The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Foreword

I Have Been Ghost Hunting

Cambridge has the reputation of being a city of ghosts. With its centuries’ old colleges, streets of ancient buildings and a maze of small alleyways, the spirits of the men and women who once lived and died in the area are almost tangible. Legends have long circulated about wandering spooks, numerous eyewitness reports exist in newspapers and books about restless phantoms – the internet can also be employed to summon up details of several more – and a nocturnal “ghost tour” is a regular feature of the city’s tourist trail.

A story that is associated with one particular property, the Gibbs’ Building on The Backs, has intrigued me for years. The Gibbs is an imposing, three-story edifice, standing in the shadow of King’s College Chapel: that wonderful example of Gothic architecture built in three stages over a period of 100 years. King’s itself was founded in 1441 by King Henry VI as an ostentatious display of royal patronage and intended for boys from Eton College. It has, of course, boasted some distinguished if varied alumni over the years, including E. M. Forster, John Bird and, most recently, Zadie Smith, when the college became one of the first to admit women.

Gibbs’ Building lies on the banks of the River Cam which, as its name suggests, gave the city its name. The area was first settled by the Romans at the southern edge of the Fens, a stretch of countryside consisting mostly of marshes and swamps that were not properly drained until the 17th century. Cambridge evolved at the northernmost point, where the traveller was first confronted by the ominous, dank Fens. Even then, stories were already swirling in from the darkness of strange figures and unearthly sounds that only the very brave – or foolish – would think of investigating.

Today, of course, the whole countryside from Cambridge to the coast of East Anglia is very different. But a story persists in King’s College that a ghostly cry is still sometimes heard on a staircase in Gibbs’ Building. The main authority for this is the ghost story writer, M. R. James, who came from Eton to Kings at the end of the 19th century and was allotted a room close to the staircase. He never heard the cry, James explained in his autobiography, Eton and King’s (1926), but he knew of other academics who had. Out of a similar interest, I have visited Cambridge on a number of occasions hoping to get to the bottom of the haunting. I had one fascinating discussion with a local author and paranormal investigator, T. C. Lethbridge, who suggested a novel reason why the city had so many ghosts. It was due to being near the Fen marshes, he said. During his research, Lethbridge had discovered that ghosts were prevalent in damp areas and came to the conclusion that they might be the result of supernatural “discharges” being conducted through water vapour. It was – and is – an intriguing concept.

But to return to the story of the Gibbs’ Building Ghost. Certainly there is some further evidence about it in the form of brief reports in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, which were given to the Cambridge University Library in 1991. However, though like M. R. James I have neither heard nor seen anything during my visits, there is a possible explanation as to its cause of the phenomena.

It seems that a certain Mr Pote once occupied a set of ground floor rooms at the south end of Gibbs’ Building. He was, it appears, “a most virulent person”, compared by some who crossed his path to Charles Dickens’ dreadful Mr Quilp. Ultimately, Pote was banned from the college for his outrageous behaviour and sending “a profane letter to the Dean”. As he was being turned out of the university, Pote cursed the college “in language of ineffaceable memory”, according to M. R. James. Was it, then, his voice that has been occasionally heard echoing around the passageways where he once walked? I like to think it might an explanation for a mystery that has puzzled me all these years – but as is the way of ghost stories, I cannot be sure.

It comes as no great surprise to discover that M. R. James, who is now acknowledged to be the “Founding Father of the Modern Ghost Story”, should have garnered much of his inspiration while he was resident in Cambridge. He was a Fellow at King’s and, as an antiquarian by instinct, could hardly fail to have been interested in the city’s enduring tradition of the supernatural. Indeed, it seems that he was so intrigued by the accounts of ghosts that he discovered in old documents and papers – a number of them in the original Latin – as well as the recollections of other academics, that he began to adapt them into stories to read to his friends. He chose the Christmas season as an appropriate time to tell these stories and such was the reaction from his colleagues that the event became an annual gathering.

When James was later encouraged by his friends into publishing his first collection of these tales, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, in 1904, the public response was equally enthusiastic. Within a few years the scholarly and retiring academic had effectively modernized the traditional tale of the supernatural into one of actuality, plausibility and malevolence well suited for 20th century readers – banishing the old trappings of antique castles, terrified maidens, evil villains and clanking, comic spectres – and provided the inspiration for other writers who, in the ensuing years, would develop the ghost story into the imaginative, varied and unsettling genre we know and enjoy today.

