This tradition is also revived in the upcoming Pavane Press anthology, <\/span>A Winter\u2019s Tale: Horror Stories for the Yuletide <\/i><\/span>(a winter’s tale on amazon<\/a>) The introduction to the anthology notes that \u201cWhether their intent was to inspire or to frighten, the Victorians had one thing right: there is an inexorable connection between joy and fear, and they celebrated the season of joy with ghost stories that both frightened their audiences and relieved them with the knowledge that their own existences were less terrifying.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n 2020, in particular, seems suited to reviving the custom of ghost stories for Christmas. It\u2019s been a darker year than any I can think of in my half century of life, one that has brought tragedy and fear and terrible uncertainty. Though the new year approaches with the hope of change, it is still an unknown, so walking into the winter is as frightening for us in its way as for our ancestors centuries ago. At the same time, though, the winter holidays\u2014including Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas\u2014are times of cheer when we celebrate our communities. We are encouraged to exchange gifts, be generous to our fellows, and (depending upon one\u2019s religious views) celebrate a symbolic new beginning.<\/span><\/p>\n What a strange and somehow poetic paradox. This is certainly a year when we need the comfort and glamour of our winter holidays more than ever, yet the tinsel and candlelight will not be able to distract us entirely from the anxiety and sadness that we still harbor.<\/span><\/p>\n Compassion is the gift that I believe we all need this year, both to give and to receive, and it is also the key to some of my favorite tales of the supernatural. Like this season itself, they yoke together darkness and light, dread and love. And I relish them for the hope they bring in the midst of the creepy promise they extend\u2014for, after all, they are ghost stories.<\/span><\/p>\n The perennial favorite, of course, is ‘A Christmas Carol’, in which Charles Dickens\u2019s spirits teach skinflinty Scrooge to look upon his fellow men and women with compassion. It\u2019s a beautiful idea that so selfish a creature can find redemption and change his life for the better, and I\u2019m not surprised \u201cA Christmas Carol\u201d continues to maintain its popularity more than 175 years after it was first published. <\/span><\/p>\n For me, though, one of the most poignant plot arcs sees a living human being able to release a tortured soul from its bondage here on earth. To be sure, there are many different sorts of ghosts in fiction, and they may be trapped on our plane for any number of reasons: to gain revenge; to complete unfinished business; or even simply a kind of recording, a \u201cstone tape\u201d (as Nigel Kneale\u2019s teleplay termed it) that has no capacity for thought or reason and is no more than someone\u2019s most anguished moments of life played like a film projected over and over.<\/span><\/p>\n But some are able to communicate with the living…and of those, there are lucky ones with whom the living can interact. Sometimes a mortal person\u2019s compassion can even be their key to freedom. This is the case in the four stories I present to you now. All are frequently chosen for anthologies, perhaps because of the poignancy that each conveys so powerfully. And though only one is truly Victorian, all are heirs to that tradition.<\/p>\n ‘The Open Door’ by Margaret Oliphant, published in 1881, is an excellent example of the sentimental Victorian ghost story at its best. (http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/ebooks\/10052<\/a>)<\/p>\n A comfortable domestic setting is established at once by the narrator and protagonist, a family man, and his affection for his children\u2014particularly his young son, Roland, who is described as sensitive and delicate\u2014is crucial to the development of the story. Roland is the first to be aware of the haunting, and the evident agony of the spirit torments him to the point that he falls ill. He tasks his skeptical father with finding a way to end the agony of the unseen spirit.<\/p>\n The father\u2019s love for his son\u2014and his fear that the boy may die if thwarted\u2014motivates him to investigate and to persist in those investigations even when he would much rather give up his quest. \u201cWas ever such a task given to an anxious father trembling for his only boy? I felt in my heart, fantastic as it may appear, that I must fulfill this somehow, or part with my child.\u201d<\/p>\n When the protagonist does experience the visitation, he describes it as \u201ca low, moaning, wailing voice, full of suffering and pain, …full of human misery\u201d calling, \u201cOh, mother, let me in!\u201d Like his son before him, he immediately feels pity for the spirit: \u201cMy heart was rent with pity and trouble,\u2014pity for the poor suffering human creature that moaned and pleaded so, and trouble for myself and my boy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The protagonist enlists the help of first his butler, then his son\u2019s doctor, then the local minister\u2014and, as in the old fairy tales, the third encounter is the charm. The minister recognizes the voice of one of his late parishioners, and in a powerful scene entreats the anguished ghost to leave the earthly realm and go to both his deceased earthly mother and his heavenly Father. His prayer and his own conviction, aided by his past relationship with \u201cWillie\u201d during life and his knowledge of the specific circumstances of his death, succeed in ushering the troubled soul to peace.