Classic Ghost Stories

Joan AikenJoan Delano Aiken was the daughter of Conrad Aiken, whose story Mr Arcularis we read out on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. Her elder sister Jane was a writer and her brother John was a chemist. Her father, being a poet presumably appreciated the para-rhyming of their names.Joan was born while her father was domiciled in England,  on Mermaid Street in Rye in East Sussex in 1924. She died in Petworth West Sussex in 2004.She went to a private school in Oxford but did not go to University. Instead she wrote stories. Her first story appeared on the BBC Children’s Hour in 1941 when she was seventeen. After the death of her first husband she went to work as an editor on magazines.She is most famous for her children’s fiction, notably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea. Her stories have almost a magical realism feel (a term which of course really belongs to South American literature) in that she uses what appear to be genuine historical settings subtly twisted to become fantasy. Many of her novels have supernatural themes, such as the Shadow Guests and the Haunting of Lamb House.She won many awards for her fiction during her lifetime. The Lodgers is in her collection of short supernatural stories A Touch of Chill.   Not knowing what to make of it, I went on Good Reads and found it got an average of three stars out of five with most reviewers not being clear about what the story is about.The best I can do is to suggest that this is a mid-20th Century story where small town life is subverted into the weird as people like Robert Aickman were doing. I wonder whether the deliberate cultivation of the irrational is taking place here where the weird is not meant to be understood rationally, but there to create atmosphere.The weird slovenly, drunken Colegates come from the Middle East. They have odd paraphernalia such as the 'collecting jar' which seems to be vaguely occult. The reference to the Egyptians and the black and white pillars put me in mid of the ritual magic of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It seems that the Colegates collect the souls of children. In the end, I think young Bob's soul flies out of the window and Desmond Colegate pursues it like a butterfly hunter into the graveyard where the exertion gives him a stroke of a heart attack. But I may be wrong. The boy, and the vet's boy who the Colegate also taught games of cards to (the cards seem important -- Tarot???) both die of natural causes. Are the Colegates then a drunken version of the Grim Reaper? They don't cause the death, they are just around to harvest the souls?If you know, tell me!If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here [Become A Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)) For Bonus StoriesOr [buy me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)) , if you’d like to keep me working. [Music](https://bit.ly/somecomeback (https://bit.ly/somecomeback)) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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Edith BagnoldEdith Bagnold, later Lady Jones was born in 1889 in Rochester, Kent and died in 1981 in London . She was most famous for her novel *National Velvet* published in 1935, which was made into a famous film that starred Elizabeth Taylor.  Her father was a Colonel in the  British Army, and she was mainly brought up in Jamaica.  She loved riding horses when she was in Jamaica and that inspired National Velvet.  She went to art school in London and worked for Frank Harris, an Irish-American novelist and had an affair with him. She was very Bohemian and mixed with artists and free-thinkers.During the First World War she became a nurse but was critical of the way the hospitals were won and got sacked. She became a driver for the army in France and wrote a memoir of her time dung that. In 1920 she became the wife of Sir Roderick Jones and therefore became Lady Jones.  they lived on the south coast of England near Brighton. They had a house in London and were neighbours of Winston Churchill and Jacob Epstein.Her great-grand-daughter was Samantha, wife of the recent British Prime Minister, David Cameron.  Virginia Woolf called her ‘a scallywag who married a very rich man.’ Woolf thought that Bagnold had begun as a rebel and Bohemian but ended up being conventionally rich with a butler. Read this article about Bagnold.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/biography.theatre (Upstairs, downstairs | Margaret Drabble | The Guardian)If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music)  by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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H G WellsHerbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent just outside London. He Died aged 79 at his grand house in Regent’s Park in London.He was a scientist by training having got his degree at Imperial College London (the Royal College of Science).  He was a biologist with a strong interest in Darwin and Natural Selection.  His early adult life was one of financial insecurity and job after job teaching and he earned his Bachelor of Science in 1890 through the University of London’s external teaching scheme.  In 1893 while teaching A A Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh) at a school in London, he published a biology text book.By 1895 he was contributing stories and articles to different periodicals. Politically, he was a Socialist. His mother was a domestic servant and his father had been a servant gardener though later became a professional cricketer for the Kent county team and who had a sports shop which didn’t do very well.   