“Then what can you want to do now?” said the old lady, gaining courage.
“I wants to make your flesh creep,” replied the boy.

From The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

A Personal Reflection on Ghostly Matters

Every Sunday when I was a boy I would visit my great aunt Marjorie and her husband Robert at their two-up-two-down in Clifton Avenue, Harehills, Leeds. It was a house Uncle Bob had lived in all his life, he’d even been born there. Auntie Marjorie was elderly and rarely left the place, except once a week to get her hair done, so I thought it odd when I overheard her saying to Uncle Bob that the previous night she’d seen his sister, Ethel. Then I twigged – she meant her ghost. Yet it was all very matter of fact. “She was on’turn up t’landing. And I saw your Mavis on Friday.” Years later, when I was sixteen, Auntie Marjorie asked if I would do some wall-papering for her. I asked where. “Oh, the staircase,” she replied.

The house was old and the walls uneven, but the intricate pattern of red roses would help hide the bumps. Over the two days it took me to complete the job I had a constant sense of being watched by people I couldn’t see. No ill intention towards me, more curiosity. And, gentle Reader, that was the nearest I ever ever came to encountering a real ghost. I say real, because on those Sunday visits Auntie Marjorie and I would watch old movies together. She especially liked those with ghosts.

One movie I remember in particular was Between Two Worlds, a 1944 American fantasy featuring passengers on a ship who don’t understand why they’re there. Well, we do – it’s because they’re dead but don’t know it. Yet there are two on board who have quite died in the real world and this leads to the twist of the tale. The Ealing film The Halfway House, also from 1944, featured travellers with shady pasts who take refuge from a storm in an inn that’s run by a father and daughter, who, we discover, were killed in an air bombing raid. Except here, time has gone backwards and they’re not dead yet, though both know they will be as their bodies cast no shadow. During their stay at the inn the guests reassess their lives and, because of the switch in time, are able on leaving to make a new start with different choices. What I was learning, sitting on the settee with my Auntie, was that ghost stories aren’t really about ghosts. They’re tales that can make you think – and sometimes sneak in a moral message too.

Other ghost films I remember are The Ghost and Mrs Muir, The Ghosts of Berkeley Square, Dead of Night, The House of Mystery and The Ghost Train. I loved haunted house movies too and a particular favourite was The Cat and the Canary with Bob Hope – “Don’t big empty houses scare you?” “Not me, I used to be in vaudeville”. Oh yes, I discovered ghost stories could be funny and make you laugh too.