<\/span><\/p>\n Oliphant ends by offering two different interpretations for the phenomenon. The father muses that an event like the living Willie pleading in vain for his late mother to let him in \u201cmight impress itself somehow upon the hidden heart of nature. I do not pretend to know how, but the repetition had struck me at the time as, in its terrible strangeness and incomprehensibility, almost mechanical,\u2014as if the unseen actor could not exceed or vary, but was bound to re-enact the whole.\u201d After he proposes this \u201cstone tape\u201d explanation, however, he notes that \u201cThis spirit in pain,\u2014if it was a spirit,\u2014this voice out of the unseen,\u2014was a poor fellow-creature in misery, to be succored and helped out of his trouble, to my boy.\u201d Indeed, whether the spirit was a thinking, feeling entity or a psychic record of a single event, had young Roland not taken pity for it and recruited his father\u2019s help, it\u2019s clear that the ghostly phenomenon would have continued.<\/span><\/p>\n Mary E. Wilkins\u2019s 1903 story The Lost Ghost’ (<\/span>http:\/\/www.eastoftheweb.com\/short-stories\/UBooks\/LostGhos.shtml<\/a>) is also about an unquiet spirit separated from its mother, but this is a darker story, and we learn that the mother was not worthy of the ghost\u2019s devotion. Wilkins, too, starts the story in an atmosphere of cozy domesticity, with two neighbor women visiting together over needlework and gossip, which makes it all the more startling when the darker tendencies emerge. Mrs. Meserve tells the story of a time before her marriage when she lodged with two widowed sisters, delicate Mrs. Dennison and kind Mrs. Bird. <\/span><\/p>\n Initially she is happy in the house and even enjoys being spoiled a little by one of her landladies, Mrs. Bird, who is \u201ca real motherly sort of woman; she always seemed to be the happiest when she was doing something to make other folks happy and comfortable. Mrs. Dennison told me she had always been so…. \u2018It’s lucky Abby never had any children,\u2019 she said, \u2018for she would have spoilt them.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Mrs. Meserve\u2019s contentment is destroyed, however, when she learns the house is haunted\u2014a fact that emerges when a ghostly little girl brings the lodger\u2019s coat to her room:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI saw my coat first. The thing that held it was so small that I couldn’t see much of anything else. Then I saw a little white face with eyes so scared and wishful that they seemed as if they might eat a hole in anybody’s heart. It was a dreadful little face…but it was so pitiful that somehow it did away a good deal with the dreadfulness. And there were two little hands spotted purple with the cold, holding up my winter coat, and a strange little far-away voice said: ‘I can’t find my mother.’\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Now that the phantom has made its presence known, Mrs. Meserve begins to see it frequently\u2014carrying out errands and chores without being invited, and saying over and over, \u201cI can\u2019t find my mother.\u201d She adds, \u201cI never heard a living child cry for its mother that was anything so pitiful as that dead one. It was enough to break your heart. She used to come and say that to Mrs. Bird oftener than to any one else.\u201d Mrs. Bird responds to the visitations with more sympathy and less fear than the other women, once going so far as to say, \u201cIt seems to me sometimes as if I should die if I can’t get that awful little white robe off that child and get her in some clothes and feed her and stop her looking for her mother.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When Mrs. Meserve learns the terrible story behind the ghost child\u2019s presence, these pitiful, eerie manifestations take on even more horror. She learns that the little girl died when her mother left town for an extramarital assignation, locking her daughter in her room before leaving. When finally found, the little girl had either frozen to death or died of starvation\u2014her would-be rescuers seem unable to determine which. Knowing this history, the women who see her ghost can\u2019t understand why she would wish to be reunited with her now-dead mother.<\/span><\/p>\n The little ghost shows good judgment in visiting Mrs. Bird, however. When the kindly, maternal woman dies suddenly, her spirit becomes the mother figure the phantom longed for. \u201cWe saw, as plain as we ever saw anything in our lives, Mrs. Abby Bird walking off over the white snow-path with that child holding fast to her hand, nestling close to her as if she had found her own mother.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n From that time on, Mrs. Meserve notes, the little girl\u2019s ghost was never seen. Though kindly Mrs. Bird had to die to do so, she and her impulse of tenderness freed the lost ghost from her lonely vigil in the house where she had died waiting for her mother\u2019s return. At the same time, Mrs. Bird attained a daughter to care for, as she had wanted. It\u2019s a sad but satisfying ending.<\/span><\/p>\n The two tales that follow are among my very favorite ghost stories, and both showcase women characters whose capacity for empathy proves paramount to a happy ending. They carry over, I believe, from the Victorian tradition that assigns emotionality to women and children (like Roland in the first story). Men in fiction of the era are permitted to be compassionate in more restrained ways, but they risk seeming unmanly if they give free rein to fear or to their softer feelings. And, intriguingly, our next story comments explicitly on the role women can and should play with regard to unhappy specters.