A scholar remains behind as pestilence silences the college. The gates are locked, the chapel dim, and a single window glows with the light of something unfinished. In the stillness of old stone, a man pursues his solitary work—methodical, precise, and unknowable. What follows is not a tale of horror in the usual sense, but something quieter, older, and threaded with the weight of ritual. Memory lingers in the cloisters. The dead are not always absent.

*The True History of Anthony Ffryar* was first published in *Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye* (W. Heffer & Sons, 1919), under the pen name “Ingulphus.” The story was reissued in the Ghost Story Press edition of 1993 with an additional tale.

Arthur Gray (1852–1940) was Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and a scholar of Shakespeare and local history. He wrote ghost stories rooted in the architecture, liturgy, and institutional memory of the university he called home.

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