Because his family struggled financially, they put him out as an apprentice as a draper. He worked a thirteen hour day and slept in a dormitory and his later novels Kipps and The History of Mr Polly describe this lower middle class or tradesmen’s life.He suffered from Diabetes and founded the Diabetic Association in 1934.He was a progressive futurist who foresaw many modern developments such as tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons and satellite TV. His books deal with time travel (The Time Machine) and alien invasion (The War of the Worlds).The Door in The Wall by H G WellsThe Door in the Wall was first published in The Daily Chronicle in 1906, when he was forty, and reprinted in Wells’s collection The Door In The Wall And Other Stories published in 1911. It is one of Wells’s most well-known stories, and he wrote at least a hundred short stories, mostly in the early part of his career.The story is told to Redmond, and this device of having a story introduced to an otherwise blank hearer, who then learns of the ending of the story and makes his own conclusion, is well known. In fact more Victorian and Edwardian supernatural stories than not begin in this style (e.g. The Turn of The Screw, many stories of M R James) and it was copied by Ray Russell in the 1960s in his Sardonicus series when he wanted to write as if the story were Victorian.The way Wallace recounts the story to Redmond is set out from the beginning as questioning whether Redmond should believe him. He says early on that he does, and at the end confirms this again. On balance, as fabulous as the story is, he chooses to believe Wallace.The hero of the story, is Lionel Wallace a successful politician. And it is this success that is the central theme to the story, which to me is about putting off spiritual contentment in favour of worldly obligations time after time, until in the end, he makes the right, and final choice.Every time he passes by the door and chooses a worldly goal rather that trying the door he is sure in his heart the door is unlocked and only waiting for him to step inside. The first time he goes in, he is a child. The second time he is a busy schoolboy intent on not being late for school. The third time he is on his way to his Oxford entry exam, the fourth time he is on his way to an important appointment, which seemed to be to be with a lover. There is a long gap and he is finally a successful politician, overworked with a tarnish beginning to spread on this world and he becomes more receptive to the message. He sees the door three times just when he is finding this world burdensome. He is determined that he would go in through the door.  Wallace at this time is around forty yeaSupport the show

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The Grey Woman Part 3In which Anna and Amante go on the run, meet some good souls, some bad ones and accomplish miracles with corks and home-made walnut dye, thus saving their lives. Will it all go right in the end? You will have to listen, won't you?Random Notes For Part 3Disguises. Victorians loved disguises. Think of Sherlock HolmesThe beautiful Ann breaks one of her front teeth! No one later remarks on this.Amante has corks in her cheeks to alter the shape of her face. A great idea, but did she keep them in all the time? It might make talking tricky. I think Mrs Gaskell got too carried away with the fun of disguises to think about its sustainabilityIn the blacksmith’s smithy, when M. De La Tourelle turns up, he describes his wife as having run off with a base profligate woman from Paris. It’s a good job he didn’t say she was Norman as that would have been more likely to give the game away. Phew.The Countess de Roeder (for it is she) shies away from the common room “full of evil smells and promiscuous company”. I’ve been in pubs like that. We are set up for this by the description of her being a fair-haired young woman speaking German French who had hair that Amante reminds Anna is the same colour as hers used to be before they cut it off and burned it in the stove.The Murder of the Countess De Roeder sets up the fate of M. De La Tourelle as we ultimately find out. However, in a modern novel, or film, it would be urged that the protagonist confronted and brought about the doom of the villain, not some minor character never seen (the Baron de Roeder).We get word of the crooked jeweller a few times just dropped in. I think the subtle hinting at this is very well done “Ainsi le Chauffeurs se vengent” means “Number 1: Thus the Bandits Revenge Themselves”Amante’s father was a tailor in Rouen, but earlier, Mrs Gaskell told us that Amante’s father was a Norman father.And then her complexion goes from roses and lilies to ashen grey. It’s a nice touch that M. De La Tourelle looks up and doesn’t recognise her. This emphasises her unfair transformation into The Grey Woman.I guess the daughter can’t marry Maurice de Poissy because her natural father killed his father? She slips this in at the end as an additional, but arguably unneccesarry other than for the sheer joy readers take in twists. But it also allowed me to finish in true thriller style with a revelatory sentence with a duh-duh-duh rhythm.The way this is written made me narrate it in short rhythmic bursts. I think this is due to her sentence structure.I’ve only been to Heidelberg once, but I liked it immensely