This book is intended to be a companion to my earlier anthology, Haunted House Stories (2005), as well as a celebration of the Modern Ghost Story ranging from the groundbreaking tales of M. R. James to the dawn of the 21st century. A collection that demonstrates how and why the ghost has survived the march of progress that some critics once believed would confine it to the annals of superstition. Defying, as it did so, the very elements that were expected to bring about its demise: the electric light, the telephone, cars, trains and aeroplanes, not forgetting modern technology and psychology and, especially, the growth of human cynicism towards those things that we cannot explain by logic or reason.

I have deliberately divided the book into seven sections in order to try and show just how diversified it has become in the hands of some very accomplished and skilful writers, a considerable number of them not specifically associated with the genre. After the landmark achievements of James and his circle, readers of supernatural fiction soon found the story-form attracting some of the most popular writers of the first half of the 20th century – notably Conan Doyle, Kipling, Buchan, Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov – who created what amounted to a “Golden Era” of ghost stories. However, the occurrence of two world wars in the first half of the century saw the emergence of a group of writers exploring the idea of life after death as personified by ghosts, which offered an antidote to the appalling slaughter and suffering caused by the conflicts. Some of these stories were read as literally true by sections of the population, obviously desperate for some form of comfort after the loss of dear ones. Among my contributors to this particular section you will find Arthur Machen with his famous story of “The Bowmen”, Algernon Blackwood, Dennis Wheatley and Elizabeth Bowen. Plus one name I believe will be quite unexpected: that of Sir Alec Guinness, whose evocative ghost story at sea, “Money For Jam”, I am delighted to be returning to print here for the first time since 1945!

The Gothic Story also returned revitalized to address new generations, thanks to the work of an excellent school of female writers, loosely categorized as “Ghost Feelers”. At the forefront was the American Edith Wharton, who claimed it was a conscious act more than a belief to write about the supernatural. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, “but Em afraid of them.” Even with this reservation, Wharton and others went ahead to create the “new gothic” of claustrophobia, disintegration and terror of the soul, notably Marie Belloc Lowndes, Eudora Welty, Daphne du Maurier and Jane Gardam. The humorous ghost story which Dickens had first interjected to entertain the readers of Pickwick Papers, the previous century, got a life of its own thanks to a typically innovative story from H. G. Wells in 1902. His lead was followed by others of a similar sense of humour such as Alexander Woollcott, James Thurber, Kingsley Amis and Ray Bradbury.

The book would, of course, be incomplete without a section devoted to the Christmas Ghost Story. Over the years, dozens of newspapers and magazines have echoed the words of the editor of Eve magazine addressing his readers in 1921: “Ghosts prosper at Christmas time: they like the long evenings when the fire is low and the house hushed for the night. After you have sat up late reading or talking about them they love to hear your heart beating and hammering as you steal upstairs to bed in the dark . . .” Here you will find Rider Haggard, Marjorie Bowen, Hammond Innes, Peter Ackroyd and their seasonal compatriots vying to keep you firmly in your seat by the fireside.

The final selection sees the ghost story come of age as the 21st century dawns. It has now completed its evolution from the Medieval Tradition through the Gothic Drama and the Victorian Parlour Tale. In a group of unique stories by Fritz Leiber, J. B. Priestley, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Pullman and Louis de Bernières you will encounter ghosts no longer confined in any way but existing in the most everyday situations of modern living: inhabiting flats and houses, using the transport system, the phone, even the latest IT technology, for self-expression. You will find them emancipated in a way no one could have imagined a century ago. As L. P. Hartley observed recently, “Ghosts have emancipated themselves from their disabilities, and besides being able to do a great many things that human beings can’t do, they can now do a great many that human beings can do. Immaterial as they are or should be, they have been able to avail themselves of the benefits of our materialistic civilisation.” A sobering thought, it seems to me, as technology presses ahead even faster and further in the 21st century.

I started my remarks with M. R. James and I will end with him, as he has been so influential on the ghost story genre. As he was dying, the great man was asked by another writer of supernatural fiction, the Irishman Shane Leslie, to answer a question that had long been bothering him. Did James really believe in ghosts? The old man smiled slightly, lifted his white head and looked his visitor straight in the eyes. “Depend upon it!” he said. “Some of these things are so, but we do not know the rules.” I suggest we may still be looking for those rules at the end of the 21st century.

Peter Haining

June 2007