‘With her head tucked underneath her arm
She walks the bloody tower
With her head tucked underneath her arm
At the midnight hour.’

‘With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm’, written in 1934 by Robert Patrick Weston (1878 – 1936) and William Herbert Lee (1880 – 1946) for Stanley Holloway (1890 – 1982). The ‘she’ in the song refers to Anne Boleyn.

Ghosts: A Biographical Guide

No two ghosts are quite the same. However, without, I hope, turning into one of those zealous lepidopterists with a sharp pin and sticky label, it might be useful to consider some general types. With this biographical guide I hope to show the range of ghosts open to the writer, but it should be said from the off that the category of ghost doesn’t necessarily set the tone, be it comic or tragic, of the story itself.

“He had passed on without pausing; without looking at me; I could almost have believed, without seeing me!” says a character in Amelia B. Edwards’ Was it an Illusion? (1881). Let’s call this the ‘oblivious ghost’, who has little or no awareness of your presence. Another example can be found in George MacDonald’s Uncle Cornelius His Story (1869), where there is an encounter with a woman who “looked as if she had walked straight out of an ancient drawing-room in her evening attire”. The word ‘ancient’ leads us on to the ‘time-slip ghost’, who appears to be living in a different time dimension rather than a parallel spiritual realm. Think here of the characters in old fashioned dress in the coach in The Ghosts of the Mail (from The Pickwick Papers, 1836) by Charles Dickens.

Then there is the ‘trapped ghost’, who may have escaped the punishment of the ungodly, but is not yet able to receive the reward of the righteous. Sir Simon de Canterville, for example. And here you might add the maritime legend of ‘The Flying Dutchman’, the phantom ship condemned to sail forever. A variation on the trapped ghost is what you could call the re-enactment or ‘echo ghost’, who is confined in our earthly plane and for some reason is forced to relive a terrible trauma or offence. This metaphysical concept is explored in detail in E.F. Benson’s 1922 tale In the Tube – “For it seems certain that the spirit of a man, after the death of his body, is obliged to re-enact such a crime, with a view, I suppose we may guess, to his remorse and his eventual redemption.” In such stories it’s the spiritual nature of the suffering that tends to be the focus and theme.

A cousin of the echo ghost could be said to be the ‘imprint ghost’, where the idea is that the walls of a room or the bricks of a house have somehow soaked up the psychic energy of an event, usually traumatic, which a living person close by then senses and a curious 1972 British television horror drama called The Stone Tape, written by Nigel Kneale (writer of the BBC series The Quatermass Experiment) explores this idea. The story features a team of experts who move into a Victorian mansion with a reputation for being haunted. After a ghostly sighting the scientists try to determine if the stones of the building really are able to record past events. The drama had a great impact and following the broadcast there developed the hypothesis that became known as the ‘Stone Tape Theory’. However, the concept of a ghost being the result of an event somehow imprinted in time or absorbed by its surroundings isn’t new, for it’s there in Margaret Oliphant’s The Open Door written in 1882 where it’s postulated that a trauma event of the past ‘might impress itself somehow upon the hidden heart of nature.’

An entertaining take on the imprint ghost is A.M. Burrage’s The Fourth Wall (1915), where friends rent a cottage once lived in by an actor who toured for years in a play. The cottage in the mind’s eye of the visitors is transformed into a stage with one of the walls disappearing to reveal a watching audience (the title of the story refers to the conceptual barrier in a theatre between the stage and the people in the auditorium). The explanation for all this is that the actor who lived there imbued the cottage with such strong memories of his performances that the guests became able to see them. However, this is perhaps more a form of ESP or Extra-Sensory Perception than an actual haunting.

Let’s move on to the ‘incognito ghost’, where a person encounters a character who seems alive enough, only is later discovered to be dead or to have recently departed this world. Examples of this type of ghost can be found in Charles Dickens’ The Portrait Painter’s Story (1861), Edith Wharton’s Afterward (1910) and A.M. Burrage’s Smee (1929). Over the years, the incognito ghost has become probably the most overused of all ghost scenarios and a regular reader of supernatural tales can usually spot this twist coming like the fleet at D-Day. That said, it can useful as a decoy. Frankly it’s as clear as sunshine that in Nancy Spain’s 1952 tale The Bewilderment of Snake McKoy, Mrs Bellwood, the writer in the attic, is a ghost and that the tale is leading to that revelation, except the big twist comes in the final line. And a real killer it is.

