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.

Getting lost in October Country

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Every October, I do my best to spend at least some time reading stories of ghosts, haints, fetches, ghouls, and other unpleasant manifestations. This October has, sadly, found me too busy to get very far in that project, so that all I have to share right now is a bit from a letter from Penelope Fitzgerald to her editor Mandy Kirkby of May 19, 1995, collected in the wonderful So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald:

The ghost at the Southwold-Walberswick crossing is said to be a mother waiting for her child who was supposed to be coming back on the last ferry. The white dog, which I have actually seen, was something to do with Dunwich, I think, and the poltergeist was horrid.

This is one of those occasions that makes one wish that collections of letters as a matter of course incorporated both sides of the correspondence. What did Kirkby ask to elicit this response? Readers of Fitzgerald's The Bookshop will recognize the poltergeist (and not be surprised that the ghost in the novel, convincingly eerie, was drawn from life), while the ferry ghost seems pretty straightforward--but what was the white dog? And what were the circumstances of Fitzgerald's sighting of it? I've written before about a certain matter-of-factness the English seem to bring to relations the appearance of the presumably ghostly, and this seems a perfect example.

But for those intrepid readers who are not English, and who refuse to simply accept intrusions from the unlikely spirit world as commonplace, that little taste of ghostliness will surely not be enough. Fortunately, prompted by Maud Newton, James Hynes has put together a list of ten great scary stories at his blog. The ones I already know are frightening and uncanny enough that later this week I'll be making the effort to seek out the rest.

And if that list doesn't include enough scares for you, you're welcome to dip into the I've Been Reading Lately archives and enjoy my numerous ghost-and-goblin posts from last October. Or you can simply reflect at length on various Sarah Palin-as-President scenarios . . .

Ah, imagine having a president who was "a constant and voracious reader"!

For your Presidents' Day enjoyment, where better to turn than to Abraham Lincoln?

In his account of Abraham Lincoln's early manhood, Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998) (which I wrote about briefly in January), Douglas L. Wilson pieces together a narrative from carefully weighed and vetted first- and second-generation accounts of Lincoln's life after he left his family in Indiana and struck out on his own. Wilson's approach is effective, seemingly getting us yet another bit closer to the historical Lincoln, but the primary sources themselves are the real attraction: his well-chosen selections provide a fascinating glimpse of the life and pastimes of the frontier, delivered in the rough-hewn dialect of its inhabitants.

The language of this account of a prank Lincoln pulled in New Salem--featuring ghosts and drinking, two I've Been Reading Lately favorites--is so spare that it could serve as myth, were it not for the goofy way in which the moral lesson is driven home:

Lincoln is reported to have improvised a prank while in New Salem that sounds as though it were inspired by Burns's poems. As Row Herndon told it,

there was a man that use to come to salem and get tight and stay untell dark he was fraid of Gosts and some one had to goe home with him well Lincoln Perswaded a fellow to take a Sheet and goe in the Rod and perform Gost he then Sent an other gost and the man and Lincoln started home the Gost made his appearence and the man Became much fritened But the Second gost made his appear[ance] and frightend the first Gost half to Deth that Broke the fellow from staying untell Dark anymore.

But while young Lincoln's wit and bawdy humor entertained--and, where unearthed, still do--it was his ability to deploy a similar ease and quick-wittedness as a speaker on more serious points that helped convince his fellow Illinoisans of his leadership potential. Many components went into his ascendance as a politician--including, in a reminder that looks, of a sort, have always mattered in politics, his height and strength--but this list from his Springfield acquaintance William Butler is a nice, brief summary:

Asked why Lincoln was regarded as a good candidate for political office at this time (1832), William Butler replied: " . . . the prominence given him by his captaincy in the Black Hawk War--because he was a good fellow--because he told good stories, and remembered good jokes,--because he was genial, kind, sympathetic, open-hearted--because when he was asked a question and gave an answer it was always characteristic, brief, pointed, a propos, out of the common way and manner, and yet exactly suited to the time place and thing."

I really don't mean to continue making this comparison, because I know it's a real stretch, and of limited utility anyway . . . but I will anyway just this one last time: Wisconsinites and Hawaiians heading to the polls tomorrow, I think you know which of your Democratic candidates gives answers that are "pointed" and "a propos, out of the common way and manner, yet exactly suited to the time place and thing."


{Photo and LOL Obama by rocketlass.}

"I am now getting into the habit of sitting at home all the morning and reading."

{A detail from Thomas Rowlandson's Vauxhall Gardens (1784) showing Boswell, Johnson, Hester Thrale, and Oliver Goldsmith}

From James Boswell, I've learned that ever since leaving college I've unwittingly followed a Johnsonian approach to learning--with today's day off from work falling particularly in line with his precepts:

He said he would not advise a plan of study, for he had never pursued one two days. "And a man ought just to read as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good. Idleness is a disease which must be combated. A young man should read five hours every day, and so may acquire a great deal of knowledge."

And all along I just thought of it as the life of a curious dilettante!

Speaking of curiosity, in noting Boswell's fear of ghosts yesterday, I neglected to mention Johnson's position on the matter. Being of a cast of mind that required him to examine every conceivable question, he of course had one:

He talked of belief in ghosts; and he said that he made a distinction between what a man might find out by the strength of his imagination, and what could not possibly be found out so. "Thus, supposed I should think that I saw a form and heard a voice cry, 'Johnson! you are a very wicked fellow, and unless you repent you will certainly be punished.' This is a thought which is so deeply impressed upon my mind that I might imagine I saw and heard so and so; and therefore I would not credit this, at least would not insist on your believing it. But if a form appeared, and a voice told me such a man is dead at such a place and such an hour; if this proves true upon inquiry, I should certainly think I had supernatural intelligence given me."

