who we're not supposed to be. Ray Bradbury, in his introduction to Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, the collection in which Hynes found the story, writes,

Every man has had alternate lives, there were a million paths we could have followed when young, but we followed that one which now seems inevitable to us, the one that memory says is the only one. . . . We came so very close so many times, to being fools, to being lost, to being dead, that we marvel that we have somehow blundered through to this day and year.

That story, Rafman's Google Street View photos, and the wan October twilight itself haunt me with that mystery, the world's essential unknowableness, the inescapablity of our own finitude in the midst of the undermining infinity of time and space.

Bradbury writes,

For it is not only what life does in the material world that counts, but how each mind sees what is done that makes the fantasy complete. We are two billion worlds on a world here.

Make that seven, make it October, and the reason spooky stories hold us in their sway becomes evident: the world is a haunted mirror, and while our training is strong enough that most of the we look at it slant, we can't help but let our gaze slip to its shadowy corners, and wonder at the slithering we tell ourselves we don't see there.

If only I had the monkey's paw!

{Photo by rocketlass.]

Any fan of ghost stories knows that some of the best come from writers who are known primarily for mainstream fiction, the sort where the only scares are the usual 3 A.M. existential insomnias. Henry James is the most well-known of those writers, having written enough to fill a fat volume, but he shares company, with, among others, Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, and Rudyard Kipling, who’ve all also written a book’s worth of ghostly tales. And then there are the here-and-there one-offs from Penelope Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Joyce Carol Oates, Donald E. Westlake--the list goes on and on.

But like a classic hungry ghost, I can't help but want more. Herewith, my wish list:

1 Herman Melville. Oh, "The Lightning-Rod Man" comes close--but only in that its lush, overripe language calls to mind Ray Bradbury, and its air of menace feels as if it's building to some supernatural revelation. The fact that it doesn't in no way prevents it from being a great story, mind you. But the autumnal extravagance of this story does make me wonder what Melville might have created had he turned his hand to the world beyond the grave. (Over in the Gotham Ghost Gazette Andrea Janes, meanwhile, has speculated, in a different way, on what might have been: a ghost story not by Melville but of Melville.)

2 Joseph Conrad. In response to a question about Conrad and ghosts I put out on Twitter, Mark Kohut pointed out that not only did Conrad not write any ghost stories that he knew of, but that his story "The Black Mate" was an "anti-ghost story, ghost as con job." But imagine what Conrad's ghosts would be like? They'd be called into existence as much by our own needs as hauntees as by the dead's need to haunt, manifestations of our failures of nerve and honor, our unforgettable regrets, the gnawing acid of our mistakes. They'd certainly not be for the faint of heart two whiskeys in.

3 Barbara Pym. She would be on the other end of the spectrum from Conrad: I imagine Pym's ghost stories being gentle, even cozy. The vicarage would be haunted, manifested by spoilt milk and wobbling mint jellies; the ghost would be the source of quiet worry, its relatively benign activities nonetheless way too far beyond the pale to be acknowledged in polite company, especially as it would be at its most active when unrequited crushes begin to rear their unmentionable heads. Decorum would be at risk of disruption, desire, as always, however, ultimately thwarted by reticence. The ghost, like love, would move on.

4 Rex Stout. Wouldn't it be fun to have Nero Wolfe confronted with an actual, honest-to-goodness ghost, one he couldn't banish with a "Bosh!"? Inconceivable, I realize--Stout's world has no truck with nonsense, and Wolfe would, I suspect, continue to deny the supernatural even in the face of the strongest evidence. But what fun it would be to see the battle of wits and clash of stubbornness that could ensue between two such powerful forces!

5 Iris Murdoch. Murdoch's ghosts would, I trust, be like her characters generally: flighty, impressionable, headlong, emotional. They would haunt because of love, be banished by clarity, wreak havoc in between.

These are my five. Yours? (But let's be clear: I get the first crack at wishing for these when that damned monkey's paw turns up! Then you can go. It's not like anything could go wrong, right?)

Can't blog--too busy reading!

829 pages! Can you blame me for being a bit behind? But don't blow out the candle and breathe a sigh of September-tinged relief: the ghosts and I will be with you again shortly!

True-life tales!

Being at best a skeptic who wishes he were an agnostic on the subject of ghosts, I tend to traffic here in actual stories of ghosts in October: created pieces, written to entertain (and frighten), rather than tales that purport to be true. Oh, I mix in the latter once in a while. Part of the fun of reading ghost stories is allowing writers and tellers to blur that line; a lot of the pleasure of M. R. James's stories, I noted yesterday, comes from their faux pedanticism and the air it lends them of veracity. But for the most part what I want from ghost stories is the enjoyment afforded by any story in which plot and atmosphere are paramount, the sensation of a well-constructed machine moving smoothly through its operations.

The past few weeks, however, have brought across my virtual desk a couple of effective stories of real-life ghosts that seem well worth sharing. The first, from the Paris Review blog, is just getting underway: yesterday writer Amie Barrodale opened a tale of a haunted apartment she once rented in Iowa City that promises to continue throughout the coming days. The first post is more tantalizing than substantive--the ghost does little to frighten--but how could anyone resist a true-life ghost story in which two people independently start referring to a closet as "the bad area" within minutes of moving in? I'm looking forward to part two.