Another popular ghost scenario is where a character dresses up as a supposed ghost, only for the real one to turn up. You might think of this phantom as the ‘usurping ghost’ and you’ll find an entertaining example in The Ghost (1928) by Catherine Wells, wife of H.G. Wells. In such tales the pretender or hoaxer often meets an unpleasant demise, as in Louisa Baldwin’s The Real and the Counterfeit (1895), where ‘the Cistercian monk passed them like a white mist that sank into the wall, and Musgrave and Lawley were alone with the dead body of their friend, whose masquerading dress had become his shroud.’ Fans of Alfred Hitchcock Presents might recognise the phoney-ghost-turns-out-to-be-real scenario from a 1959 story called Banquo’s Chair, where a retired detective plans to employ an actress to make a murder suspect believe he’s seeing the ghost of the woman he killed and so confess the crime. And the ruse works – “Get out whoever you are or I’ll kill you again!” – only the actress who was meant to play the murdered lady turns up after the event, saying she’d been delayed. Who then (or what) was the ghostly figure the killer saw?

There is as well the ‘doppelganger ghost’, who has a physical similarity or spiritual affinity with the main character of the story, as in Charles Dickens’ The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) and The Signal-Man (1866). Another example is the protagonist in Henry James’ The Jolly Corner (1908), where Spencer Brydon encounters a version of the man he might have been, and even offers a horticultural metaphor to explain the situation: “It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever.” Desmond MacCarthy’s Pargiton and Harby (1926) offers a more psychological approach in that it’s a portrait of a guilty man who appears to be haunting himself.

A different kind of duality can be found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Markheim (1885), but here the supernatural figure, who arrives after a murder has been committed, is more an angel or incarnation of conscience, though there are hints of a physical resemblance: ‘At times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself.’ And we mustn’t forget in the modern era Muriel Spark’s The Leaf-Sweeper (1952), where one version of Johnnie is flesh and blood and the other is a ghost and each have a very different attitude to Christmas. But leave it to Sheridan Le Fanu to outdo all these doppelgangers in his 1872 tale The Haunted House in Westminster (also known as Mr. Justice Harbottle), where there are three troubling lookalikes that unnerve the wicked Judge Harbottle, including a caricature of himself who acts as judge in his own murder trial. When it came to doubles, Sheridan Le Fanu was not one, as it were, to do things by halves.

One of the most regular phantoms in supernatural fiction is the ‘omen ghost’, or what Edith Nesbit in Man-size in Marble (1887) calls ‘a presentiment of evil’. In these stories the sighting of a historical spook, or sometimes its appearance in a dream, is thought to be a precursor of death. Think here of the ghostly old squire and his hunting party in At Chrighton Abbey, where the housekeeper observes, “You’ve seen that which always brings misfortune and sorrow to this house, Miss Sarah. You’ve seen the dead.” Yes, it’s impending doom for the unmarried son, but the actual focus of the tale is on the cold and unfeeling nature of his fiancée and the change that bereavement brings in her attitude to those less fortunate than herself. Another example of the omen ghost can be found in Charles Whibley’s Twelve O’Clock (1926), the supposed story of the Thomas Lyttelton (1744-1779), known as ‘the wicked Lord Lyttelton’, who in Whibley’s tale is visited by a spirit who tells him he will die in three days time. And indeed he does, for the twelve o’clock of the title becomes the hour of his death.

In Rudyard Kipling’s At the End of the Passage (1890), encountering the apparition becomes the means of the demise: “He was scared to death. Look at those eyes. For pity’s sake don’t let him be buried with them open!” and in Julius Long’s The Pale Man (1934) the spook turns out to be the Grim Reaper. The Sweeper (1931) by A.M. Burrage features a tramp who comes begging, but the unkind lady of the house makes him sweep her garden in payment for food, only as he does the job he dies, saying that one day he will come for her and she’d better be ready. From then on the lady makes amends for her behaviour and insists to her servants that anyone coming to her door asking for food is given some. As with At Chrighton Abbey, a brush with what we may call ‘the ghost of death’ turns a character’s haughty nature into kindness.

Another reoccurring spectre is the ‘possessing ghost’, where a spirit takes over the physical body of the living, often with ill intent, as in Lennox Robinson’s A Pair of Muddy Shoes (1919) and Lady Cynthia Asquith’s ‘God Grant That She Lye Stille’ (1947). A tale which proved a popular take on the possessing spirit was D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner (1926), which was twice made into a movie. The story features a boy in a luckless family who when riding his rocking horse discovers the name the winning horse in an important race before it is run, but the price to be paid for this knowledge gained on the rocking horse is the boy’s life.