<\/span><\/p>\n ‘The Woman\u2019s Ghost Story’, by Algernon Blackwood (1907), is brief but powerful. (<\/span>https:\/\/americanliterature.com\/author\/algernon-blackwood\/short-story\/the-womans-ghost-story<\/a>) The unnamed narrator tells a room full of men about her \u201cexperience\u201d years ago when, as an unconventional and independent young woman, she went to spend a night in a house reputed to be haunted. When she encounters a man apparently waiting there for her, she assumes he is the caretaker, but soon after he follows her inside she realizes her mistake. \u201cI\u2019m the man who was frightened to death,\u201d he tells her.<\/span><\/p>\n Concluding that he is a madman, she runs from the room but turns the wrong way and, instead of escaping the house, runs upstairs. There she locks herself in a room, only to find the man is there too. He explains, looking at her with \u201cthe saddest eyes I had ever seen,\u201d that he died in that house and fear keeps him there\u2014but he feels that if someone can love him he may be freed. \u201cIt\u2019s my condition that keeps me here. I want something to change my condition for me, for then I could get away. What I want is sympathy. Or, really, more than sympathy; I want affection\u2014I want <\/span>love!<\/i><\/span>\u201d He needs to be relieved of the feeling of fear engendered by \u201cthe succession of cruel and curious people who come to this house to see the ghost, and thus keep alive its atmosphere of terror.\u201d He implores the narrator to take pity on him instead of cowering in a corner. \u201cWon\u2019t you step out into the middle of the room and try to love me a little?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n With her \u201csense of pity\u201d touched by the spirit\u2019s plight, even in the midst of her terror she is able to do as he bids, and is rewarded by the spirit exclaiming, \u201cYou have done a kind act. That\u2019s the first attempt at sympathy that has been shown me since I died.\u201d As her compassion for the hapless ghost grows and her fear subsides, she is able to walk closer to him and find the determination to help him.<\/span><\/p>\n His response is an extraordinary and lovely speech that always haunts me long after I finish the story: \u201cYou women…you wonderful women, to whom life often brings no opportunity of spending your great love, oh, if you only could know how many of us simply yearn for it! It would save our souls, if but you knew. Few might find the chance that you now have, but if you only spent your love freely, without definite object, just letting it flow openly for all who need, you would reach hundreds and thousands of souls like me, and release us!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s a poignant speech, bestowing a kind of beauty and nobility on the idea of being a spinster, a status generally not held in high regard at the time. This philosophy overturns what might otherwise seem a tragic denial of fulfillment and suggests that love need not go to waste simply for the lack of a husband or children. <\/span><\/p>\n It certainly has an impact on the narrator, who is \u201cstirred…profoundly.\u201d The ghost urges her, \u201cPut your arms round me and kiss me, for the love of God!…Forget that I\u2019m a man and you\u2019re a woman….Forget that I\u2019m a ghost, and come out boldly and press me to you with a great kiss, and let your love flow into me….Love me! and I shall be free!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The spirit\u2019s plea summons forth \u201can emotion infinitely greater than fear\u201d in the narrator, and she goes toward him with arms outstretched. She recalls, \u201cPity and love were in my heart at that moment, genuine pity, I swear, and genuine love.\u201d She finds the strength to give him the embrace that sets him free:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cHow can I describe to you, all you skeptical men sitting there with pipes in your mouths, the amazing sensation I experienced of holding an intangible, impalpable thing so closely to my heart that it touched my body with equal pressure all the way down, and then melted away somewhere into my very being? For it was like seizing a rush of cool wind and feeling a touch of burning fire the moment it had struck its swift blow and passed on. A series of shocks ran all over and all through me; a momentary ecstasy of flaming sweetness and wonder thrilled down into me; my heart gave another great leap\u2014and then I was alone…. All fear had left me, and something was singing round me in the air and in my heart like the joy of a spring morning in youth.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Just as the ghost insisted, her act of generosity and pity frees him from his miserable existence on earth. I find it particularly moving that he has to persuade the heroine to release him from his suffering, and every step she takes toward that goal is a triumph of courage and trust. She undergoes a journey in just a few pages that challenges her to find the courage to free a soul in torment and profoundly changes her understanding of the world\u2014and of love. There is no indication in the story that she ever married. Perhaps after the beauty and power of that encounter she found the prospect of marriage inadequate.<\/span><\/p>\n The last story I\u2019ll discuss is E.F. Benson\u2019s ‘How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery’, published in 1912 (<\/span>in Benson collection from Project Gutenberg Australia: http:\/\/gutenberg.net.au\/ebooks06\/0605171h.html<\/a>). I first read it in Marvin Kaye\u2019s anthology <\/span>Ghosts: A Treasury of Chilling Tales Old &New. <\/i><\/span>Kaye made it the last story in the book, explaining, \u201cI have given this tale the last position because I do not believe it can be bettered.