In his leisure hours Dr. Teesdale was a considerable student of the occult, for like most advanced and proficient physicians, he clearly recognised how narrow was the boundary of separation between soul and body.
From E.F. Benson’s The Confession of Charles Linkworth (1912)
Who’s Who in the Ghost Tale
Spook tales don’t just need ghosts and ghost seers, but also people who will deny them, conjure them, refuse to stay in the same house as them and ultimately send them back to where they belong.
Let’s start with the occultist, who uses spells or some sort of paraphernalia to conjure up spirits. Dabblers sometimes get away with it, but if they are driven by desire to usurp the natural order, the occultist usually comes a cropper. One of the most remarkable is Apuleius Charlton in H.R. Wakefield’s A Black Solitude who’s described as a ‘psychological freak’ and the last survivor of the Mauve decade. The idea that it’s the homosexual male who sees ghosts goes way back to Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, which is discussed in the lecture ‘Transgressional Queer Sex and the Victorian Spook’ given at Claverley Manor in ‘I Was Once a Haunted House’. Black magic, séances and occultism notably feature in several E.F. Benson stories, including Spinach, At Abdul Ali’s Grave, ‘And the Dead Spake – ’, Outside the Door and The Thing in the Hall. Had his father lived long enough to read them, such subject matter may well have led to interesting exchanges over Sunday lunch as Edward White Benson was for many years Archbishop of Canterbury.
At the opposite end of the spectrum there are the sceptics, who uses terms such as ‘bosh’, ‘bunkum’ and ‘humbug’. Often sceptics are from the medical profession and the one in Margaret Oliphant’s The Open Door is very pleased with himself when the ghost doesn’t appear. “It is just the same with tables and all other kinds of ghost apparatus; a sceptic’s presence stops everything,” says Doctor Simpson. Yet when the ghost does manifest itself ‘the scoffer could scoff no more. Light touched his own face, and showed a very perplexed countenance.’ Simpson clings to the explanation of “phonetic disturbances” and “ventriloquism” but he’s convincing no one. Not even himself.
There are many ghost stories where the sceptic is challenged to spend a night in a room or house said to be haunted. Think here of William Hope Hodgson’s The Whistling Room and Ralph Adam Cram’s No. 252 Rue M. le Prince. H.G. Wells’ The Red Room features a room with a reputation for being haunted. Candles are mysteriously blown out and ‘the shadows seemed to take another step towards me.’ But our sceptic isn’t convinced and argues that all that really haunts the room is man’s inner fear – “Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms.” A score draw, you might say, between haunted room and doubting Thomas.
Sceptics in spook tales offer an array of explanations for the ghost, ranging from the scientific to the sociological. Scrooge puts the ghostly vision of Marley down to something he’d eaten, ‘undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato’, as does Warder Draycott in The Confession of Charles Linkworth and the narrator of Sheridan Le Fanu’s An Old House in Aungier Street, who says, ‘What of that? Was this singular apparition – as full of character as of terror – therefore the creature of my fancy, or the invention of my poor stomach? Was it, in short, subjective (to borrow the technical slang of the day) and not the palpable aggression and intrusion of an external agent?’ A trick of the light and the mist is a popular explanation for ‘The White Lady’ phenomenon and then there are shadows, drugs, hallucinations and that old stand-by ‘a skinful of port’ alluded to in Vincent O’Sullivan’s When I Was Dead (1905).
In what the narrator calls ‘Sceptics’ Corner’ in ‘I Was Once a Haunted House’ some rather fantastical explanations are offered by scientists, among them ocular trauma, magnetism in rocks and electrically charged particles that are emitted at the moment of someone’s death. Then there are all those legends of ghosts discussed in Roger Clarke’s book A Natural History of Ghosts that were probably covers for poachers in woods and smugglers in caves and invented in part to scare people away. On the other hand, there’s Fisher’s Ghost (1859) by John Lang, based on a real case where interest in a supposed ghost sighting led to the uncovering of an actual killer. The story originated with the disappearance on 17 June 1826 of an English-born Australian farmer from Campbelltown named Frederick Fisher whose murdered body was discovered where his ghost was said to have had pointed.
E.F. Benson offers many speculative metaphysical explanations for the supernatural in his stories: “In reality there is no ‘me’, no ‘you’, no ‘it’. Everything is part of the one and only thing which is life” (The Man Who Went Too Far); “How inextricable is the interweaving between mind, soul, life – call it what you will – and the purely material part of the created world” (Outside the Door); “There’s eternity outside Time: Time is a sort of mist lying around us. Now and then the mist clears, and then – how shall I express anything so simple? – then we look down on Time, like a little speck of an island below us, quite clear, future and past and present, and awfully small” (The Bed by the Window).
The idea of creatures such as dogs, horses and cats being sensitive to spooks was discussed in the section of ghost seers, but a special mention here for moths. In E.F. Benson’s The Dust-Cloud, Expiation and The Outside Door, the hovering and flicking moths are merely disconcerting, but in Robert W. Chambers’ The Messenger, where they are described as ‘Death’s Messenger’, they act as harbingers of death, as they do as well in Tom Hood’s The Shadow of a Shade where “these little fellows emit little drops of a red-looking fluid at certain seasons, and sometimes so plentiful that the superstitious think it is a shower of blood.” I have heard anecdotally that certain actors are superstitious about moths in theatres, and perhaps that’s not surprising because moths, like actors, know how to find the spotlight and their fluttering wings can sometimes result in distraction. With this and the harbinger superstition in mind, it seemed therefore appropriate to include a moth in the theatre ghost tale, The Ghost Light.