I also should add some meat to my earlier note that part of what makes Boswell so much fun is his ear for the oddities of everyday speech. An account he gives of the woman who cleaned and cooked for him and his roommate ends with one of the best examples:

[Mrs. Legge] is perhaps as curious an animal as has appeared in human shape. She presents a strong idea of one of the frightful witches in Macbeth. . . . She . . . owns that she married Mr. Legge for money. He is a little queer round creature; and claiming kindred with Baron Legge, he generally goes by the name of The Baron, and fine fun we have with him. . . . To give a specimen of Mrs. Legge, who is a prodigious prater. She said to Bob this morning, "Ay, ay, Master Robert, you may talk. But we knows what you young men are. Just cock-sparrows. You can't stand it out. But the Baron! O Lord! the Baron is a staunch man. Ay, ay, did you never hear that God never made a little man but he made it up to him in something else? Yes, yes, the Baron is a good man, an able man. He laid a married woman upon the floor while he sent the maid out for a pint of porter. But he was discovered, and so I come to know of it."

One unanticipated pleasure of Boswell's journal is the passing acquaintance it gives us with David Garrick. Garrick, the most celebrated actor of the age (or any age?), is an inescapable presence in the letters, journals, biographies, and histories of the eighteenth century, and Boswell gives us occasional glimpses of both his fame and his personality. This note of Boswell's attendance at one of Garrick's performances as King Lear gives an idea of the extent of Garrick's popular success and of the power of his acting:

So very high is his reputation, even after playing so long, that the pit was full in ten minutes after four, although the play did not begin till half an hour after six. I kept my self at a distance from all acquaintances, and got into a proper frame. Mr. Garrick gave me most perfect satisfaction. I was fully moved, and I shed abundance of tears.

No Proustian dashing of too-highly-raised hopes to be found there. Meanwhile, though he and Boswell never become more than casual acquaintances, Garrick comes off well in their meetings, seeming friendly, interested, and kind. Once when Boswell calls on him at the Drury Lane Theatre, he delivers a memorable line to seal an invitation to tea:

"And pray, will you fix a day when I shall have the pleasure of treating you with tea?" I fixed next day. "Then, Sir," said he, "the cups shall dance and the saucers skip."

The pleasantly individual cast of that image helps make clear why Johnson called Garrick, "the first man in the world for sprightly conversation."

Finally, because the weekend approaches, a reminder that though the perils of drink are many, they can often be an utterly reasonable price to pay for the company to which they admit one. Following a two-bottles-of-port night with Dr. Johnson, Boswell records:

A bottle of thick English port is a very heavy and a very inflammatory dose. I felt it last time that I drank it for several days, and this morning it was boiling in my veins. Dempster came and saw me, and said I had better be palsied at eighteen than not keep company with such a man as Johnson.

Were I a more capable drinker, or had I just a tad fewer readers, I could offer individual toasts to each of you. As is, prudence dictates that I raise a single glass: here's to rambles with Boswell, which I hope you've enjoyed.

Some letters, some ghosts, and other Boswell odds and ends

{James Boswell by Thomas Lawrence, ca. 1790-95}

There's just so much good stuff in Boswell's London Journal that I can't help but share a bit more.

1 Though Boswell as a young man had met David Hume, a fellow Scot who was at that time known better for his History of England than for his philosophy, their acquaintance was slight. So when Boswell's friends played a prank on him by forging a letter from Hume inviting a regular correspondence, Boswell's excitement at the prospect made the joke a grand success. Boswell decided that the best way to get back at his friends would be to succeed in striking up an actual epistolary friendship with Hume. What he failed to realize was that Hume, though barely remembering Boswell, was peeved at him, for in a pamphlet Boswell and friends had recently published for the purpose of slagging playwright David Mallet (known as Malloch) they had quoted derogatory comments about Mallet that Hume had made to them in a private conversation long ago. Got that? All of that is utterly unimportant three hundred and fifty years later except that it sets the scene for this bristling, astonished letter from Hume:

You must know, Mr. James Boswell, or James Boswell, Esq., that I am very much out of humour with you and your two companions or co-partners. How the devil came it into your heads, or rather your noddles (for it there had been a head among you, the thing had not happened; nor are you to imagine that a parcel of volatile spirits enclosed in a skull, make a head)--I repeat it, how the devil came it ito your noddles to publish in a book to all the world what you pretend I told you in private conversation? I say pretend I told you; for as I have utterly forgot the whole matter, I am resolved utterly to deny it. Are you not sensible that by the etourderie,, to give it the lightest name, you were capable of making a quarrel between me and that irascible little man with whom I live in very good terms? Do you not feel from your own experience that among us gentlemen of the quill there is nothing of which we are so jealous (not even our wives, if we have any) as the humour of our productions? And that he least touch of blame on that head puts us into the most violent fury and combustion? I reply nothing to your letter till you give me some satisfaction for this offence, but only assure you that I am not, Sir, your most obedient and most humble servant,
DAVID HUME

The sputtering anger brings Hume to life in a way that the metaphysical rigors of his philosophy can never come close to doing I particularly like the way that he turned the period's formulaic string of meaningless pleasantries on its head at the letter's close.

In the face of what must surely have been a shocking rebuff, however, Boswell demonstrated his usual quick wit. Though he opened his response with a fairly lame joke about having written about a different man named David Hume, he followed it with a much stronger effort:

As to the consequences of this affair, we are very sorry that you live in good terms with Mr. Malloch, and if we can make a quarrel between you, it will give us infinite pleasure. We shall glory in being the instruments of dissolving so heterogeneous an alliance; of separating the mild from the irascible, and the divine from the bestial.

We know very well how sore every author is when sharply touched in his works. We are pleased with giving acute pain to Mr. Malloch. We have vast satisfaction in making him smart by the rod of criticism, as much as many a tender bum has smarted by his barbarous birch when he was janitor of the High School at Edinburgh.

As to the giving you satisfaction for the offence, you may receive full gratification by reading the Reviews on our performance [that is, their pamphlet]. You will there find us held forth both as fools and as knaves; and if you will give us any other abusive appellations, we shall most submissively acquiesce. I hope this affair is now perfectly settled. I insist upon your writing to me in your usual humane style, and I assure you most sincerely that I am, my dear Sir, your most obedient humble servant,
BOSWELL & Co.

That brashness--the vigorous confidence of a smart young man finding his feet in an exciting and challenging world--runs throughout the London Journals and provides a good deal of its charm.

