Hamlet: My father – methinks I see my father.
Horatio: Where, my lord?
Hamlet: In my mind’s eye, Horatio.
Hamlet, Act 1, scene 2
To Reveal – or Not to Reveal – The Ghost
Stephen King in Danse Macabre makes a useful distinction between terror and horror, suggesting that terror is what the mind imagines – the fear of the half-know, what may or may not be lurking behind the door – whereas horror is what the eye sees in plain sight – “Oh look! It’s a bog-eyed monster!”. In some stories there is what King calls ‘gross-out’ and that leads to neither horror nor terror but revulsion. King argues that, artistically, horror is best, next is terror and then revulsion.
Interestingly Roald Dahl says in his introduction to his collection of his favourite ghost tales, Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (1983), that the best ghost stories don’t actually have ghosts in them, or at least you don’t see the ghost as such but only the results of their actions. That’s not actually the case in several of the tales in Dahl’s collection – it’s horses for courses after all – but his general point is a fair one because it’s what you’re imagining in your head that’s often key to any spook tale. It’s essentially the same point made by Stephen King who argues that in the movies the power of the mind to imagine is always more commanding than special effects.
It’s worth mentioning in this context M.R. James and ‘flash or stab’ at the crescendo of the tale, where, for the briefest of moments, you see the phantom and sometimes the terrible deed it has done – ‘His mouth was full of sand and stones, and his teeth and jaws were broken to bits. I only glanced once at his face’. And one look was enough for that narrator of A Warning to the Curious was enough. Modern screenwriters, incidentally, refer to this element of a story as ‘the kick’, but it’s a dramatic moment you could argue that goes way back to ancient Greek theatre. Violence, murder and sex were not permitted on the Athenian stage. However, the consequences of murder, the dead bodies of those killed in the play, were allowed to be seen, if briefly, via the ekkyklema, which was a platform rolled out from the skene, the building behind the playing area where masks were changed. M.R. James would probably have been aware of this tradition, yet perhaps it’s more the reticent nature of his narrators which keeps the description of the supernatural encounters within a certain limit. That said, The Diary of Mr Poynter does have an extended crescendo, as does my homage to M.R. James, The Portrait of a Looking-Glass.
But what about the more general issue of whether a ghost is or is not seen, or indeed whether they are corporally real or not? Well, in ghost stories there is little consistency on this point.
Let’s begin with the mysterious lady in Charles Dickens’ The Portrait-Painter’s Story, published in ALL YEAR ROUND in September 1861, a journal edited by Dickens himself. The sitter for the portrait is believed by the narrator to be real, only of course the twist – typical of many tales of the period – is that she is revealed to be a ghost. A curious postscript to the publication of this tale is that Dickens received a letter from a miniaturist, one Thomas Frank Heaphy, claiming that he was that very painter in the story and had written his own version of the tale. Dickens replied assuring Heaphy that he had heard the story told at a a friend’s house and assumed it was an anonymous piece of lore. Nowadays we would call it an urban myth.
The point is that in such narratives the walking dead are always, as with Mrs. Veal Daniel Defoe’s The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1705), ‘of substance’. In other words, corporally real. The mysterious lady in Guy de Maupassant’s A Ghost (1883) has manifested herself in order to get her hair combed, and that hair is definitely of substance because, as de Maupassant’s narrator informs us, ‘my dolman’ – a sort of Turkish robe – ‘was covered with long woman’s hair which had rolled themselves around the buttons.’
Now let’s move on to corpses that won’t stay in their graves and begin with the old lady ghost in Sir Walter Scott’s 1828 tale, The Tapestried Chamber. ‘Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived.’ And you can’t get more Gothic horror than that. More subtle is the decaying carcass in Edith Nesbit’s 1905 story In the Dark. True, the spectre is not exactly a corpse, but since it is described as being harder than those alive – ‘more like a stone thing’ – we can deduce perhaps that the process of rigour mortis has at least begun. Decay though is well under way in Perceval Landon’s Thurnley Abbey (1908), because when the ghost, if you can call it that, appears, it does so swathed in a rotten and tattered veiling, and has a visage ‘not entirely that of a skull, though the eyes and the flesh of the face were totally gone’. In Amelia Edwards’ The Phantom Coach (1864) the putrefaction is contagious because it’s even spread to the coach itself: ‘The sashes splintered at the touch. The leather fittings were crusted over with mould, and literally rotting from the woodwork.’ And it’s worth noting here the description of the medical skeleton in Jerome K. Jerome’s The Man of Science (1892) where ‘those empty sockets in that grinning head… seemed to be drawing him towards them’.
