INTRODUCTION

The Irish writer is ideally suited to creating stories of strange ghostly happenings. At his best the Irish writer has a wild and fantastical imagination causing him to view life though a wonderfully strange distorting mirror. There is something dream-like and unfettered about the Irish creative force which enables these storytellers to travel down different roads from those of other authors; roads which are bizarre, challenging and eccentric in nature, allowing the Irish scribe to conjure up unexpected and often fantastic scenarios. This flavour can be found in the works of such Irish literary giants as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Spike Milligan, Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. Not all wrote ghost stories, of course, but all created fictional works which challenged the imagination and took it to stranger places than it was normally allowed to go – the defining ability of a good ghost-story writer.

This is a collection of some of the best ghost tales created by writers who were not only born in Ireland but also inherited that wild and fantastical imagination I referred to earlier. This volume is like a treatise in the art of raising goose pimples.

Let us consider some of the contributors to this heady brew. It is appropriate to begin with Sheridan Le Fanu, whose stories fill half this volume. His work was held in great esteem by that doyen of the macabre narrative Montague Rhodes James. He wrote of Le Fanu:

He stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories . . . Nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly.

SHERIDAN LE FANU (1814–73) was born in 1814 into a middle-class Dublin family of Huguenot descent. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and though he was later called to the bar he never practised law; instead he turned his attention towards journalism and later fiction. In 1869 he became editor and proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine, which in time became a rich repository for horror fiction and ghost stories, many written by himself and often uncredited. The sudden death of his wife in 1858 turned him into an eccentric recluse who wrote his ghost stories in bed. He died of a heart attack in 1873. While he was a popular author for more than twenty years, producing such successful novels as The House by the Churchyard and Uncle Silas, after his death his work was neglected, especially his supernatural fiction. It was not until 1923 when M. R. James, whose literary style and subject matter were heavily influenced by Le Fanu, was responsible for promoting his stories by editing and providing an astute and illuminating introduction to a collection entitled Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories that Le Fanu’s work was appreciated more widely. It is now regarded as a landmark publication. In it, James, through meticulous research, was able to present many of Le Fanu’s obscure and originally unsigned narratives to the reading public. The collection’s title story along with five other tales, ‘Squire Toby’s Will’, ‘The Child that went with the Fairies’, ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, ‘Ghost Stories of Chapelizod’ and ‘The Vision of Tom Chuff’, are presented in these pages.

These tales were written when the ghost story as a genre was slowly developing into a more literary style of fiction. Many of the early examples of the form had used ghosts as a means of preaching a moral or effecting a change in the mortal who had encountered the spirit from the grave. Dickens was a great exponent of this approach. His A Christmas Carol is a fine example, but not the author’s only one, of this use of spirits as a chastising force rather than as an entity to frighten for its own sake or to fulfil an even more sinister purpose. However, shortly before his death Dickens did pen a ghost story, ‘The Signalman’, which was dark and chilling without any moralistic or Gothic trappings. It was frightening in itself, involving a haunting which was created to chill the reader as well as the characters within the tale. However, Le Fanu was already practising this approach and, in fact, in a quiet fashion he developed and refined it. Le Fanu insisted above all else on unity of mood and economy of means in telling his ghostly yarns – a very modern approach for a Victorian writer. His stories are chilling because they draw you into the narrative in an insidious fashion by initiating and then escalating an atmosphere of unease.

E. F. BENSON (1867–1940), another great ghost-story writer, observed rather flamboyantly that Le Fanu’s tales ‘begin quietly enough, the tentacles of terror are applied so softly that the reader hardly notices them till they are sucking the courage from his blood. A darkness gathers, like dusk gently falling, and then something obscurely stirs in it.’

Part of Le Fanu’s success is due to his ability to desist from using the usual props of the traditional ghost story, the Gothic paraphernalia: the haunted castle, the moonlit ruin, the saturnine villain and the distressed lady alone in some Godforsaken spot. He tended to set his tales in surroundings that would be familiar to the average middle-class reader, thus giving the narratives an uncomfortable immediacy.

The autobiographical style of ‘Madam Crowl’s Ghost’, in which the author adopts not only the persona of an old woman remembering a strange incident from her past, but also her quaint peasant Irish tongue in which to tell it, is a clear example of Le Fanu using realism to sharpen the supernatural edge to the narrative. The domestic detail early on, especially when the young child is teased and patronised by the adults, and the general tone of an oral history, make the whole narrative more believable, gracing it with an air of verisimilitude. The plot is a simple one, but it is wrought with such cunning and care that the climactic scenes – the appearance of the ghost and the discovery of Madam Crowl’s secret – are genuinely frightening because in some strange way one can accept them as true.

