Chapter 1

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THE HAUNTERS & THE HAUNTED

GHOST STORIES AND TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY ERNEST RHYS

PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY DANIEL O'CONNOR, 90 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, W.C.1. 1921

For permission to use copyright stories in this volume, the editor and publishers wish to make special acknowledgments to Messrs Allen & Unwin, Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr E.H. Blakeney, Sir George Douglas, Bart., Dr Greville MacDonald, Mr Arthur Machen, and Mr Thomas Hardy.

CONTENTS

I. GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES

PAGE

1. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER 17

2. THE OLD NURSE'S STORY 40

3. THE SUPERSTITIOUS MAN'S STORY 54

4. A STORY OF RAVENNA 58

5. TEIG O'KANE AND THE CORPSE 67

6. THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS: OR THE HOUSE AND THE BRAIN 83

7. THE BOTATHEN GHOST 128

8. THE GHOST OF LORD CLARENCEUX 138

9. DR DUTHOIT'S VISION 143

10. THE SEVEN LIGHTS 147

11. THE SPECTRAL COACH OF BLACKADON 160

12. DRAKE'S DRUM 169

13. THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM 171

14. THE POOL IN THE GRAVEYARD 179

15. THE LIANHAN SHEE 181

16. THE HAUNTED COVE 216

17. WANDERING WILLIE'S TALE 225

II. GHOST STORIES FROM LOCAL RECORDS, FOLK LORE, AND LEGEND

PAGE

18. GLAMIS CASTLE 249

19. POWYS CASTLE 253

20. CROGLIN GRANGE 259

21. THE GHOST OF MAJOR SYDENHAM 264

22. THE MIRACULOUS CASE OF JESCH CLAES 268

23. THE RADIANT BOY OF CORBY CASTLE 270

24. CLERK SAUNDERS 274

25. DOROTHY DURANT 280

26. PEARLIN JEAN 284

27. THE DENTON HALL GHOST 287

28. THE GOODWOOD GHOST STORY 293

29. CAPTAIN WHEATCROFT 300

30. THE IRON CAGE 303

31. THE GHOST OF ROSEWARNE 310

32. THE IRON CHEST OF DURLEY 317

33. THE STRANGE CASE OF M. BEZUEL 320

34. THE MARQUIS DE RAMBOUILLET 326

35. THE ALTHEIM REVENANT 329

36. SERTORIUS AND HIS HIND 331

37. ERICHTHO 334

III. OMENS AND PHANTASMS

PAGE

38. PATROKLOS 343

39. VISION OF CROMWELL 345

40. LORD STRAFFORD'S WARNING 346

41. KOTTER'S RED CIRCLE 348

42. THE VISION OF CHARLES XI. OF SWEDEN 350

43. BEN JONSON'S PREVISION 359

44. QUEEN ULRICA 360

45. DENIS MISANGER 362

46. THE PIED PIPER 365

47. JEANNE D'ARC 367

48. ANNE WALKER 368

49. THE HAND OF GLORY 371

50. THE BLOODY FOOTSTEP 375

51. THE GHOSTLY WARRIORS OF WORMS 378

52. THE WANDERING JEW IN ENGLAND 379

53. BENDITH EU MAMMAU 382

54. THE RED BOOK OF APPIN 385

55. THE GOOD O'DONOGHUE 387

56. SARAH POLGRAIN 390

57. ELEANOR COBHAM, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER 393

INTRODUCTION

In this Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales, has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real, describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good. Perhaps the very difficulty of it has rendered it more tempting to the writers who have dealt with the subject. His collection, notably varied and artfully chosen as it is, yet by no means exhausts the literature, which fills a place apart with its own recognised classics, magic masters, and dealers in the occult. Their testimony serves to show that the forms by which men and women are haunted are far more diverse and subtle than we knew. So much so, that one begins to wonder at last if every person is not liable to be "possessed." For, lurking under the seeming identity of these visitations, the dramatic differences of their entrances and appearances, night and day, are so marked as to suggest that the experience is, given the fit temperament and occasion, inevitable.

One would even be disposed, accepting this idea, to bring into the account, as valid, stories and pieces of literature not usually accounted part of the ghostly canon. There are the novels and tales whose argument is the tragedy of a haunted mind. Such are Dickens' _Haunted Man_, in which the ghost is memory; Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, in which the ghost is cruel conscience; and Balzac's _Quest of the Absolute_, in which the old Flemish house of Balthasar Claes, in the Rue de Paris at Douai, is haunted by a dæmon more potent than that of Canidia. One might add some of Balzac's shorter stories, among them "The Elixir"; and some of Hawthorne's _Twice-Told Tales_, including "Edward Randolph's Portrait." On the French side we might note too that terrible graveyard tale of Guy de Maupassant, _La Morte_, in which the lover who has lost his beloved keeps vigil at her grave by night in his despair, and sees--dreadful resurrection--"que toutes les tombes étaient ouvertes, et tous les cadavres en étaient sortis." And why? That they might efface the lying legends inscribed on their tombs, and replace them with the actual truth. Villiers de l'Isle Adam has in his _Contes Cruels_ given us the strange story of Véra, which may be read as a companion study to _La Morte_, with another recall from the dead to end a lover's obsession. Nature and supernature cross in de l'Isle Adam's mystical drama _Axël_ a play which will never hold the stage, masterly attempt as it is to dramatise the inexplainable mystery.

