Ghost stories

Ghost stories. The ghost story genre may be broadly defined as comprising short stories or, less commonly, novels or novellas which have as their central theme the power of the dead to return and confront the living. ‘Real’ ghosts, according to report, are often spasmodic, mute, and obedient to simple laws (a murder to be revealed, a warning to be given). But in fiction, ghosts appear to operate within a moral and physical universe that interpenetrates our own but whose workings are wholly inexplicable to us. Moreover, fictional ghosts take many forms, from the recognizably human to the fearfully alien: insubstantial wraiths, or corporeal creatures with the ability to inflict gross physical harm. Or they may never reveal themselves at all, relying instead on an ability to infect and control the minds of the living.

Rooted in immemorial folk beliefs, ghost stories, as a literary genre, have their own conventions and are a comparatively recent development. It is true that spectacles of the returning dead are common in classical and early modern literature—as in Chaucer's ‘Nun's Priest's Tale’, when Chanticleer the cock tells how the ghost of a murdered man revealed the circumstances of his death to his sleeping companion. But in the literary ghost story the ghost is all, and the deliberate arousal of fear is the story's primary purpose. There are certainly benevolent ghosts, but the most memorable stories are those in which the supernatural is presented in a malevolent or predatory aspect.

Literary ghost stories were largely a Victorian creation, and often included admonitions to rationalism; others took account of attempts to establish the objective existence of supernatural phenomena by devising narratives in which the author posed as the recorder of events, as in The Night-Side of Nature (1848) by Catherine Crowe (1790–1876), a collection of tales claiming to be based on actual experiences. The ghost story's immediate literary antecedents were the Gothic short stories and fragments, common in English magazines during the late 18th and early 19th cents; but while the short story remained the genre's dominant form, 19th-cent. ghost stories were quite different from their Gothic predecessors. Where early Gothic fiction had been unconcerned with either historical detail or present realities, the best writers of Victorian ghost stories set supernatural incidents in convincing everyday settings. There is a parallel here with sensation fiction, another literary vogue of the 1860s and 1870s, in which criminality lurks beneath the surface decorums of daily life.

An early example of a story which struck a new and distinctly anti-Gothic note was Sir W. Scott's ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ (1828). The story takes place in an English castle, set in a real English landscape in the recent past; and its ghost is disturbingly palpable. Such characteristics became fully developed in the stories of Le Fanu, who created the most consistently impressive body of short ghost fiction in the Victorian period. Le Fanu gave his most effective stories credible settings and characters and was adept at creating ghosts that induced physical fear—like the famous spectral monkey in ‘Green Tea’ (1869). His first collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), inaugurated the golden age of the Victorian ghost story, and for the next 20 years or so it flourished in the pages of such monthly magazines as Temple Bar, Tinsley's, Belgravia, and Dickens's All the Year Round. Dickens himself wrote the much anthologized ghost story ‘The Signalman’ (1866), though his role as popularizer of Christmas and its association with the telling of ghost stories was more important. Many writers of magazine ghost stories were women, amongst them Amelia B. Edwards (1831–92), whose famous story ‘The Phantom Coach’ first appeared in All the Year Round in 1864; M. E. Braddon, author of ‘The Cold Embrace’ (1860) and ‘Eveline's Visitant’ (1867), both published in Belgravia; R. Broughton (Tales for Christmas Eve, 1873); and Mrs J. H. Riddell (1832–1906: Weird Stories, 1882). Women contributed to the genre's development into the 20th cent., with writers such as ‘ Vernon Lee’ (Hauntings, 1890), E. Wharton (Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910), V. Hunt (Tales of the Uneasy, 1911), M. Bowen (Curious Happenings, 1917), and M. Sinclair (Uncanny Stories, 1923).

Le Fanu's heir, and the great exponent of the factualizing narrative, was M. R. James. His antiquarian ghost stories, the first of which, ‘Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book’, published in 1895, drew on his own formidable learning. His four collections, beginning with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), were built on solid Victorian foundations. His ingeniously plotted stories, some of which drew on themes from English and Scandinavian folklore, typically portrayed safe and ordered worlds invaded by terrifying agents of unappeasable supernatural malice. James's style was emulated by younger contemporaries such as E. G. Swain (1861–1938: The Stoneground Ghost Tales, 1912), R. H. Malden (1879–1951: Nine Ghosts, 1943), and A. N. L. Munby (1913–74: The Alabaster Hand, 1949); his influence is still detectable more recently, in works by Ramsey Campbell (see horror) and S. Hill, whose novel The Woman in Black (1983) has been adapted for stage and television.

If M. R. James is the master of the direct ghost story, in which the intrusion of the supernatural is objective and incontrovertible, his namesake H. James created, in The Turn of the Screw (1898), a potent reinterpretation of Victorian conventions, which begins with a deliberately Dickensian evocation but develops into an ambiguous narrative that blurs the boundary between subjective and objective phenomena. Other well-known stories in which indirectness predominates over blatancy include ‘How Love Came to Professor Guildea’ (in Tongues of Conscience, 1900) by R. Hichens (1864–1950) and ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ (in Widdershins, 1911) by Oliver Onions. An even more complete acceptance of the inconclusive characterizes the ghost stories of W. de la Mare (e.g. ‘Out of the Deep’, in The Riddle, 1923). More recently, the enigmatic stories of Robert Aickman (1914–81), in Powers of Darkness (1966), Cold Hand in Mine (1975), and other collections, fuse traditional elements of ghost fiction with oblique narrations that are concerned more with ‘the void behind the face of order’.

The first thirty years of the 20th cent. saw the rise of specialist ghost story writers such as A. Blackwood (The Listener, 1907); W. F. Harvey (1885–1937: Midnight House, 1910); E. F. Benson (The Room in the Tower, 1912); A. M. Burrage (1889–1956: Some Ghost Stories, 1927); and H. Russell Wakefield (1888–1964: They Return at Evening, 1928). Like their Victorian predecessors, these writers show us ordinary men and women confronted by mysteries that are beyond nature and reason. Ghost stories continue to be written and read, their resilience and adaptability testifying to the tenacity of what Virginia Woolf called ‘the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid’. See also Gothic fiction.