2 Given all the ghost stories I've featured lately, I couldn't very well not share this one with you, from the entry for March 12, 1763:

I stayed supper, after which we talked of death, of theft, robbery, murder, and ghosts. Lady Betty and Lady Anne declared seriously that at Allanbank they were disturbed two nights by something walking and groaning in the room, which they afterwards learnt was haunted. This was very strong. My mind was now filled with a real horror instead of an imaginary one. I shuddered with apprehension. I was frightened to go home. Honest Erskine made me go with him, and kindly gave the half of his bed, in which, though a very little one, we passed the silent watches in tranquility.

Even better, editor Frederick Pottle notes:

In the sketch of his life which he wrote later for Rousseau, Boswell confessed that he had been so much afraid of ghosts that he could not sleep alone until he was eighteen. The fear, though somewhat moderated, persisted throughout his life.

3 Speaking of the editorial notes: following an evening at Lord Advocate's, Boswell complains:

Mrs. Miller's abominable Glasgow tongue excruciated me. I resolved never again to dine where a Scotchwoman from the West was allowed to feed with us.

To that statement, Pottle appends what must surely have been the most fun note to write in the whole book:

Yet he later married one.

It shows admirable restraint not to end that sentence with an exclamation point.

4 Also in the notes, taken from Boswell's other papers, is this bit of dialogue between Boswell and his erstwhile (though dissipated and unreliable) patron, the Earl of Eglinton, revealing the Earl's unfavorable reaction to the recent publication of Boswell's correspondence with his friend Erskine:

EGLINTON Upon my soul, Jamie, I would not take the direction of you upon any account, for as much as I like you, except you would agree to give over that damned publishing. Lady N___ would as soon have a raven in her house as an author. . . . By the Lord, it's a thing Dean Swift would not do--to publish a collection of letters upon nothing. Nor Madam Sevigne either.

BOSWELL My Lord, hers are very fine.

EGLINTON Yes, a few at the beginning; but when you read on, you think her a d__nd tiresome bitch.

5 I'll close with the journal's most famous episode (aside perhaps from the time Boswell has sex with a prostitute on Westminster Bridge?)--and the one towards which, from our distant vantage point, the whole journal is building: the fateful meeting with Samuel Johnson on May 16, 1673:

Mr. Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his moral antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, "Don't tell where I come from." However, he said, "From Scotland." "Mr Johnson," said I, "indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." "Sir," replied he, "that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help." Mr. Johnson is a man of a most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king's evil. He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of impression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has great humour and is a worthy man. I shall mark what I remember of his conversation.

And with that, what can I do but pull down the Life of Johnson from the shelf? I think that's next . . . though there's a chance Jane Austen might intervene.

"The gruesomely conscious realm of ghostly fear and cold terror," or, The Haunted Commonplace Book!

{Resting, London. Photo by rocketlass.}

From a gravestone in Norfolk churchyard, collected in Everybody's Book of Epitaphs, W. H. Howe, editor

Underneath this sod lies John Round
Who was lost in the sea and never was found.

From Jean-Claude Schmitt's Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (1994, 1998 translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan):

Historians and ethnologists commonly speak of a "belief in ghosts." But what does this really mean, and how can the historian ascertain past beliefs? One of the recent advances in the "anthropology of beliefs" is to question the ill-considered uses of the notion of "belief." We must be careful not to reify belief, to turn it into something established once and for all, something that individuals and societies need only express and pass on to each other. It is appropriate to substitute a more active notion for the term "belief": the verb "to believe." In this way a belief is a never-completed activity, one that is precarious, always questioned, and inseparable from recurrences of doubt.

That seems in keeping with Shirley Jackson's argument, in the lecture I quoted from yesterday, that even those of us who claim not to believe in ghosts are a quick glimpse in the wrong direction away from changing our minds. We don't believe, but . . .

From the entry for "ghost" in David Pickering's Cassell's Dictionary of Superstitions (1995):

Measures that may be taken against encountering ghosts include, according to Scottish tradition, wearing a cross of Rowan wood fastened with red thread and concealed in the lining of one's coat.

From "Mujina" by Lafcadio Hearn, collected in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904):

Then that O-juchu turned round, and dropped her sleeve, and stroked her face with her hand, ;--and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth,--and he screamed and ran away.

From "The Banshee," in Jorge Luis Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967, 2005 translation by Andrew Hurley):

No one seems ever to have seen one. They are less a shape than a wailing that lends horror to the nights of Ireland and (according to Sir Walter Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft) the mountain regions of Scotland. Heard outside one's window, they herald the death of some member of the family.

{Weeping girl in Cemetiere Mont-Royal, Montreal. Photo by rocketlass.}

Most of us skeptics these days ground our rejection of the concept of ghosts not so much on our not having seen one but on basic rationality. The efforts of William James and his colleagues to find proof of spirit manifestations were, after all, a bust, and no verifiable evidence has emerged since. Rationality, therefore, demands that we at the very least put ghosts in the category of unlikely. And yet, the sun still goes down, and the autumn nights still carry their unsettling chill . . .

From Jean-Claude Schmitt's Ghosts in the Middle Ages (1994, 1998 translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan):

A persistent yet somewhat ambiguous and contradictory refusal to admit the possibility that the dead might return in dreams or perhaps in conscious visions characterized the ecclesiastical culture of the early Middle Ages. . . . In a religious way of thinking long fragmented by a fundamental dualism--the antagonism between the devil and the saints, between the phantasmagorias of the former and the controlled apparitions of the latter--there was very little room for ghosts or for the oneiric and ambivalent revelations of ordinary dead people.

From D. J. Enright's introduction to the "Loving Revenants" chapter of The Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994):

That these visitors rarely convey a message of much overt significance has found its reasons. What motivates them rather than the delivery of urgent intelligence is the natural desire to glimpse their children, their loved ones, to revisit places where they lived or worked (a pantry, a library, an altar), returning, in the words of Hardy's poem, to where the living person "found life largest, best." Such appearances are more for the sake of the revenant, then.

{Gravestone of an aviator, San Michele Island, Venice. Photo by rocketlass.}

Of course, unlike most of human history--or for example, thinking back to yesterday's post, the years following World War I--now we are able to pass through our days with little thought of death. It's something that happens elsewhere, to other people. Such a denial makes every aspect of modern life easier, from conspicuous consumption to support for distant wars. Death no longer visibly stalks us, and though we know that means he'll ultimately sneak up and pounce us instead, we have become very good at denying that inevitability.

From Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1921, 1996 translation by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzch):

No other age has so forcefully and continuously impressed the idea of death on the whole population as did the fifteenth century, in which the call of the memento mori echoes throughout the whole of life. Denis the Carthusian, in the book he wrote for the guidance of the nobleman, makes the exhortation that "when he goes to bed, he should imagine not that he is putting himself to bed, but that others are laying him in his grave." . . . . In the fourteenth century, the strange word "macabre" appeared, or, as it was originally spelled, "Macabré." "Je fis Macabré la dance," ("I made the Dance Macabre") says the poet Jean Le Fevr in 1376. It is a personal name and this might be the much disputed eytmology of the word. It is only much later that the adjective is abstraced from "le danse macabre" that has acquired for us such a crisp and particular nuance of meaning that with it we can label the entire late medieval vision of death. The motif of death in the form of the "macabre" is primarily found in our times in village cemeteries where one can still sense its echo in verses and figures. By the end of hte Middle Ages, this notion had become an important cultural conception. There entered into the realm surrounding the idea of death a new, grippingly fantastic element, a shiver that arose from the gruesomely conscious realm of ghostly fear and cold terror.

Ah, but us ghost story fans at least have October as our memento mori, our occasion for focusing our attentions on the fate we'll all share--and, while eschewing the comforts of religion, thinking on the possibility that it might not be the end after all.


{St. Boniface Cemetery, Chicago. Photo by rocketlass.}

From "The Girl I Left Behind Me" by Muriel Spark, collected in The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark (1994):

I opened the door and my sadness left me at once. With a great joy I recognized what it was I had left behind me, my body lying strangled on the floor. I ran toward my body and embraced it like a lover.

From Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842):

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

From Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1975):

It became unspeakable.

Now, you cannot ask a man to meet a ghost, because ghosts are not to be counted on.

{Robert Boursnel, "Self-Portrait with Spirits" (1902)}

From a 1958 lecture, "Experience and Fiction," by Shirley Jackson

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor--most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren't careful--if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.

Shakespeare's ghosts have distracted me for a few days from my efforts to convince every single one of you to go to your nearest used bookseller and buy a copy of D. J. Enright's The Oxford Book of the Supernatural, from which I've taken Shirley Jackson's dead-on assessment of shaky skeptics. I've also drawn today's headline from the book; it appears in Oliver St John Gogarty's As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1936) in a description of a haunted evening with the Yeatses, during which Yeats, unflappable, makes the following 2 a.m. demands of a ghost:

1. You must desist from frightening the children in their early sleep.
2. You must cease to moan about the chimneys.
3. You must walk the house no more.
4. You must not move furniture or horrify those who sleep near by.
5. You must name yourself to me.

That doesn't leave a ghost much scope for activity. I suppose he could blow on Yeats's tea and make it cool extra-quickly.

Though Yeats may be the poet best-known for trafficking with spirits, he's not alone by any means. John Donne appears in Enright's collection via a story of a dark vision featured in Izaak Walton's early biography. Having made a trip to Europe despite his (yet again) pregnant wife's "divining soul bod[ing] her some ill in his absence," Donne is found by his patron Sir Robert,

in such ecstasy, and so altered as to his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him; insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr Donne to declare what had befallen him in the short time of his absence. To which Mr Donne was not able to make a present answer: but, after a long and perplexed pause, did at last say, "I have seen a dreadful vision since I last saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms this I have seen since I saw you." To which Sir Robert replied, "Sure, sir, you have slept since last I saw you." To which Mr. Donne's reply was, " I cannot be surer that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you: and I am as sure, that at her second appearing she stopped, and looked me in the face, and vanished."

The vision proves at least partially true: Donne soon learns that the child was stillborn and his wife, though alive, is very ill.

Then there is the poet who is a ghost, as Enright presents Harold Owen recounting in the third volume of his memoir, Journey from Obscurity (1965). On a naval ship during World War I, he enters his cabin to find his brother Wilfred--who should have been at the Western Front--sitting in Harold's chair:

I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: "Wilfred, how did you get here?" He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt no fear--I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. . . . . I loved having him there: I could not, and did not want to try to understand how he had got there. I was content to accept him, that he was here with me was sufficient. . . . I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. . . .

I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these and overpowering sense of emptiness and loss. . . . Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.

From now on, any time I read about World War I and the swathe it cut through a whole generation I'll remember the sense of deep, ultimately frustrated longing in that passage; whatever hopes or fears in Harold Owen generated that vision, they are of a piece with those that drove the postwar efforts by Conan Doyle and others to search out a spirit world that might reveal some trace of their lost loved ones. So many millions of young men were gone, and the desire on this side of the veil for any contact at all was so powerful that the bereaved of World War I would surely have agreed with this passage that Enright quotes from Margaret Oliphant's A Belaguered City (1879):

Why should it be a matter of wonder that the dead should come back? The wonder is that they do not. Ah! that is the wonder. How one can go away who loves you, and never return, nor speak, nor send any message--that is the miracle: not that the heavens should bend down and the gates of Paradise roll back, and those who have left us return. All my life it has been a marvel to me how they could be kept away.

For as often as we hear stories of ghosts who need something from us, in fact it is we who need them--need them not to forget, not to stop caring for us. It's no wonder that such a strong desire sometimes generates a response, whatever questions we might harbor about its reality.

Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake

{William Hogarth, "David Garrick as Richard III" (1745)}

Like a good dissertation advisor, Jenny Davidson from Light Reading noted that I left out some Shakespearean ghosts in yesterday's roundup--eleven of them, in fact, who levy curses on their murderer, Richard III, on the eve of his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It seems appropriate that this most self-dramatizing of villains should suffer a haunting, but like everything else in the play, the ghosts remain overshadowed by the force of Richard's character: next to his evil ingenuity and ruthlessness, no one else seems quite alive--including the dead.

