Calling All Spooks

One of the characters in Jerome K. Jerome’s The Man of Science (1892) says, “I think it illogical to disbelieve anything that we are not able to disprove.” Equally you could argue it is illogical to believe in a something whose existence is unprovable, yet that doesn’t stop people having faith in some sort of ongoing life after death. But if there is such a thing, what are the right words to describe what we become?

The English language has the benefit of having a varied linguistic ancestry and so has several different ways of referring to those who have departed this life. The word ‘spirit’ originates from the Latin spiritus, meaning ‘breath’, and so spirit even when referring to those no longer with us, still has a real sense of life about it. In another linguistic tradition there’s the word ‘ghost’, which comes from the German Geist, which has its derivation in the Old Icelandic geiski, meaning ‘fear’, which gives it a linguistic history evoking unease and trepidation. Etymologies aren’t always that useful, but perhaps partly because of their different derivations, ghost and spirit have developed particular meanings and usage. Clairvoyants, for instance, are far more likely to say ‘spirit’ than ‘ghost’, because for them the spiritus is a soul that has simply moved on to a higher realm of existence. Equally, if a headless ancestor turned up at your bedpost waving chains, it’s more than likely you’d refer to such a fearful apparition as a ghost. That said, many people use ghost and spirit interchangeably, including most of the characters in this collection. The exception though is Billie Blooming, who, not surprisingly is a psychic medium.

A follow on from all this is, what if the supernatural entity or presence or whatever is neither ghost nor spirit? If you wish to get pedantic you could argue that several ‘ghost tales’ by M.R. James don’t actually have a ghost at all – in the sense of someone who died and has now returned to haunt you – for his tales instead often feature a supernaturally empowered artefact or document. Think here of the peculiar binoculars in A View from a Hill and the cabalistic testaments found in The Tractate Middoth and The Uncommon Prayer-Book. And then there are all those weird spiders in The Ash Tree, the demon in Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook and whatever it is in Casting the Runes – ‘He put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’ Freudians have had fun finding all sorts of meanings in that over the years! M.R. James incidentally never considered Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to be a ‘ghost story’. Marley, as a former living human being, is a ghost, but the others, call them phantoms, spectres, shades or shadows, are essentially spiritual incarnations of concepts of Christmas and Time.

three eyeballs

And what of the word ‘sprite’, that supernatural entity of European folklore? Or ‘ghoul’, which comes from the Arabic ghūl, a demon-like creature that robs graves and eats corpses? Then there are banshees, boggarts, lemures, kelpies, bag-a-boos, imps, poltergeists and the rest. And should we really include in a ‘ghost story’ anthology the vampires found in Theophile Gautier’s Clarinonde and E.F. Benson’s Mrs Amworth? And what about all those Gothic demons in the tales of Sheridan Le Fanu or the mummy in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No. 249? And we haven’t even mentioned yet the gastropod aberrations in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft or their offspring that found themselves in the tales of the generation that followed Lovecraft? And then there are those stories where the natural world turns unnatural, such as the strange behaviour of birds in Philip MacDonald’s Our Feathered Friends or that Christmas fir tree taken, with deadly consequences, from its rightful home in H.R. Wakefield’s Lucky’s Grove. All these tales can be found in popular ‘ghost story’ anthologies, yet none has an actual ghost.

In the Victorian era tales of the supernatural and the marvellous were collected under the general title Weird Tales, as in Charlotte Riddell’s collection of 1882, as the word weird in those days had connotations of the supernatural or the alien. Sheridan Le Fanu used the term ‘romantic horror’, Robert Louis Stevenson referred to ‘crawlers’ and Robert Aickman spoke of ‘strange stories’. Stephen King talks about his ‘fearsomes’ and the ‘shudder pulps’ of the 1930s, but in more recent years it’s ‘ghost stories’ which have become the umbrella term under which all weirdness shelters. In this collection there are tales which clearly involve actual ghosts, but there are also Christmas angels and a phantom shadow that’s perhaps more monster than spook. Yet in all the stories there is a supernatural element, or at least that which is perceived to be supernatural, and that I would say is the prerequisite of the ‘ghost tale’.