and would like to go back.Next week we are reading another listener request. If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here... https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music)  by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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Brief NotesTrusty Amanate is someone she can talk to.The expedition by candlelight through the castle passagesThe withheld lettersShe is a prisonerAnna bites out a chunk of her hand to keep her fear from overcoming her while she’s under the table. She later breaks one of her front teeth. She’s rough.The spying servantsThe Chauffeurs are not drivers but robbers. The gendarmes are gendarmes though.A rollicking boys own story, but for girls because it includes love.Amante is fearless, she can beard Lefebvre, but she is scared of the servants as she knows about them. Her husband buys her gifts and makes her a flower garden. So, he must love her in his own way. I think he probably does, or why entertain her?We find the reason for M. De La Tourelle’s frequent absences. He is not away at some distant estate at all.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music)  by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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The Grey Woman by Mrs Elizabeth GaskellElizabeth GaskellElizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810 and died in the country in Hampshire in 1865. She was one of the most famous women novelists of the Victorian period. As well as being a novelist, she was a biographer and wrote a biography of Charlotte Bronte which was published in 1857. Apparently she did a bit of editing and only put in the nice things in Charlotte Bronte’s biography, judging herself that certain aspects should be left out. Her most famous novels are Cranford, published between 1851 and 1857, North and South between 1854 and 1855, and Wives and Daughters published in 1865—the year of her death. Her father was Keeper of the Treasury Records and she was born in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, London which is now a billionaires row and was probably for the well-to-do even in 1810.Her mother was from the North of England which may have prompted her interest in the division between the North of England dominated by the Industrial Revolution and the south of England which did not have the heavy industries of coal and iron extraction. She spent much of her childhood in Cheshire in the North. She also spent time in Newcastle upon Tyne. When she was married she lived in Manchester. She visited Edinburgh and Whitby and then when she visited a house she had both in Hampshire, died suddenly of a heart attack.Unlike some women of her class, she did attend school and was educated privately at Stratford Upon Avon. She read the classics and travelogues sent to her from her brother in the navy. The Grey WomanThis story was published by Mrs Gaskell in 1865 in London in a collection known as *The Grey Woman & Other Tales*. By this time, Mrs Gaskell was a the very famous author of a number of blockbuster novels. This was also the year in which she suddenly died.She was influenced by German literature and travelled in Germany in 1841. A number of her short stories, not just her ghost stories, have a German theme or setting.One of the themes of the story is the difference between the sophisticated and effete French and the simple straightforward Germans and the rivalry and mistrust between them.The first thing that strikes our ear (or our eye) is the vivid descriptions of the mill, the gardens, the scoured dishes, the red-tiled floor and the river Neckar murmuring outside the mill. Gaskell is a great writer of descriptions and talented at the ancient rhetorical art of *enargia*—which is the skill of drawing the listener into a scene by activating each of their senses through well-written description.This description of the rain in the garden of the mill turned cafe strikes me that it might have been lifted from a real incident that happened to Gaskell while she was in Germany and borrowed into her writing.Again we see the distance device. To quote M R James (again) — ghost stories should be distanced from the reader through placing them at a pint in the past far enough away so we can believe things we wouldn’t accept if they were set in our modern world but close enough so that we can still identify with the situations in it —so this story written in the late 1840s say at the earliest has its incident in 1789.Early on we get a little foreshadowing: we are told that the portrait of Anna Scherer shows she was very beautiful, which is important later in the story as explaining how she married the French nobleman, even though only from a miller’s family, and also that in the portrait she is full of colour, but lost that colour due to fright. The details of this fright are not available when they are mentioned.That sets us up for a ghostSupport the show