It should come as no surprise that Richard refuses to believe in the ghosts. After all, everyone in his eye is a tool or an obstacle; once they lose the potential to be either, why would they tarry in his sight, alive or dead? No, it must be a dream:

I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.

Dream or not, Richard nonetheless rehearses a sort of crisis of conscience:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

Yet there's little sense that the ghosts' imprecations ("Let us be lead within thy bosom") cause him anywhere near the horrors that Banquo's silence provokes in Macbeth. Macbeth, though deeply ruing the irrevocable first step that set him on his murderous path, tells himself that he has no choice but to kill Banquo because,

For mine own good
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as to go o'er.

--which renders Banquo's silent reappearance all the more horrifying, a grotesque proof that though Macbeth may plunge ever deeper into the rivers of blood, the absolving shore will remain forever distant.

Richard, on the other hand, has no false image of a distant day beyond murder--and no lost better self to regret. His crisis of conscience is in actuality little more than a batting about of the concept of his villainy. The ghosts may curse him, but he is proof against curses because there is nothing in him to damage; they lead him to worry not about what he has done but about what others might do--

O Ratcliff, I have dream'd a fearful dream!
What think'st thou--will our friends prove all true?

. Though he claims that the ghosts

Have stuck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers
Armed in proof and led by shallow Richmond,

his only real worry is the failure of his designs.

This gets to the heart of why Banquo's ghost is chilling where Richard's chorus of victims is forgettable--and thus of one of the reasons that Macbeth is the far better play. As Mark Van Doren writes,

Richard is never quite human enough. . . . He is only stunning in his craft, a serpent whose movements we follow for their own sake, because in themselves they have strength and beauty.

A ghost, like a reader, needs some flaw in a character to latch on to; a perfect good or a perfect evil leave little for the reader to ponder or the ghost to prey on. If a man be a perfect villain, what levers does a ghost have? What threats are at his disposal? Is it even possible to haunt him at all?

"It harrows me with fear and wonder."

{The ghost of Hamlet's father, as played at the Booth Theatre, London, 1870. Sketch by Thomas Glessing.}

In a comment to yesterday's post, Jenny Davidson from Light Reading corrected my half-assertion that Jacob Marley is literature's most famous ghost. That crown, she rightly notes, rests with the ghost of Hamlet's father, who should also, I think, get extra credit for appearing to so many more people than your usual ghost charged with a mission. He first manifests in front of two or three of the men of the guard:

MARCELLUS
Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

Horatio, however, is having none of it:

Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.

But once the ghost does appear, there's no denying its presence, nor that it is

In the same figure, like the king that's dead.

Horatio, harrowed, hails Hamlet.

Watching the ghost of Hamlet's father, it's easy to see where Hamlet gets his flair for the dramatic. After all, need he appear in the chill of the ramparts at midnight? Wouldn't the quiet coziness of Hamlet's bedchamber have served as well? Ah, but then he'd eschew the hair-raising buildup he knows the guards will give him before he appears to his son, let alone Horatio's ascription to him of the powers of a Will-o-the-Wisp:

HORATIO
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.

And then there's the ghost's whole, "Oh, the stories I could tell of the horrors of the afterlife!" bit:

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine,

Only, well, it turns out he's not allowed to:

But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

While Hamlet's father's technique is quite effective--as he surely knew it would be, if he possessed any understanding of the character of his son--I prefer the more straightforward approach of, as Perry White would say, great Caesar's ghost, when he appears to Brutus in his tent:

BRUTUS
Ha! who comes here?
I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition.
It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That makest my blood cold and my hair to stare?
Speak to me what thou art.

GHOST
Thy evil spirit, Brutus.

BRUTUS
Why comest thou?

GHOST
To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Well; then I shall see thee again?

GHOST
Ay, at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

[Exit Ghost]

I suppose you could ask why Caesar bothered to appear to Brutus at all--couldn't he have just shown up at Philippi? But I appreciate his straightforwardness; it seems appropriate to a great general. And after all, shouldn't a ghost be confident that his very presence will supply sufficient drama to make whatever point he's charged with putting across?



In that regard, no one tops Banquo, who doesn't even speak--or appear to anyone but Macbeth. A model of ghostly restraint, he merely sits quietly on Macbeth's stool and shakes his gory locks a bit:

MACBETH
Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes

LADY MACBETH
What, quite unmann'd in folly?

MACBETH
If I stand here, I saw him.

LADY MACBETH
Fie, for shame!

MACBETH
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.

And his encore is even better:

MACBETH
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

Now that's supernatural efficiency.

"If that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death."

{Aubrey Beardsley, illustration to Poe's "The Black Cat" (1894-95)}

In recent days I've been mostly writing about ghosts and spirits who frighten, whether by their actions or simply through the way their presence disturbs settled views of the workings of the world. But it seems wrong to focus solely on the scary ghosts, when the corpus of ghost stories is rife with more benign--and more calmly received--spirits as well.

Hawthorne, for example, though a master of the gothic tale, lightened up considerably when describing the spirits who haunted his home in "The Old Manse" (1846):

Houses of any antiquity, in New England, are so invariably possessed with spirits, that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor; and sometimes rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon, in the long upper entry;--where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably, he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of manuscript discourses, that stood in the garret. Once, while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a rustling noise, as of a minister's silk gown, sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs. Still, there was nothing visible. A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen, at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing--performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labor--although no traces of anything accomplished could be detected, the next morning. Some neglected duty of her servitude--some ill-starched ministerial band--disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without any wages.

Similarly, though Jan Potocki's strange, captivating Russian doll of a novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (c. 1815) contains many a legitimately chilling moment, his protagonist frequently presents events with a detached irony. Even the scariest revenants, two hanged brothers who plague the narrator throughout the novel, are first presented as a focus of stories, even a point of argument:

Very strange tales were told about the two brothers who had been hanged; they were not said to be ghosts, but it was claimed that at night nameless demons would possess their bodies, which would break free from the gallows and set out to torment the living. This was taken to be so well attested that a theologian from Salamanca had written a thesis proving that the two hanged brothers were species of vampire, and that the supposition that one of them should be a vampire was no less implausible than that the other should be so: an argument that even the most skeptical were forced to agree was sound.