It is interesting to contrast this story and the telling of it with the next in the collection, ‘Squire Toby’s Will’, which is related in elegant and sophisticated prose, interposed with realistic dialogue. Using his own knowledge of the law, Le Fanu creates a tale of sibling rivalry tinged with a blossoming strangeness which slowly through the course of the story grows into a chilling account of filial retribution from beyond the grave. It is typical of Le Fanu’s slow-burn technique that the reader is almost surprised to discover that he has become unnerved by events related in the narrative.

The stories present a blatant acceptance of the unexplained – the supernatural, if you like. There are no pat excuses or explanations to tidy up the events. They all involve instances where the unknown is an accepted fact. But Le Fanu’s cleverness lies in his ability to blur the distinction between reality and the supernatural, making both equally real by presenting his ghost scenes as so psychologically convincing that the materiality or immateriality of the invading presence becomes irrelevant.

Perhaps the clearest statement, if the most paranoid, that we get concerning the reality of the supernatural is in one of his most famous tales, ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’. The title reads like that of a learned thesis and yet the account involves an infernal presence in a house which appears as a ‘monstrous grey rat’. The narrator submits to the ‘materialism of medicine’ and takes a tonic to dispel his ‘infernal illusion’. This works for a while, suggesting that perhaps this gruesome vision was conjured simply by an overwrought imagination and a fevered brain. However, by subliminal means, Le Fanu has already convinced the reader that the apparition is ‘real’ and so we realise before the narrator that medicine will not fend off this reality for long. And sure enough, the rat returns! Le Fanu’s narrator assures us that even during the calm period ‘the fiend was just as energetic, just as malignant, though I saw him not’.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865–1939) not only wrote supernatural fiction but he was a believer in the ‘other world’. Along with ghost-story writers Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, he was a member of the Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn, a secret occult society which according to some accounts practised alchemy and magic. His fascination with the supernatural led him to conduct a long series of experiments into automatic writing with his wife, who he believed was in touch with the spirit world.

However, it was during his friendship with Oscar Wilde in the 1890s that Yeats wrote most of the supernatural fiction which James Joyce regarded as tales of ‘fantastic terror’ and ‘the beauty that is beyond the grave’. There are two examples of these works presented in this volume. ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’ and ‘The Curse of the Fires of the Shadows’ are both atmospheric pieces, the ghosts having historical relevance to the history of Ireland. In ‘Vision’ we encounter the shades of Dervongilla and Diarmuid, whose sin we are told ‘brought the Norman into Ireland’ in 1169, thus laying the foundations for eight centuries of Anglo-Irish conflict. ‘The Curse’ retells the legend surrounding the burning of Sligo Abbey in 1642 by Puritan soldiers and the curse placed upon them by the abbot of the White Friars before dying.

The two other most celebrated authors in this collection are BRAM STOKER (1847–1912) and OSCAR WILDE (1854–1900). Stoker, of course, was the author of the ground-breaking vampire classic Dracula, but he also penned several highly effective short tales in the supernatural genre. Perhaps the more chilling of the two tales selected for this edition is ‘The Judge’s House’. The notion of a revenging judge represented by the figure of a rat and a strange hanging is similar to that found in Le Fanu’s story, ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’. However, while the Le Fanu piece has the charm and the gentle chill of the Victorian ghost story, ‘The Judge’s House’ has a more direct visceral force and a modern theatricality which takes it into the realm of horror fiction. Stoker’s tale has a gruesome and fascinating inevitability about it which makes it a gripping read. We can see that in the recounting of the events which take place in the haunted chamber in ‘The Judge’s House’ Stoker’s dramatic style looks forward to the kind of supernatural fiction created by the twentieth-century masters rather than harking back to his earlier literary influences.

The second of Stoker’s stories, ‘The Secret of Growing Gold’, may well have been inspired by the exhumation of the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal. On her death Rossetti had buried the only copies of his unpublished poems in the coffin with his beloved wife. Seven years later, in 1869, Rossetti ordered an exhumation to recover the notebook. When the coffin was opened it is said that her hair was still golden and growing. A friend of Stoker was shown some of the hair which was recovered from the perfectly preserved body. It was fine and lustrous as though it had been cut from a living head. This macabre account prompted Stoker to create his story of haunting and revenge from beyond the grave.

