Seasonal Round-up: Ghost Stories
Various Authors

Posted 31 October 2006.


As was the case last year, the approach of Hallow'een has had me huddled nervously over my Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories for several nights. I'm not sure that indulging my long-standing affection for these frightening tales is entirely healthy, but a guilty pleasure is, after all, a pleasure. I persist.

The stories I read this year were written between the 1930s and the 1980s. In fact, I've now reached the end of my Oxford Book and will have to somehow conjure up a new collection of stories next year. The Oxford Book doesn't publish just any old trash, and the specifically literary quality of these stories was consistently high.

I was interested to encounter Charles Williams' highly allegorical story "Et in Sempiternum Pereant". It opens, like the Divine Comedy that Williams loved so much, with a traveller who seems to have lost his way. Coming upon an old house, he enters, but finds it empty. Yet the longer he lingers, the stranger the place seems, and it gradually becomes clear that the house is a place where eternity comes near, a point of intersection of the life beyond life with our own. I have sometimes been bothered by Williams' highly wrought style in the past, but in a story of this sort it was very effective.

"Bosworth Summit Pound" by L.T.C. Rolt was perhaps the scariest story in this year's batch. If the ghost of a drowned lover is going to rise up from the dark river, a shadow against a shadow, to drag her murderer into the depths, I would rather not have my house-boat parked nearby, thank you very much. In Elizabeth Bowen's "Hand in Glove", an old woman's ghost revenges itself on her abusive daughter, and in T.H. White's "Soft Voices at Passenham" a church organist is tormented by spirits that urge him to play, relentlessly, through the whole of Hallow'een night. These ghosts are not our friends.

But there are lighter hearted stories as well. In "An Encounter in the Mist" by A.N.L. Mundy a well-intentioned ghost wanders a foggy English hillside directing lost hikers down the hill. In the years since his death, however, the hill's topography has changed and he unknowingly directs them over a cliff. (Fear not, the author lived to tell the tale.) In Simon Raven's touching "A Bottle of 1912" a soldier returns home from the war and, being met by his young son, is served with a glass of the wine which his family had promised to drink with him upon his return. Only after he has drunk does he learn that his entire family, including his son, were killed while he was gone. And in the slightly humorous "A Story of Don Juan" by V.S. Pritchett we learn that the Don's famous powers of seduction extend even to women who have shuffled off the mortal coil.

My favourite story this year was "The Cicerones" by Robert Aickman. I don't understand the title at all. John Trant, a tourist in Belgium, rushes into a church, guide-book in hand, to see its art before it closes for the day. His watch stops. He meets a few people inside, all of whom seem to be working there, and all of whom behave somewhat strangely. I don't want to give the story away, but I will say that it builds a great sense of tension that then resolves into singing. It's an excellent story, highly recommended if you can find it.

Happy Hallow'een.

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