Even Jacob Marley--possibly literature's most famous ghost?--though he frightens Scrooge, is far from scary for the reader. Though Dickens could go in any direction after his unforgettable opening line--

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. . . . Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail

--the digression that follows establishes an, affable, conversational tone:

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Marley, in fact, for all Scrooge doesn't want to believe it, is actually a member of that seemingly common breed: the duty-bound ghost. Charged with a penitential mission, he will do his utmost to execute it--and Marley, at least, has the benefit of speech, an aid that, if lore is to be believed, is sadly denied to many a restless spirit, reduced to mutely pointing or dragging chains.

Far more rare is the ghost who, though not constrained by any long-ago wrong, helps the living of his own accord. After all, ghosts without missions have little to bind them to this earth, whereas those who do have duties are left, one assumes, with little extra time or attention. But in the right circumstances, a bargain can be struck--which is what happens in one of my long-standing favorite ghost stories, Walter R. Brooks's "Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons" (1957). When young Jimmy accidentally scares a ghost haunting an old house belonging to his aunt, the embarrassed ghost, worried about exposure, offers to teach Jimmy how to vanish. A few lessons, and:

That night at supper Jimmy's aunt said, "Well, what have you been doing today?"

"I've been learning to vanish."

His aunt smiled and said, "That must be fun."

"Honestly," said Jimmy. "The ghost up at grandfather's taught me."

"I don't think that's very funny," said his aunt. "And will you please not--why, where are you?"

I first encountered "Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons" in an old paperback from my father's boyhood that I read dozens of times. It mixed stories of harmless ghosts--Jimmy's friend being one, a weeping ghost who flooded a house with its tears being another--with more worrisome creatures, including some dangerously bewitching goblin children. My favorite story, an old English tale that comes to mind every autumn when the leaves first start to swirl down the street, is a good one to return us to the creepier sort of Hallowe'en manifestation. The book disappeared long ago, so I'll have to tell the story myself:

One October evening, an old woodman was finishing up the day's cutting, feeling more than ever before the pains of age. The autumn chill had seeped into his bones, his breath came short, and his axe seemed to bite less deeply, yet stick more firmly, with every stroke. Though he knew there were malicious spirits abroad at that time of year, the slow pace of work necessitated by his age meant that he was unable to begin his long walk home until after the darkness had already begun to rise from the forest floor about him. So when his work was done he tied his lantern to his staff and, hanging it in front of him to light the winding path, he steeled himself for his long walk through the woods, keeping always in his mind a vision of his warm fireside, where his wizened wife and their black tomcat, Tam, would be waiting patiently for him to return.

As any night walker knows, the woods on an October night are alive with rustlings and shiftings. Leaves whipped up by the wind take on the appearance of a pursuer; a low-hanging branch begins to look like an arm, grasping and clawing after the solitary traveler. As the aged woodcutter trudged along, he reminded himself that the noises he heard were nothing to be alarmed about. "That one," he thought, "that one is just a clutch of acorns falling to the ground. And this one, this one is just a squirrel--like me he's caught out too late and hurrying to his warm den."

But as the depths of the forest closed in about him and the darkness pressed hard upon the wan light of his lantern, the woodcutter began to hear other noises-- more regular, more troubling. Small animals scrabbling around, he told himself; the wind whipping the leaves, he told himself. But even as he tried to dismiss the sounds, they began to resolve themselves into a pattern. He shuddered as he realized that they what he was hearing was speech--hissing, whispering, speech, the sound of dozens of voices overlapping.

"Tommy Tuppence is dead," the voices whispered. "Tommy Tuppence is dead," they hissed. "Tommy Tuppence is dead."

The woodman was glad that he had no idea who Tommy Tuppence might be, but nonetheless he was frightened, and he quickened his steps. But then as he hurried around a bend, he stopped short, for crossing the path mere yards ahead of him was a file of cats, nine of them, black as the surrounding night. Their tails in the air, they strode confidently up to him, almost as if they planned to rub familiarly against his legs; the thought horrified the woodcutter, and he was relieved when instead they described a circle around him, whispering all the while, "Tommy Tuppence is dead. Tommy Tuppence is dead." The nine cats turned a circle around the man once, twice, then they were gone, their hissing words hanging in the air behind them.

With a speed he'd not known for decades, the woodcutter took to his heels, and he didn't slow down or turn his head until he reached his cottage. As he burst through the door, his wife stared at him in horror and jumped from her chair, pitching Tam from her lap. "Oh, you look a fright, my dear! Whatever has happened?"

The woodcutter, not even stopping to catch his breath, told of the darkness, and of the nine cats. "And," he said, taking his wife by the shoulders, "though I expect you'll think I'm crazy: those cats were all talking."

"Well what on earth did they say?"

"They just kept repeating and repeating: 'Tommy Tuppence is dead. Tommy Tuppence is dead.' I've no idea who--" He broke off as the cottage filled with a terrible screeching.

It was Tam--his black fur puffed out and his tail in the air. Fixing the woodcutter with an unearthly stare, Tam cried out, "If Tommy Tuppence is dead--then I'm the king of the cats!"

With that, Tam streaked across the room, shot up the chimney, and was never seen again.

I like to imagine that the chorus of Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is actually a similar secret communication, the announcement of Lugosi's death passing from goth to goth until it reaches the new king of the vampires.

Have you checked the children?

{Photo by Odlandscape.}

Yesterday I used some lines from Michel Tournier's The Mirror of Ideas to describe adult fears. Later in that essay, Tournier notes,

The child walking in the dark comforts himself with a song. Jean Cocteau tells that when he tried this remedy, he ended up being terrified by the words he invented to the song.

Children's fears burgeon that way--kids aren't yet all that good at the sort of denial of unwanted thoughts that most adults master; they're not as good at coaxing their minds away from the things that have scared them. If adult fear is rooted in death, a child's fear is rooted in a more general not-knowing: the world is large and little-understood, even by a perceptive kid. There is much to fear.