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A comic ghost story from Edwardian London–perfect to relax to and not scary at all.The Lost Tragedy by Denis MackailDenis Mackail was born in 1892  in London. His mother was the daughter of the famous pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.  His father was Scottish, born on the Isle of Bute, and later Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and a specialist in Latin Literature and also President of the British Academy.  His sister was also a novelist. He was more distantly related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, a British prime minister.Denis Mackail was born into some privilege. His most famous novel Greenery Street deals with social manners in the upper-middle class London he knew. As such, this story is interesting as it deals with the doings of lower middle class tradesmen such as book-dealers.  Mackail must have known something of the trade to paint it so well.Mackail suffered from ill-health when he was a young man and though he worked as a stage-set designer in the theatre in London, he was not fit enough to fight in the First World War.  I am not clear what his physical health problems were but he suffered from anxiety himself and had what is called a ‘nervous breakdown.’Despite his comfortable early start he had some financial troubles and had to write to supplement his income. He published a novel every year from 1920 until 1938. He moved in literary circles and was a friend of A A Milne and P G Wodehouse, both famous for their light-hearted and comic writing. He wrote the official biography of J M Barrie (the author of Peter Pan) and but after the death of his wife in 1949 he never wrote another thing. Despite that he lived another twenty-two years, dying in London in 1971 at the age of seventy-nine.Genre expectations. Writers can expect to get excoriated if they defy genre expectations. If you write a Romance be that clean or mucky (I don’t really read either to be honest)  or Space Opera that is not huge in scale, or Heaven Forbid ‘LitRPG’ that doesn’t have enough stats in it, then the hard-core genre reader will cut you down to size with a one-star review.I say this because this may be a ghost story, but it is a comic ghost story and that genre has its own tropes and conventions, not least the wise cracking spectre as in the Ben and William show in this story.  I hope listeners were not too disappointed.The Lost Tragedy is a well constructed tale. We have the set up of Shakespeare as someone they recognise but whose name they can’t place, who speaks with a ‘west-country’ accent, which might relate to the Warwickshire accent of Stratford Upon Avon.It is very common for ghost stories to be related as ‘frame stories’ where the events are told to an unconnected person by someone who has first-hand, but now long previous association with the events. It is also in keeping with M R James’s dictum that ghost stories should be removed from the every day by placing them remotely in distance or time in that it happened when Mr Bunstable was a young man.There is a tradition of the comic ghost story. This story reminded me somewhat of the Ghost Ship by Richard Middleton. This humorous tale of a ghostly pirate ship was published in 1912 but as Middleton killed himself in 1911, was written before that. I only mention the date because it was part of a trend of ghost stories with jokey spectres which perhaps began with Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost  published in 1887 and have a noble tradition through Casper The Friendly Ghost who first appeared in 1945 and  the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks 1971.I also liked the description of the bookshop. It reminded me both of Black BooksSupport the show

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Oke of Oakhurst Part 3How awful Alice Oke is. Though the narrator praises her as a wonderful woman she seems wholly unpleasant to me, and though William Oke is painted as a bore, he seems a thoroughly decent and mistreated man driven to madness by his wife’s caprices.William is so driven to distraction by his love for this teasing woman that when he begins to imagine he sees Lovelock, and then tries to not to show his reaction, she asks him whether he has seen Lovelock — his ghostly rivalWas the ghost of Lovelock real? Was Alice Oke really the reincarnation of the former Alice Oke? We can read it both ways. Alice alludes to Lovelock being with her, but I was never sure whether this was just to tease her husband and she didn’t mean literally, even as a spirt, but is essence as an idea. The issue of Oke thinking there would be no hops that year, when he previously has said it would be a bumper year and hops are there to be seen, is perhaps meant to indicate that he is losing his grip on reality. I cannot see any other reason for this incident to be reported to us. But I may be missing something.On the walk with the painter, Oke talks about having to save his wife from dishonouring herself “one way or another”. Perhaps the idea of killing her is already in his mind at this point, though I didn’t guess that at the time. When he shoots her, the gun isn’t mentioned right there and then, but we remember we were clearly told how he had been cleaning and preparing the guns around the house, so that was neatly set up.Alice Oke appears to have a Mixed Personalty Disorder with Histrionic and Narcissistic traits while William Oke seems to have sunk into a depression with psychotic features. Poor bloke, old William Oke.The story was originally called The Phantom Lover but Vernon Lee later renamed it, Oke of Oakhurst and I think that William Oke crazed murderer that he became is really the hero.Our painter/narrator is merely a camera lens though which we see the tragedy.