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  About Ghost

  About Louise Welsh

  Reviews

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  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.