Returning once more to the book that kicked off I've Been Reading Lately's ghost and monster week, 'Salem's Lot: Stephen King marks that distinction between children and adults, writing that adult fears are

pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek to jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. . . . with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

That openness to fear lines up, too, with the position held by many who actually believe in the supernatural that children are more open to and aware of the otherworldly. They haven't yet, the argument goes, set limits on which of their perceptions they're willing to accept, which to dismiss before they even reach the level of consciousness. Rebecca West, in The Fountain Overflows (1957), her somewhat autobiographical novel of growing up in a poor and talented family, allows her young characters some of that perceptiveness. For a few months the children live with--and maybe even psychically generate--a poltergeist. In another particularly striking scene, late at night in a deserted stables, the young narrator's sensitivity is nearly powerful enough to bring to life--even for her mother--the spectral horses she sees stamping and snorting in the stalls:

My mother's eyes moved to my face. The horses in the stalls became luminous shapes. We knew that if we willed it, if we made a movement of the mind comparable with the action of throwing all one's weight on one foot, we could make them visible as ourselves.

All of which returns me to my own story of seeing a ghost, about which I wrote last October:

I have no memory of it, but I've been told by my parents, no wild-eyed new-agers they, that it happened when I was three or four, while our family was being given a tour of a house in Colonial Williamsburg. I turned to my mother and, pointing to the empty corner of a room and said, "Look, Mommy--there's a ghost." The guide blanched and told my parents that the house was rumored to be haunted.

Even though it's not much of a story, and I don't remember a bit of it, that surely has to land me squarely in the large category of "I don't believe in ghosts, but . . . ."

I suppose one could keep far worse company than William James.

The unknown

{Photo by Secret Agent Martens.}

I know I rashly wrote yesterday that I was wrapping up my series of posts on ghosts and spirits, but it turns out that just like Jason Voorhees, I'm not quite finished yet. Hallowe'en's still a ways away; who knows how many times I'll lurch back into view with more scares?

From Moby-Dick (1851), by Herman Melville

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

Note how Melville moves from the potential, the seeming, to the definite: what we can see we cannot know, but what we cannot see we know deep in our bones. Good tellers of ghost stories have always known that; as Michel Tournier explains in The Mirror of Ideas (1994),

There is such a thing as an atavistic fear, digging its roots down to an ancestral past sleeping in our hearts; eternal humanity trembles with us in the presence of mystery. . . . It is the darkness itself that frightens--not the monsters hiding in it.

The merest hints of horror catch in the soul; the less a storyteller describes, the less he provides for our rational minds to attack and reject. As M. R. James wrote in "Ghosts--Treat Them Gently,"

On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence.

Limn lightly the horror--give us, as Peter Ackroyd puts it,

the sudden stillness in a wood, or the sound of footsteps in an empty street

--and we will supply the rest. Even Stephen King, not someone usually associated with reticence, demonstrates that he knows the power of the undescribed when he uses it to create the most chilling moment in 'Salem's Lot. At midnight, a man at the gate of a graveyard raises his voice in prayer to his dark lord, then:

There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.

"I bring you this."

It became unspeakable.

By claiming to have come up against the limits of what language will even tolerate, King frees our imaginations to run on the darkest of paths, which of course they will do. For despite what we tell ourselves when encouraged by daylight, as the night steals in we remember that fear is built into the very structure of the universe. All that awaits us is the greater unknown of death. And while we feverishly distract ourselves from its approach, death for its part can afford to be patient.

From The Zurau Aphorisms (2004), by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hoffman

The dogs are still playing in the yard, but the quarry will not escape them, never mind how fast it is running through the forest already.

Is it any wonder that we take pleasure, however perverse, in telling ghost stories?

Premonitions and apparitions

{"The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous," photographer unknown, circa 1890}

Too busy to do any real posting today, but in keeping with the Hallowe'en theme, how about a couple of warnings . . . (cue scary organ music) . . . of impending Death!

The first warning wouldn't have actually been all that helpful, taking as it did the form of barking. It's a memory of a story Thomas Hardy told publisher Sir Newton Flower, collected in Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray:

Here is an odd thing about [Hardy's dog] Wessex. One November night, William Watkins, who founded the Society of Dorset Men in London, went to call on Hardy after dinner, as was his custom whenever he was in Dorset. It was a night of wild storm. This is Hardy's story of the episode to me:

"For some reason Wessex rushed wildly round the house, growling and barking. He dashed at the front door; then came back again. Watkins and I opened the door, and Wessex ran out into the storm, still barking. I thought there might be marauders about, but we could find nobody. We came in; we got Wessex in. An hour later, Watkins, after a final cup of coffee, went back to his hotel in Dorchester, and died in his bed that night. What did Wessex know?"

Far creepier--though just as impossible to verify--is Alec Guinness's story, from Blessings in Disguise (1985), of meeting James Dean in Los Angeles; as with so many other stories this week, I owe D. J. Enright for including this one in his Oxford Book of the Supernatural:

[O]n the way back to the restaurante he turned into a car-park, saying, "I'd like to show you something." Among the other cars there was what looked like a large, shiny, silver parcel wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon. "It's just been delivered," he said, with bursting pride. "I haven't even driven it yet." The sports-car looked sinister to me, although it had a large bunch of red carnations resting on the bonnet. "How fast is it?" I asked. "She'll do a hundred and fifty," he replied. Exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean's kindness, I heard myself saying in a voice I could hardly recognize as my own, "Please, never get in it." I looked at my watch. "It is now ten o'clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week." He laughed. "Oh, shucks! Don't be so mean!" I apologized for what I said, explaining it was lack of sleep and food. . . . We parted an hour later, full of smiles. No further reference was made to the wrapped-up car. . . . In my heart I was uneasy--with myself. At four o'clock on the afternoon of the following Friday James Dean was dead, killed while driving the car.

A sinister, deadly automobile--sounds like a topic for Stephen King, whose appearance at Fenway Park recently was responsible for this week's delving into the ghostly in the first place.

I'll bring the week of Hallowe'en postings to close--for now!--with a passage from M. R. James's "A School Story." What's great about the passage is that you don't even need to know its context to enjoy the dread that grows through this account of a night visitation:

"I didn't hear anything at all," he said, "but about five minutes before I woke you I found myself looking out of this window here, and there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's window-sill and looking in, and I thought he was beckoning." "What sort of man?" McLeod wriggled. "I don't know," he said, "but I can tell you one thing--he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and," he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive."