A different type of possession is where a spirit inhabits an inanimate object, as in Algeron Blackwood’s The Kit-Bag (1908), ‘where the canvas fell into a fold like a nose and forehead, and the brass rings for the padlock just filled the position of the eyes. A shadow – or was it a travel stain? for he could not tell exactly – looked like hair. It gave him rather a turn, for it was so absurdly, so outrageously, like the face of John Turk, the murderer.’ You might also include here the glove in Elizabeth Bowen’s Hand in Glove (1952) and the strange pages found in Margaret Irwin’s The Book (1930). Plus there’s the supernatural portrait in Hume Nisbet’s The Old Portrait (1890) and whatever it is that’s in the porcelain ornament in C.H.B. Kitchin’s The Chelsea Cat (1952). Saki’s Laura (1914) takes a different possession tack and explores the idea of a spirit returning as an animal or a young boy.

The ‘child ghost’ is usually harmless enough, as in Hugh Walpole’s The Little Ghost (1933) and A.M. Burrage’s Playmates (1927), though the nature of the child ghost in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Lost Ghost (1903) is far more ambiguous. The young twins in E.F. Benson’s How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery (1911) become unthreatening when they are shown pity and sympathy which brings about ‘a wonderful sense of peace.’ However, we have the Edwardian master of the ghost tale to thank for making ghost children truly frightening. I was thirteen when I first saw the television adaptation of M.R. James’ Lost Hearts and frankly it freaked me out. The story features a predatory old man, a boy called Stephen (with the same name and of a similar age to me), but it was those corpse-like child ghosts with their lifeless green faces and long finger nails that stayed in my head for years to come. Even to this day I find the music made by a hurdy-gurdy a shiver giver. Ultimately the child ghosts are Stephen’s protectors, but the reveal of the boy’s chest, showing where his lost heart had been, is a terror I will never forget.

The ‘suicide ghost’ is often revealed in the back story to be the reason why a place is haunted, as in O. Henry’s The Furnished Room (1904), E.F. Benson’s The Other Bed (1912) and The Story of Clifford House, by an anonymous author (the story first appeared in THE MISTLETOE BOUGH in 1878, edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon). Elizabeth Bowen has an unusual take on the suicide ghost, for in The Apple Tree (1931) it’s the tree on which a girl hanged herself that is the manifestation.

The Bells, the 1871 play by Leopold David Lewis, has it that one Christmas Eve, Mathias robbed and killed a man and now he hears the bells of his sledge and sees the dead man before him and in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth the cry is “Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!” when the murderer sees Banquo’s ghost at the evening feast. Key to both plays is that it’s only the killers (and of course the audience) who see the manifestation. It’s a moot question, but are the ghosts here real or phantoms of a disturbed mind?

The demons of Sheridan Le Fanu’s tales are presented as primarily supernatural, reflecting a world view where, as Barton says in The Watcher, “There is a God – a dreadful God – and that retribution follows guilt. In ways, the most mysterious and stupendous; by agencies, the most inexplicable and terrific; there is a spiritual system – great Heavens, how frightfully I have been convinced! – a system malignant, and inexorable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned!” The sins of the past haunting the agitated mind of the living is a key theme in many of Le Fanu’s tales. Curiously Le Fanu’s The Haunted House in Westminster and Lewis’ The Bells have a similar basic plot in that both Mathias, the burgomaster, and Judge Harbottle, are haunted by the ghost of a man whose death they brought about, leading to a dream where they are tried for murder and presented with rope with which in real life they then hang themselves. Freud not doubt would have explained the dreams as projections of guilt and so lets call what we have here the ‘guilt ghost’.

Following on from all this we have what you might refer to as ‘the psychological ghost’, where an explanation involving the mind is probably more feasible than the one relying on a supernatural agency. The ghost in Edith Wharton’s The Triumph of the Mind (1916) can easily be construed as an unconscious instinct warning the traveller who has taken shelter in a house of the dangers that lurk within it. In Desmond MacCarthy’s Pargiton and Harby (1926), where a guilty man essentially haunts himself to death, the term ‘incipent persecution mania’ is used to explain what may or may not be spooky events. The key point is that the exclusivity and certainty of the supernatural, so essential to Gothic ghost tales of Victorian fiction, had by the Edwardian era faded to doubt and ambiguity.