At first glance Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ is a frivolous light-hearted piece concerning a hapless spirit’s attempts to haunt a stately home. Particularly in the early stages of the story the style is very modern, filled with Wilde’s native Irish whimsy and peppered with witticisms. However the story grows darker and more serious towards its climax and it is ultimately a tale of morality, extolling the virtues of Love. In typical Wildean fashion, Beauty and Fidelity triumph over the darker forces.

CHARLOTTE RIDDELL (1832–1906), who wrote as Mrs J. H. Riddell, is not an author well known to the modern reader, but contemporary reviewers placed her on the same level as Sheridan Le Fanu. Why she is now forgotten by all but those familiar with the ghost-story genre is a mystery in itself. It is certainly not because she wrote so little. She was the author of well over forty novels and numerous short stories. The two tales chosen for this volume demonstrate effectively that she was a fine exponent of the art of chilling the reader.

Riddell was adept at creating a sense of place, especially when involving an old building which in essence becomes one of the characters in the story. For example, in ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ the titular property is described thus:

‘It’s a fine house,’ answered William, raking the embers together as he spoke and throwing some wood upon them; ‘but, like many a good family, it has come down in the world.’

Of course, the house, which is so beautifully and expertly described in its neglect and decay, harbours ghostly secrets and horrors.

Again, in ‘A Strange Christmas Game’ – a wonderfully conceived and executed short ghost story – a crumbling old house is the scene of a strange and introduction revelatory haunting which provides the new tenant of the Martingdale Estate with the explanation as to why the previous owner, a distant relative of his, disappeared without trace on a Christmas Eve many years before. The surprising twist at the end adds extra pleasure and polish to this satisfying story.

No doubt FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN (1828–1862) would be more well known had he not died at such an early age fighting in the American Civil War. He was born Michael O’Brien in County Cork. After his time at Dublin University, where he showed an aptitude for writing verse, he moved to London to pursue a career in journalism. This eventually took him to America, where he changed his name to the more distinguished Fitz-James O’Brien. His stories showed great imaginative flair and he is regarded as one of the early writers who fostered the genre we would now call ‘science fiction’. Two examples of his forays into the ghost-story field are presented here. ‘What Was It’ is one of the earliest known examples of the use of invisibility in fiction, while ‘A Pot of Tulips’ is a traditional ghost story, one of the best from the Victorian era.

ROSA MULHOLLAND (1841–1921) is another writer who sadly is little read today. She was born in Belfast and in her youth was determined to become a painter but Charles Dickens was so impressed with her writing that he persuaded her to concentrate on putting pen to paper. The stories included in this collection clearly reveal not only the influence of Dickens on her fiction but also the work of Sheridan Le Fanu. ‘The Ghost of Rath’ and ‘The Haunted Organist of Hurly Burly’ have all the pleasing features one delights in and expects from a ghost story, including unexplained noises at night in an old house, strange dreams, spectral visions and, in the latter tale, the nocturnal wailing and moaning of an organ.

THOMAS CROFTON CROKER (1798–1854) was born in Cork and for some years held a position in the Admiralty. Croker devoted himself largely to the collection of ancient Irish poetry and folklore. ‘The Haunted Cellar’ is told in anecdotal fashion; whether this is because there is an element of truth in the yarn or the author wishes to create that impression one cannot say.

JEREMIAH CURTIN (1835–1906) is the odd author out in this collection in the sense that he was not Irish. He was an American writer but he specialised in folklore and he was the author of two classic books in the genre, Myths and Folklore of Ireland and Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World, Collected from Oral Tradition in South-West Munster. From this latter volume comes ‘St Martin’s Eve’. The story is told in a very matter-of-fact manner with no attempt to add dramatic dressing. It is a chilling story, simply told and somehow all the more chilling for that.

Although there is a fine variety of ghostly experiences awaiting you in this volume, I believe there is a common thread that links these tales. It is perhaps most noticeable in the Le Fanu narratives, but it can be sensed in the other stories, too. It is that stoical unquestioning Irish acceptance of the belief that we are not alone, that we may be visited by spirits from beyond the grave, and while the experience will be fearful, we should not be too surprised. In some ways, this makes these Irish ghost stories all the more unnerving.