In such cases, I recommend that one err on the side of assuming that the creepy stranger is, in fact, not alive.

Finally, for those of you who are bored at work: a Google search on "I don't believe in ghosts, but" is guaranteed to keep you entertained for many an hour. It even led me to a great line supposedly from Edgar Allan Poe, which, though the attribution appears sketchy, does seem apt:

I don't believe in ghosts, but I've been running from them all my life.

Scary

For a brief moment last night, purely by accident, the following three books were stacked on the bed at my house:

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
Ghost Hunters, by Deborah Blum
The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connolly

The only one of the three having anything, really, to do with ghosts or spirits is Ghost Hunters, whose subtitle, "William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death" tells you all you need to know. Johnson's The Ghost Map, which was a pleasantly surprising Christmas gift from Stacey, is about London's 1854 cholera epidemic, while The Unquiet Grave, is a sort of commonplace book or journal that, if it's about anything, is about how Cyril Connolly can't form this mess of thoughts into a book.

But if I stack those in the window—maybe with The Oxford Book of Death on top and The Oxford Book of the Supernatural on the bottom—they would probably serve as a reasonably effective burglar-deterrent.

However, as Stacey pointed out last night when I broached the idea, we just might return from work one night to find our house lousy with ghosts and spirits of every stripe. They'd probably even have figured out how to work the buzzer and let all the vampires in, too.

Ghosts, part 2

I wrote the preceding post when I was only a little way into Hilary Mantel's memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Finishing it didn't force me to revise my opinion of the book—it continued to be enthralling—but it did force me to revise my opinion of the ghosts and presences that feature in it. When Mantel is nearly eight years old, she tells of seeing . . . something . . . in the backyard:

I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, a spot in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds, and bracken. I can’t see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; as if pinned to the moment. I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.

I pluck my eyes away. It is like plucking them out of my head. Grace runs away from me, runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse.

Mantel never is able to explain the sighting, even to herself, beyond calling it a mistaken glimpse of a pure evil humans are not intended to see, the horror stays with her, is still with her. Her powers of description are so strong—“rinsed by nausea,” “a sick resonance”—that it’s not hard to believe.

By focusing on these poorly understood presences, I’m probably not being fair to Giving Up the Ghost overall—it’s about far more than that. It’s emotional and impressionistic, but it’s also deeply thoughtful and packed with interesting details about life in postwar England, an honest groping for the truth of Mantel’s life and the complicated interplay of illness, sexism, class, and personal choice that have made her who she is. Knowledge of it will infect—and inflect—all her novels, which I now feel compelled to read.

Oh, and a side note: Saturday was the one-year anniversary of this blog. 148 posts. Goodness. Thanks for reading.

Ghosts

From Macbeth, Act 3, Scene IV

MACBETH
Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes

English writers toss out references to ghosts with remarkable casualness; they seem to take the default position that they will be believed when they talk about hauntings—the opposite, I would argue, of the position Americans and American writers take. Ghosts are around, the body of literature seems to say; sometimes people see them. There's no controversy. I suppose that if your national history is one of knights and ladies and dank castles, ghosts come naturally—though I would also expect that if your national history included the largely ignored story of the extermination of the ten million people who were living in the land when your forebears arrived, you would have quite a few ghost stories, of an extremely unpleasant variety.

Yet it is England, not America, that is rich with ghosts. And, unlike the ghost of Banquo (which, understandably, greatly frightens Macbeth just by his appearance), most of the ghosts I've come across in English novels—and especially in English memoirs—are unthreatening, ordinary, even quotidian. Penelope Fitzgerald, for example, tells of Keats's ghost haunting the then-pastoral village of Hampstead when she was a girl, and in her novel The Bookshop (1978) a ghost troubles the heroine, though never in a particularly menacing way. Anthony Powell, in his memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1983), mentions a ghost that haunted one of his childhood homes; that ghost, transmuted like all the facts of his life, appears in his fiction as the driver of a particularly vivid domestic scene. Rebecca West, in The Fountain Overflows (1957), a thinly veiled retelling of her childhood, includes ghosts, poltergeists, and magic, invisible horses. Unexplained presences manifest themselves here and there in Iris Murdoch's writing, and—perils of being away from my bookshelves!—I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.

Halloween, of course, put me in mind of this topic, as I was reading ghost stories (of which the English are the masters (followed closely by the Japanese?)). And then I was thinking about William James (because of a new book on his paranormal researches), the first chapter of whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) includes several stories of ghostly encounters that James collected. But it was Hilary Mantel who really brought it to a head, with the opening pages of her enthralling memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003):

About eleven o'clock, I see a flickering on the staircase. The air is still; then it moves. I raise my head. The air is still again. I know it is my stepfather's ghost coming down. Or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I "know" it is my stepfather's ghost.

I am not perturbed. I am used to "seeing" things that aren't there. Or—to put it in a way more acceptable to me—I am used to seeing things that "aren't there." It was in this house that I last saw my stepfather, Jack, in the early months of 1995: alive, in his garments of human flesh. Many times since then I have acknowledged him on the stairs.

She talks herself back from that certainty a bit, offering the reader a chance to believe her sightings are the result of migraines; but throughout the book, presences abound, flickering at the edge of consciousness like ideas too large and unwieldy for childhood apprehension. They aren't exactly benign, but Mantel gives the sense that their danger is more potential than actual, like the shadowy adult secrets that quietly define childhood.

Childhood is when I, too, reportedly saw a ghost. I have no memory of it, but I've been told by my parents, no wild-eyed new-agers they, that it happened when I was three or four, while our family was being given a tour of a house in Colonial Williamsburg. I turned to my mother and, pointing to the empty corner of a room and said, "Look, Mommy--there's a ghost." The guide blanched and told my parents that the house was rumored to be haunted.

From Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

One night, I hear my mother and Jack, discussing. I am lurking in the cold Glass Place, coming in from the lavatory. "Well," she says, "so? So what do you think it is?" Her voice rises, in an equal blend of challenge, fear, and scorn. "What do you think it is? Ghosts?"