More substantial is an article by Australian James Bradley from the new issue of the magazine Meanjin. In the course of discussing, well, "bad areas" and reports of hauntings, Bradley tosses off some really tantalizing references to ghostly experiences among his family and friends ("Another involved my brother, and a little girl he spoke to in a hallway in a hotel who could not have been there." More, please!), does a wonderful job telling a chilling story of a haunting of sorts in the sparsely settled lands of Central Australia, and shares some fascinating information about a scientific theory about the reasons some places might feel haunted. It's all worth checking out, especially the postscript, which adds another layer to Bradley's own experience of hauntings.

This passage in particular will stay with me as I read and think about ghost stories this month:

After all, any story is really two things: the experience it describes and the sense we give to that experience by arranging and shaping it. It would be a mistake to say the first is simply something that happened—no experience is that simple or unconstructed—but as soon as that experience is described or connected to other experiences it becomes something quite different, a thing charged with meaning.

This is particularly true of ghost stories, which draw their energies from the tension between our rational minds and the primitive, unsettling power of the unknown. For as long as that tension can be maintained we are moved out of the world we know and understand, into a state where meaning and the order of things are unsettled, and possibility is given play.

This frisson is both exciting and unnerving, but it can only be maintained for as long as we do not enquire too closely into what is going on.

Suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite for reading all fiction, but for ghost stories that central word, "suspension," takes on a broader meaning: for maximum enjoyment, our disbelief should not be banished entirely, but rather held in suspension, neither here nor there, as we listen and sift and ponder and wonder--and then, while still thinking ourselves in some sense rational, are jolted out of our skin, belief and disbelief alike forgotten and unimportant, overcome by the uncanny.

Walking in the woods with M. R. James

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The new Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James that Oxford published last year is full of the usual James pleasures, but it also includes a number of stories that I'd not previously encountered. My favorite thus far is a very brief, decidedly minor story, "A Vignette," which was the last that James ever wrote. He sent it just before his death in response to a request for from the London Mercury, and he described himself as "ill-satisfied" with it. It's true that the story is far from one of James's best--it's much more a sketch than a fully fleshed out story--but its straightforward, relatively unbaroque relation of some vaguely spooky sightings on the edge of the forest around James's boyhood home is nonetheless effective. Much more than the typical James tale, which generates a pleasant, if unconvincing atmosphere of veracity from its superstructure of references and second-hand accounts, "A Vignette" feels remembered, as if, as Michael Cox writes, in M. R. James: An Informal Portrait, it is

the memory of something that seemed real to him at the time and that shaped his subsequent attitude towards the supernatural.

The ultimate fright in the story I won't quote, since that seems unfair--but I will share these lines, which are nicely chilling in their noting of a common truth and the way they then apply it to a very frightening specific:

To be sure, it is difficult, in anything like a grove, to be quite certain that nobody is making a screen out of a tree and keeping it between you and him as he moves round it and you walk on. All I can say is if such a one was there he was no neighbour or acquaintance of mine, and there was some indication about him of being cloaked or hooded.

The delicacy of James's description here brings to mind that other, more famous James, and a description I've quoted before, from an anecdote told by E. F. Benson, another writer known for his ghost stories:

He described a call he paid at dusk on some neighbours at Rye, how he rang the bell and nothing happened, how he rang again and again waited, how at the end there came steps in the passage and the door was slowly opened, and there appeared in advance on the threshold, "something black, something canine."

Even when he wasn't writing ghost stories, Henry James was writing ghost stories.

It also calls to mind Kenneth Patchen's deliciously frightening "Come now, my child":

Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?

That could be the very voice of October.

Walking with William James in the afterlife

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Who better to lead us into October than William James, wishful skeptic?

Late in The Master, Colm Toibin's novel of William's brother Henry, William and his wife are in London to see some specialists in cardiology, as William's heart seems to be weakening rapidly. Tiring of the overly cautious solicitude of his wife and Henry, William tells them that he will "expire on them immediately" should they show one more sign of pity or worry. He goes on to make the most delicious threat of afterlife activity:

And I should warn you both that the hauntings will not be ordinary. No mediums will be required. I will pounce directly.

Threats aside, a William James haunting would I suspect be remarkable less for its horrors than for its persistence: if he failed to get your attention with, for example, table tapping, he would surely turn to furniture moving, then to attic thumping, and so on and so on. It would be merely one more field to which he could turn his indefatigably curious mind.

And as far as that goes, is there anyone you'd rather have at your side in the presence of a ghost than William James?

M. R. James, the kindliest of frighteners

Over the weekend, I spent some more time dipping into the second volume of the correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, and I happened across a couple of brief references to Lyttelton's friend M. R. James, scholar and writer of ghost stories, that seemed worth passing on.

First, from a Lyttelton letter of September 13, 1957 ("Friday!" interjects Lyttleton in his own dateline):

It is time we met again and had a long crack, feet on fender. . . . A monstrous suggestion to make to an overworked publisher--or would be if I didn't know you have that engaging and impressive trait of M. R. James, i. e. however busy he was, he was always ready for a talk.