Among later tales ought to be reckoned Edith Wharton's _Tales of Men and Ghosts_, and Henry James's _The Two Magics_, whose "Turn of the Screw" gives us new instances of the evil genii that haunt mortals, in this case two innocent children. One remembers sundry folk-tales with the same motive--of children bewitched or forespoken--inspiring them. And an old charm in Orkney which used to run:

"Father, Son, Holy Ghost! Bitten sall they be, Bairn, wha have bitten thee! Care to their black vein, Till thou hast thy health again! Mend thou in God's name!"

John Aubrey in his _Miscellanies_ has many naïve evidences of the twilight region of consciousness, like that between wake and sleep, which tends to fade when we are wideawake; so much so, that we call it visionary. Yet it is very real to the haunted folk, to Aubrey's correspondent, the Rector of Chedzoy, or to the false love of the Demon Lover, or that Mr Bourne of whom Glanvil tells in _The Iron Chest of Durley_, or the Bishop Evodius who was St Augustine's friend, or for that matter the son of Monica himself. The reality of these visitations may seem dim, but the most sceptical of us cannot doubt that, whether from some quickened fear of death or impending disaster, from evil conscience or swift intensification of vision; whether in the forms of beloved sons lost at sea or of other revenants who were held indispensably dear in life, the haunters have appeared, to the absolute belief of those who saw them or their simulacra.

"It poseth me," said Richard Baxter, "to think of what kind these visitants are. Do good spirits dwell then so near us, or are they sent on such messages?" The question, indeed, poseth most of us, but we cannot leave the inquiry alone. M. Larigot, realising this preoccupation, has in the course of his investigations, during many years, arrived at the conclusion that there is an Art of the Supernatural, apart from the difficult science of psychical research, worth cultivating for its own sake. So he has gone to Glanvil and Arise Evans and the credulous old books--to Edgar Poe and Lord Lytton and the modern writers who tell supernatural tales. He gives us their material without positing its unquestionable effect as police-court evidence, and if we recognise its artistic interest, he does not mind much if we say at last with one great visionary, "Hoc est illusionum." But into those realms of illusion we ought not, if he is right, to enter lightly. Those who do enter there are warned that, having done so, they will not remain the same; they become aware of what Eugenius meant, who said:

"I am unbody'd by thy Books, and Thee, And in thy papers find my Extasie; Or if I please but to descend a strain, Thy Elements do screen my Soul again.

I can undress myself by thy bright Glass, And then resume th' Inclosure, as I was. Now I am Earth, and now a Star, and then A Spirit: now a Star, and earth again ..."

We see that there is another aspect to the occultation of Orion, and a very ominous one. Aurelius appeared to St. Augustine and made clear a dark passage to him in his reading, and that great Divine and Father of the Church knew it to be an enlightenment from above. But what of the other visitants from regions that are unblessed? Paracelsus has taught us to be careful in our dealings with the realities and the phantasies, as he would conceive them, of the other world; for "under the Earth do wander half-men." And there are other and worse manifestations due to Black Magic or Nigromancy, and to the black witches and white and the false sorcerers who have violently intruded into the true mystery--"like swine broken into a delicate Garden." Against these subtle and powerful magicians no weapons, coats of mail, or brigandines will help, no shutting of doors or locks; for they penetrate through all things, and all things are open to them.

Writing as a physician, Paracelsus sought to anticipate by his _Celestial Medicine_ and his _Twelve Signs_ the whole mystery of healing, and the cure of the troubled souls and bodies of men and women, which are not accorded but at odds with nature and supernature. The spirits of discord are indeed always with us; and whether you see them as witches, disguised in the living human form, or as monstrous and terrifying dream-figures, or as floating impalpable atmospheres, they are vigilantly to be guarded against. We know

"Vervain and dill Hinders witches from their will!"

in the old herbals; but we need new drugs. As for that witch which hath haunted all of us, "Maladicta," Lilly in his _Astrology_ has a remedy. "Take unguentum populeum, and Vervain and Hypericon, and put a red-hot iron into it: You must anoint the back-bone, or wear it in your breast."

The haunting apparitions are not all of earth. Cornelius Agrippa, in his book of the Secret Doctrine, shows that they are astral too. The familiar spirits of Mars, in his account, are no lovelier than Macbeth's witches:--"They appear in a tall body, cholerick, a filthy countenance, of colour brown, swarthy or red, having horns, like Harts' Horns, and gryphon's claws, and bellowing like wild Bulls."

But the spirits of Mercury are delightful. They indeed are "of colour clear and bright, like unto a knight armed,--and the motion of them is as it were silver-coloured clouds." So, if Mars has troubled the world, as in the unhappy history of our own time, we must hope for the brighter forms, and the remedial and aerial messengers of Mercury.

We may seem to have strayed from the proper boundaries in going so far. But it is one of the offices of this book to widen the area of research, and relate the ghost-story anew to the whole literature of wonder and imagination. Such sagas as that which Dr Douglas Hyde has translated with consummate art from the Irish, "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse," which Mr W.B. Yeats called a little masterpiece; or Boccaccio's story of the spectre-hounds that pulled down the daughter of Anastasio, or Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," or Hawker's "Cruel Coppinger," or Edgar Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," are of their kind not to be beaten. And in their own way some of the later records are as telling. One can take the book as a text-book of the supernatural, or as a story-book of that middle world which has given us the ghosts that Homer and Shakespeare conjured up.

ERNEST RHYS.

I

GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES

I

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

By EDGAR ALLAN POE

Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne.

DE BERANGER.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there _are_ combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country--a letter from him--which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness--of a mental disorder which oppressed him--and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said--it was the apparent _heart_ that went with his request--which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.

Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other--it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher"--an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment--that of looking down within the tarn--had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term it?--served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity--an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn--a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what _must_ have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute _fungi_ overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the _studio_ of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me--while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy--while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this--I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.