A different kind of ghost is the ‘shadow ghost’, as in Tom Hood’s The Shadow of a Shade where there is an awareness ‘that the light of her single candle flung what seemed to be two shadows of the sick man on the wall.’ Another strange shadow on the wall can be found, not unsurprisingly, in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Shadow on the Wall (1902), where a shadow appears after the death in a family and no light from any lamp can affect it. Creepy. Likewise the shadow in Edith Nesbit’s The Shadow (1905), which isn’t a ghost as such, but something perhaps more like a shadow of past deeds haunting the present. However, the writer who used the power of the shadow most effectively in the ghost tale was H.R. Wakefield. The Cairn features a peculiar shadow that could move and change its shape and in Into Outer Darkness the shadows at Whitling Manor which stain the wall lead to death. Perhaps though Wakefield’s most menacing shadow can be found in He Cometh and He Passeth By where a dabbler in the occult sends a man a cut out paper outline of a beast, with a figure painted on it. Soon an unaccountable shadow begins to haunt the man and it’s revealed that it’s the six words of the title which brought the monster into being. Here I should acknowledge that the phrase ‘unaccountable shadow’ in that story became the inspiration for the phenomenon in The Strange Case of the Unaccountable Shadow.

Of course there are other types of spook, including the ‘unknowing ghost’ who doesn’t realise they are dead, as in Algernon Blackwood’s Transition (1916) and Louis de Bernières’ This Beautiful House (2004). And the unknowing ghost can be found, albeit briefly, in the early scenes of such films such as Ghost and Always, and, if you’ve seen them, is the big twist at the end of two classic ghost movies. Then there’s the ‘erotic ghost’ or femme fatal ghost, as in Algernon Blackwood’s A Threefold Cord… (1931) – “I wish so long to find you,” she said in a low, husky tone that was almost a whisper; “for so vairy long I watch you – here in this same place” – and Ernest Theordor Amadeus Hoffmann’s The Deserted House (1817), where the ghost seer becomes ‘aroused and excited through all my nerve centres.’ Plus, of course, Coward’s enticing Elvira. Famous people, or rather the ghosts of the famous, occasionally make an appearance in fictional tales, including the legendary cricketer W.C. Grace in Lord Dunsay’s Autumn Cricket (1949), William Shakespeare, plus sidekick Ben Jenson, in Denis Mackail’s The Lost Tragedy (1926) and the Emperor Tiberius in Rose Macaulay’s Whitewash (1952).

There are those tales as well where a place is the ghostly apparition, as in Bernard Capes’ The Vanishing House (1898) and Ralph Adams Cram’s The Dead Valley (1893), which H.P. Lovecraft singled out for achieving “a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description.” Plus there’s the ghostly mist in H.F. Arnold’s The Night Wire (1926) and even that spooky Christmas tree in H.R. Wakefield’s Lucky’s Grove (1940).

There are as well a number of spook stories which seem to involve a haunting or supernatural event, only in the end it’s all explained away as human agency. You might call this the ‘false-alarm ghost’ and several feature in the Carnacki tales of William Hope Hodgson. In Richard Harris Barham’s The Spectre of Tappington (1840), there appears to be a spook who steals the breeches of Lieutenant Seaforth, only it turns out Seaforth is a somnambulist who has been spending his nights digging a grave for his trousers, breeches, pantaloons, silk-net tights and patent cords. An equally bizarre explanation for what is taken to be a supernatural happening can be found in Wilkie Collins’ The Travellers Story of a Terribly Strange Bed (1852). The story is presented as if it’s some monstrous bed that has the power to encroach on the person lying in it. However, it’s revealed the guest has been drugged and the bed is a contraption operated from the upper floor in order to kill those who sleep in it and steal their money. It’s still a four-poster grave, but one of human rather than supernatural agency. Then there’s Mary Webb’s Mr Tallent’s Ghost (1926), the curious tale of a man who, as a psychological experiment, fakes his own death in order to observe the reaction of his family and friends to his ‘ghost’. A thought, I suspect, which has been the fancy of many minds over the years.

Stephen King says in Danse Macabre that “without the sacred, there is no profane,” and similarly there can be no ghost without a ghost seer and from a creative perspective there is always a symbiotic relationship between the two. The ghost and the ghost seer complement each other in the same way as does a protagonist and an antagonist because that is how stories are constructed and designed.