A trait to aspire to, no?. And one that is particularly irritating not to possess, for the only things preventing us are our solipsism and our well-nurtured sense that the world should accommodate itself to our timetables, other folks be damned. How better to be like James, ready to listen at any time.

That accords with a further sketch of James's personality that Lyttelton presents in a letter from October 9, 1957:

I was particularly pleased to meet Edmund Blunden again. One gets in his company the same--what shall I call it?--easeful satisfaction that one used to get from Monty James. It comes--doesn't it?--when great kindliness of heart accompanies great distinction of mind. I remember M.R.J.'s cordial listening to a story which I knew he knew, and on another occasion to a man making assertions about the history of some cathedral which were so wrong that they had to be corrected, but how gently and beautifully M.R.J. did it.

Interestingly, it seems that many of James's contemporaries, while agreeing about his kindness, wouldn't have said the same about his "distinction of mind." Darryl Jones, in the introduction to the recent Oxford University Press of James's Collected Ghost Stories (1931), writes,

His extraordinary intellectual capacities were matched by a commensurate anti-intellectualism which amounted, at times, to a genuine fear of ideas--a fear which his stories, with their consistent themes of the danger of knowledge, reflect quite clearly.

He offers an amusing example:

His longtime King's colleague Nathaniel Wedd recalled James's admonishing two students who were discussing a philosophical problem: "He rapped sharply on the table with his pipe, and called out: 'No thinking gentlemen, please.'"

James's friend A. C. Benson, who also wrote ghost stories, said of him,

[His] mind is the mind of a nice child--he hates and fears all problems, all speculation, all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous. he is much abler than I am, much better, much more effective--yet I feel that he is a kind of child.

Children of course can be terribly cruel, but a kind child can be a marvel, ready to take the time to talk, and listen, and be patient with others.



{Photo by rocketlass.}

Michael Chabon, in his introduction to a pocket collection of James's stories from OUP, Casting the Runes, tries to figure out the roots of the frightening visions that came from the pen of this writer who "seems, for the entire duration of his life, to have considered himself the happiest of men.":

And what of the childhood fascination with the tortures suffered by Christian martyrs, each date and gruesome detail of beheadings, immolations, and dismemberments lovingly memorized the way some boys memorize batting averages? And the spectral face at the garden gate, pale and wide-eyed, reeking of evil, that one evening peered back at the young James across the lawn as he looked out through the windows of the rectory? And the intimate eleven-year friendship with a man named McBryde, illustrator of some of James's best stories, traveling companion and inseparable confidante, whose rather late marriage in 1903 was followed, scarcely a year later, by his untimely death? And the boys, the tens upon hundreds of thousands of boys of Eton and King's on whom James had lavished his great teacherly gifts, cut down in the battlefields of Belgium and France? And the empty lawns, deserted commons and dining halls, the utter desolation of Cambridge in 1918?

But perhaps we don't need to look that far, or dig that deep, to find the origins of James's horrors. For really, who better to write ghost stories than the timid, who if he looks can find fear in everything? Or, as Chabon concludes:

Violence ,horror, grim retribution, the sudden revulsion of the soul--these things, then, are independent of happiness or suffering. A man who looks closely and carefully at life, whether pitiable as Poe or enviable as the Provost of Eton, cannot fail to see them.

On a drizzly August Monday, hints of autumn are in the air. October, with its darkness and its stories, is just around the corner.

To close out this month of haints and scares, here's a link to a piece I edited for my friend John Williams's lit site, The Second Pass. I asked a number of writers, critics, and bloggers with whom I've discussed scary stories before--Ed Park, John Crowley, James Hynes, Jenny Davidson, Joseph G. Peterson, James Morrison, Andrea Janes, John Eklund, and Will Schofield--to write a couple hundred words about a favorite. The selections vary nicely, from the Victorian golden age of the ghost story to the present, Mars to Maine, psychic visions to psychological trauma. I hope you're as pleased as I am by the recommendations; I also find myself quite cheered by the realization that the Internet made this whole article possible: of the nine contributors, six are people I met first or know solely because of the world of online writing about books.

I picked "Desideratus," a story by Penelope Fitzgerald in which she turns her love of ambiguity and keen eye for strangeness to an incident that, while wholly natural, feels as chillingly strange as any good ghost story. Fitzgerald's too often lumped casually with influences like Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, but she loved M. R. James--to the extent of including a great James pastiche in her novel The Gate of Angels, and the collection from which "Desideratus" is taken, The Means of Escape, actually includes one story, "The Ax," that's constructed with all the precision and chills of a classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents sort of ghost story. Like all of Fitzgerald's work, it's well worth seeking out.

WIth Halloween upon us, you could do worse than to light your jack-o-lantern, set the bowl of candy on the porch, bar the door, and settle in with this collection of recommendations. Make sure your cat is on your lap when you start: you know how they love to jump out at exactly the heart-stoppingly wrong moment--I do, after all, want you with us, in non-ghostly form, for next year's stories.