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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Oke of Oakhurst by Vernon Lee Part 2So the story develops. It begins by our painter narrator noting the strange fascination Alice Oke has for her namesake from 1626. I wonder whether that precise date is important?Later on, he discovers that not only is she wearing a dress copied from the 1626 Alice Oke’s portrait, but it is the very dress. She moons over the poetry of Lovelock and he notices that it is as if the poems were written to her. She seems to know the very words they spoke.She lingers in the Yellow Room, a room in which no Oke, except her could bear sit. William Oke notes the fact he hates the room, and all the Okes do, but says nothing has happened there. Then Vernon Lee drops the comment that perhaps something will happen there.I think the oak symbolism must mean something. So far I am just thinking it is to represent the solid, earthiness of William Oke of Oakhurst and his family. Also she mentions the cries of lambs separated from their mothers for at least the second if not the third time. So she either didn’t edit her draft very well, or this too is meant to be in and therefore symbolic.The 1626 Alice Oke killed her lover the poet Lovelock. She comes over as a bit of a psycho. I think 1880 Alice Oke is a different kind of weird. She is fey and withdrawn from reality where 1626 Alice seems a bit of a firebrand and a wicked woman.As 1880 drives madly through the countryside, to take our narrator to the murder spot, she seems possessed by this wicked highway-woman ancestress. In the yellow room, our man gets the idea that Alice 1880 does not seem to be another woman from Alice 1626 but the very same.I also note that the cavalier poet Lovelock (the cavaliers were the foppish ones who fought for the side of the king in the English civil war) was a dab band with a sword. Poets aren’t as cool these days.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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Oke of Oakhurst by Vernon LeeVernon LeeDespite sounding so masculine, Vernon Lee was actually a woman called Violet Paget, born in France in 1856 and died in Italy in 1935. Despite these location she identified as English. Her biographer Vineta Colby says that Lee was English by nationality, French by an accident of birth and Italian by choice.As well as the ghost stories for which she is most famous, Vernon Lee, was an essayist who wrote about travel and art and especially aesthetics. Her parents were globe-trotting, or at least Europe-trotting intellectuals and in 1873, when Vernon or Violet was 17, they settled in Florence Italy. She stayed living in the vicinity of Florence until her death in 1935.Violet published her first collection of essays when she was 24. These dealt with Italian writers and dramatists and she later wrote on William Shakespeare and Renaissance Italy. She made fun of English artists, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites in her 1884 novel Mrs Brown.Politically, she was a convinced pacificst. She published under a masculine name because she feared that as a woman her writing would not be taken seriously. She was a feminist and mostly dressed as a man. Though she didn’t come out, she did have crushes on women and was probably Lesbian. She suffered from health anxiety.She also fell out with other writers by making fun of them in her work; notably Henry James and Edith Wharton.Henry James wrote to his equally talented brother William warning him about Vernon Lee: the most able mind in Florence, ‘as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent.’Oke of OakhurstIn Part 1, the story begins with our narrator, the artist, talking to an unknown interlocutor about a painting assignment he had. He begins to talk about the wonderful and strange Mrs Alice Oke of Oakhurst, Kent. We learn that the stay with the Okes left an indelible impression on the painter, whose name I have not yet learned.We get the impression that the Okes are gone, possibly dead. Certainly, he will never be able to paint her. Some disaster has fallen. The painter painted the husband and the wife and he has no idea who know owns the portrait of Mr Oke. This suggests their home has been broken up as if in some terrible fate has befallen them.He didn’t even finish the portrait of Mrs Oke. Vernon Lee withholds information to whet our appetite. She creates suspense.“I suppose the newspapers were full of it at the time.”So it was a scandal. “It really was stranger than anyone could have guessed.” Alice Oke is dead and her end was strange, but fitting. Lee tantalises us all the way.  She was sent to our painter from heaven, “or the other place.”Who is this woman!?? I want to know.The narrator doesn’t normally retell the story, but luckily for us, he chooses to on this occasion.Lee paints a very sympathetic picture of Mr Oke, very much in awe of his wife, but a decent sort and not without feelings and sensitivities. But she sets him up through the painter’s eyes as the very antithesis of what the London Bohemian painter would admire. The painter sets off presuming Oke is the dullest of the dull, the very pinnacle of boring Tory county life.He had been a lieutenant in the Blues which is a nickname of the Royal Horseguards, a prestigious cavalry regiment in the British Army who had been, as its name suggests a royal bodyguard.In part 2 we get the background to Mr Oke. The painter is very disparaging. He portrays Oke as a dull young Kentish Tory with no imagination and no style. He refers to him as a ‘squireen’ (which my spellcheck prefers to render as ‘squirrel’) I guess this is a pejorative diminutive of ‘squire’ with the Support the show

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