At least that skeleton had all his bones, but what about when there are only parts of you that do the haunting? The title of Arthur Quiller-Couch’s A Pair of Hands (1910) gives the game away as to which limbs we see of the child ghost called Margaret. As the tenant at Tesillack at observes: ‘just a pair of small hand and the wrists, and after that – nothing. They were moving briskly – washing themselves clean. I saw the water trickle and splash over them – not through them – but just as it would on real hands.’
Disembodied limbs, solid or otherwise, bring us to the question of whether footfalls (or footsteps as we would call them today) can be seen and heard. Again there is little consistency on this issue in ghost stories. There are visible ghosts that can walk side-by-side with the living, but leave no footprints, as in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1952 story The Old Nurse’s Tale (“Don’t tell me!” said I, very stern. “I tracked you by your foot-marks through the snow; there were only yours to be seen: and if you had had a little girl to go hand-in-hand with you up the hill, don’t you think the footprints would have gone along with yours?”), yet there are those spirits who remain unseen, as in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1859 story The House and the Brain, who are still able to leave a physical trace. As Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator tells us, ‘I saw, just before me, the print of a foot suddenly form itself.’ And this takes us on to the nebulous and insubstantial ghost.
For the ill-defined, there’s the snowdrift in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1883 classic The Captain of the ‘Polestar’ (1883), which may or may not have taken the shape of a woman and for the see-through and translucent there’s Mary Louisa Molesworth’s 1887 tale The Story of the Rippling Train: ‘He came towards the library, and seeing the door open walked in, and I, still gazing, saw his figure pass through that of the woman in the doorway as you may walk through a wreath of mist or smoke.’ At last a ghost who can walk through walls! And talking of walls, there is the ghostly shadow on the wall in Tom Hood’s 1869 story The Shadow of a Shade: ‘There was something always at his side, which none could see, but which cast a shadow.’ However, it’s worth mentioning that the opposite can also be found in ghost stories. As Rudyard Kipling’s At the End of the Passage (1890) has it: ‘Except that it cast no shadow it was in all respects real.’
Ghosts then in Victorian supernatural fiction are rarely completely invisible in all respects. An exception can be found in Fitz James O’Brien’s What was it? (1859). And what a ‘what’ it was! The narrator writes, ‘I shudder now as I think of that awful moment. I saw nothing! Yes; I had one arm firmly clasped round a breathing, panting, corporeal shape, my other hand gripped with all its strength a throat as warm, as apparently fleshy, as my own.’ Creepy. But even this exception isn’t really an exception because the entity is then tied down and given chloroform. Later the lifeless body, which they can feel but not see, is covered with plaster and from the mould a figure is made that looked ‘capable of feeding on human flesh.’ The general point is that Gothic terror needs some sort of visible or physical spectre, be it corporeal, translucent or just shadows.
The Edwardian ghost story has more ambiguity in that the early twentieth century ghost is often explainable as a psychological phenomenon. Think here of spectre in Edith Wharton’s The Triumph of the Mind (1916) which 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.
But is it possible to have a ghost story with a haunting but no actual ghost or outside human agency? Well, Ruth Rendell’s A Bad Heart published in 1994 gets close. What’s curious about the tale is that it mirrors to some degree the early part of the plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where Duncan is murdered at the residence of the Macbeths. Story theorists, incidentally, call this technique textual or mythical infra-narrative. In A Bad Heart the visitor is called Duncan and he is obliged to stay at the home of a husband and wife who, for complicated back story reasons, would be better off if he were no longer around. References to Macbeth abound, with quotes and names, and it’s established early on that it’s the only play the three of them ever saw together. Anyway, as Duncan tries to sleep he becomes fixated on the play and develops an obsession that the couple are out to kill him. I won’t say what happens in the end, but let’s just say Rendell’s tale is one that very literally is not for the faint hearted.
