REMEMBERED TODAY AS ARGUABLY the greatest writer of ghost stories who ever lived, Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) admitted to being heavily influenced by the work of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, especially when it came to tales of walking corpses. He was born in Kent and moved to Suffolk at the age of three, where he lived at the rectory in Great Livermere for many years, setting several of his ghost stories there. He studied at Cambridge University, living there as an undergraduate, then as a don and provost at King’s College, also setting several stories there. It became an annual custom to gather a group of friends and colleagues to a room on Christmas Eve where he would tell his latest ghost story, taking great pleasure in acting out all the roles.
In addition to becoming the first name of his time in supernatural fiction, he was also a medieval scholar of prodigious knowledge and productivity, having cataloged many of the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford and being responsible, after the discovery of a manuscript fragment, of rediscovering the graves of several twelfth-century abbots. Among his scholarly publications are several about the Apocrypha.
His greatest macabre stories are generally regarded to have been published in his first two collections, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911). Also published in his lifetime were A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925), Wailing Well (1928), and The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931).
“ ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ ” was first published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London, Edward Arnold, 1904).