‘What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem What If You Slept?

The World of Story

Over the years I’ve come to think of stories as part and parcel of our human survival kit. And it all begins when we’re children with that unquenchable thirst for a good yarn. Through stories we experience what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes, and so develop the ability to understand the feelings of those not like ourselves. Empathy in other words. As we mature, the story world becomes a place where we can encounter and grapple with real life conflicts in a relatively safe way. Stories are often morality tales and we like the idea of natural justice where bad people get their comeuppance. But fortune is a fickle friend and pure chance can sometimes lead to dire consequences, and such tales reflect a bleaker, more nihilistic view of the world. Then there are those stories which are never fully explained, where truths are relative and ever changing. The point is, all philosophies of life can be found in the tales we tell.

Story then is a playground of exploration for the mind, but it can also be a gym for the emotions and feelings. At its most basic level what we’re talking about here is sheer physical sensation, but stories can also purge the mind by pity and fear, a concept Aristotle calls catharsis. Some story theorists even suggest that we carry our psychological responses into the real world. We process the story, mull it over, question it, argue it, and in doing so, the tale stays with us, sometimes throughout our lives. Ah, but you may be thinking, “That’s all well and good, but what about the joy of the roller coaster ride that story has to offer? The twists, the turns, the suspense, the thrill, the jokes, the fun and colourful characters. We go to the story funfair for entertainment, after all.” Yes, that’s true as well, but there’s something else we’ve missed out.

I said that I visited my Auntie Marjorie every Sunday, but not why. Frankly, it was to escape problems at home. When I was nine, my mother came back from work, laid down on the couch and died. After that, my father, a diagnosed schizophrenic, found life an impossible challenge. I never saw the men in white coats but I knew they’d been because my father wouldn’t be there when I woke up. But his time in hospital was never permanent and so he’d come home and we’d be back to where we started. My Auntie Marjorie’s settee and the films we watched together offered me a world where I could feel safe and forget for a few hours the one I had to return to. When I taught story theory as an undergraduate course at the University of Birmingham I would always say to my drama students, “Never mock escapism if you’ve never lived a life where you needed to escape.” Of course, I’ve since learnt that I wasn’t alone. John Gardner in his fascinating book On Becoming a Novelist points out that writers are often people who learnt in childhood to turn, in times of distress, to fiction and make-believe. And that’s certainly what I did.

So where do ghost tales fit in to all this rambling story theory? Well, let’s start with that most basic and primeval of all human sensations: fear. With fear comes distinct physical changes in our body. Hairs stand on end, flesh tingles, limbs become rigid, faces are blanched white, mouths stay open, blood runs cold, and shivers go in search of a spine to run down. Okay, some of those are more fanciful than physiological, but that’s what being afraid feels like, especially in the catalepsy of a nightmare. As E.F. Benson puts it in A Tale of an Empty House, ‘as that limping step moved down the passage I felt fear, the hand of the nightmare that, as it clutches, paralyses and inhibits not action only, but thought.’

But why would we want to experience and even pay for such a thing in our waking life? Well, let’s not forget we’re animals and hearing the tread of something that does not wish to be seen is still there in our atavistic memory of oncoming darkness and its lurking shadows. And that fear is all the greater if you believe those footsteps belong to the dead, who’ve come to take you with them. Sitting in our electrically lit homes, it perhaps does no harm to occasionally be reminded that we still vulnerable flesh and blood.

When we’re reading about someone who is afraid or watching them on the screen, we walk empathetically with them and share that fear, yet we always keep a level of control. Choosing to be frightened is very different from involuntarily being frightened. Even so, if we allow ourselves the blood poison of a scary story, well, that results in sensations which shut out all else. As one of E.F Benson’s characters observes in The Bus-Conductor, “I want to be made to creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.” A bizarre sort of escapism perhaps, but at least when in rictus fear you’re not worrying about the gas bill. And when we experience that sudden adrenalin rush of terror it reminds us we’re alive. Let’s be honest here, when it’s the other guy that gets it, we say, “Rather him than me. They’re dead. I’m not. Let’s eat.” Oh, and one more thing, a ghost tale is the perfect date movie, for scary scenes offer an excuse for sudden embrace. That nervous hand that grabbed your knee as you watched A Nightmare on Elm Street. Who’d have thought all these years later you’d now be celebrating your Ruby wedding.

But the shiver factor isn’t the only response to a ghost story. In fact many writers would prefer their tales to be unsettling rather than scary. E.F. Benson in his brief preface to The Room in the Tower, and Other Stories (1912) wrote that his stories were written ‘in the hopes of giving some pleasant qualms to their reader.’ M.R. James had something similar in mind when, in his preface to Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), he wrote, ‘If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.’ Notice the reference to that solitary road. M.R. James wanted his stories to stay with you long after you’d read them. Not just a physical thrill for the moment, but a psychological agitation that remains with you as you walk among the darkening shadows of the night.

It should be said that in recent years writers, especially screenwriters, have used the ghost story not to frighten an audience but as means of exploring social issues, political injustice and sexual acceptance. Think here of  All of Us Strangers, His House, Under the Shadow and even Coco. On personal note, after watching Coco I went in the attic to find a photograph of my maternal grandfather to put it in a frame, as he was the only grandparent whose picture was not on display in my house. The general point here is that the otherness of the ghost has become an avatar which has allowed the story teller to shape a complex message to a wide audience who probably would not have sought out an overtly polemic tale.