‘The guest’ always sleeps in the haunted chamber on Christmas Eve; it is his perquisite.
From Jerome K. Jerome’s Told After Supper (1891)
Tropes of the Trade
By the late nineteenth century the tradition of the ghost story at Christmas had so many accepted conventions that Jerome K. Jerome was able to take a playful aim at them in his 1891 comic tale Told After Supper. In addition to those spooks who like to walk the earthy plane on Christmas Eve, Jerome lists several other categories of ghosts, including those who celebrate ‘the anniversary of the hanging of someone’s grandfather’, those ‘who never give the parish a single night’s quiet until someone has paid for a first-class funeral for him’, not forgetting the omen ghost – ‘He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British ghost.’ In Told After Supper Jerome also mocks the convention of the story-within-the-story: ‘Do not ask me how it is I recollect his own exact words – whether I took them down in shorthand at the time, or whether he had the story written out, and handed me the MS afterwards for publication in this book, because I should not tell you if you did. It is a trade secret.’
Sometimes story tropes and literary conventions become so well-known, formulaic and commonplace that they become clichéd and open to parody. Yet tropes get used in stories because they work and are popular. As Samuel Goldwyn famously told his movie writers when looking for the next hit, “Let’s have some new clichés.” Sounds oxymoronic, but when putting a story together there is some truth in what he says, for a genre plot requires certain story beats because that’s simply how it needs to be constructed.
An obvious story beat at the beginning of a ghost tale is some sort of warning or interdiction. If it’s a haunted house tale this will often come from one of the servants, as in the case of the housekeeper in The House and the Brain (“Few ever stayed a second night”) and Mrs Marjorum At Chrighton Abbey (“Do you know, Miss Sarah, that the gates of the north quadrangle have been locked and barred for the last forty years, and that no one ever goes in there except through the house.”) Cautioning establishes the jeopardy and the risks that will follow if warnings are ignored. However, there would be no story if it weren’t for inquiring minds that lead people astray. As the narrator of An Eddy on the Floor writes, ‘It was as if, swelling in the silent hours, the tumour of curiosity had come to a head, and in a moment it was necessary to operate upon it.’ And the cost is usually a close encounter, sometimes deadly, with the spook.
Another popular trope in the ghost tale is the claim that the story is factual. ‘The circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend them.’ So begins Amelia Edwards’ 1864 tale The Phantom Coach (also known as The North Mail). Starting with an assertion of a ghost tale’s veracity goes way back to Daniel Defoe’s The Apparition of Mrs Veal (1706), which begins with a preface saying that the story ‘was sent by a gentleman, a justice of the peace, at Maidstone, in Kent, and very intelligent person.’ Defoe, a journalist by trade, understood that for any news items to be believed it needs to be vouched for. And the fascinating background behind this supposedly true tale can be found in Roger Clarke’s excellent book A Natural History of Ghosts.
There’s an assertion of truth in the opening lines of Edith Nesbit’s 1887 tale Man-size in Marble, yet here there is the caveat that it will probably not be accepted as such: ‘Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe it’. But Mary Louisa Molesworth’s The Story of the Rippling Train published in the same year, might suggest this technique was becoming overused because there’s an opening exchange where one character notes, somewhat dismissively, “They’re all ‘authentic’, really vouched for, only you never see the person who saw or heard or felt the ghost. It is always somebody’s cousin or friend’s friend.”
Apart from simply saying so, a neat way of making a ghost tale appear factual is to pack it with detail, which is a technique used extensively by Sheridan Le Fanu. The title The Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand is itself a claim to truth, but when Sheridan Le Fanu writes about the Tiled House also being spelt Tyled House he’s saying to the reader, “Look at the careful research I’ve done into this place.” Only he hasn’t, because he’s making it up. But it’s often the historical niceties and minutia which are so important in making tales appear credible, which is what makes them ultimately so disturbing. Just ask M.R. James.
Writers have also found it a useful ploy, especially with first time ghost seers, to put at the top of their tale a reference to an illness or the need for a quiet convalescence. You’ll find this in Eileen Bigland’s The Lass with the Delicate Air (1952) and Ann Bridge’s The Buick Saloon (1931). In Robert W. Chambers’ The Bridal Pair (1902) it’s there in the opening line where an advisor says, “If I were you, I should take three months’ solid rest.” What illness often suggests is some sort of recent breakdown, thus setting up the hauntee as someone of a nervous disposition. And it’s such people, of course, who traditionally have been perceived and cited as ghost seers. In E.F. Benson’s The Face (1924) it is, ironically, the doctor’s suggestion of a quiet time away for a woman troubled by seemingly veridical dreams that results in her going to the very place where the ghost she dreams of will find her.
One of the challenges for any ghost story writer is to come up with original ways of describing those crepuscular shapes of twilight. Finding new modifiers for darkness and shadows ain’t that easy when past writers have already used up ‘grasping’, ‘furtive’, ‘wavering’, ‘uncertain’, ‘pulsating’, ‘encroaching’, ‘germinating’, ‘creeping’, ‘flaunting’, ‘distorting’ and ‘enveloping’. Hats off to Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton in The House and the Brain (1859) for ‘It was a Darkness shaping itself forth from the air in very undefined outline’ and George MacDonald in Uncle Cornelius His Story (1869) for ‘I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light.’
One way of bringing newness into a ghost tale is to introduce contemporary technology. For example, the murdered Ethel in H.R. Wakefield’s That Dieth Not (1928) manifests herself first in a telephone call, next via a wireless broadcast, and after that while the murderer is at the cinema watching a Charlie Chaplin film. Here Ethel takes over the movie, putting herself quite literally in the frame. Another tale which makes a clever ghostly use of the telephone is E.F. Benson’s The Dance – ‘There came a little goat-like laugh, just audible, and then a voice. “Settled in comfortably, dear boy?” it asked. “I’ll look in on you before long.”’