\u201d I can\u2019t disagree, and, like Kaye, I have been saving the best for last. This small masterpiece, like a good chocolate assortment, contains many different flavors. It begins like a light, even arch country-house comedy, then takes a more serious tone and becomes increasingly eerie and unsettling. When the suspense has become unbearable, the hammer falls…and then comes piercing, unexpected sweetness. All is concluded with a reassuring return to the playful tone with which the journey began. I urge you to read the story if you haven\u2019t already done so, for I will cover a relatively small portion of it here.<\/span><\/p>\n The story begins not in trying to impress upon the reader a mood of terror and suspense; in fact, quite the opposite. We are told that the Peveril family, whose home, Church-Peveril, will be the setting of the story, is so accustomed to ghosts that they no longer take them seriously, for<\/span> \u201cto the Peverils the appearance of a ghost is a matter of hardly greater significance than is the appearance of the post to those who live in more ordinary houses.\u201d With this perspective having been established, the unnamed narrator, a friend of the Peverils\u2019, runs down a roster of ghosts who might be fearsome to other families but are treated by the Peverils with the affectionate indifference usually bestowed upon eccentric relatives.<\/p>\n There is an exception, however\u2014a haunting whose consequences are so dire that even this irreverent family scarcely dares speak of it. It had its origin in 1602, when wild Dick Peveril, desirous to inherit the family seat, murdered his twin baby nephews because they stood between him and his goal. So heinous a crime was this, and so innocent the victims, that it is imprinted upon the room where the children were killed\u2014the long gallery of the title. \u201cOn each occasion they appeared at night, between sunset and sunrise, always in the same long gallery, and always as two toddling children scarcely able to walk. And on each occasion the luckless individual who saw them died either speedily or terribly, or with both speed and terror, after the accursed vision had appeared to him.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the only family haunting that the Peverils respect, and they make certain not to linger in the haunted gallery after dark, also taking care to warn their guests about its dangers. It is only through a combination of accidents and miscalculations that young Madge Dalrymple, a cousin of the Peverils who is visiting for New Year\u2019s festivities, finds herself in the gallery after dark. She is resting an injured leg there alone one afternoon, and although she knows of the gallery\u2019s dangers, she has plenty of time before sunset\u2014but then she falls asleep.<\/p>\n Madge\u2019s paralyzed terror when she wakes and finds herself in the gallery after sunset is the stuff of nightmare. Benson makes us feel her panic and horror as she tries to fumble her way out of the room by memory and touch alone, while certain that at any moment the ghostly twins will appear and seal her doom. And sure enough, before she can escape, they do:<\/p>\n \u201cThere stood…two little white figures, side by side. They came towards her slowly, shufflingly. She could not see face or form at all distinctly, but the two little white figures were advancing. She knew them to be the ghosts of terror, innocent of the awful doom they were bound to bring, even as she was innocent.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The apparitions that have brought doom to so many before her \u201csmiled at her with shy little baby smiles\u201d and gently fade away. Madge feels a beautiful certainty that no harm will come to her, and the narrator notes that, as of his recording of the tale, she has shown no ill effects. The girl\u2019s selflessness and pity were the key to freeing the ghosts from their destiny to bring suffering and death. \u201cSomething, her attitude to them, we must suppose, her pity, her sympathy, touched and dissolved and annihilated the curse.\u201d<\/p>\n In any other ghost story, I\u2019m certain the twins would have vanished entirely and passed on to whatever version of the Elysian Fields the author deemed fit. But it is part of the charm of this tale that, instead, the ghosts of the twins are brought into the family fold to take their place among the harmless specters that walk there. The narrator describes his welcome when he recently arrived at Church-Peveril after dark. His hostess greets him thus: \u201cI’ve just been seeing the twins. They looked too sweet and stopped nearly ten minutes. Let us have tea at once.\u201d<\/p>\n The flourish of humor is welcome after the tension and redemption of the climax. The story may bring you to tears, as it does me, but it will leave you with a smile on your face.<\/p>\n I think one reason I love ghost stories like these so much is that they do give me hope that humans can do better; that we can rise above self-interest. Of course, these are fictional characters I\u2019ve been discussing, but their creators had to come up with them, and that kind of imagination\u2014the magnanimity of believing that readers will sympathize with and celebrate fictitious creations characterized by compassion\u2014is very welcome indeed, both for the holidays and for the rest of our journey through the winter darkness. May we all find the empathy and kindness to help each other through to the better times ahead.<\/p>\n Atlanta author Amanda DeWees wrote her doctoral dissertation on 19th-century vampire literature, the perfect training\u2014though she didn\u2019t know it at the time\u2014for writing Victorian gothic romance novels. These include <\/em>With This Curse, which won the 2015 Daphne du Maurier Award for historical mystery\/suspense, and <\/em>her mystery series about Victorian actress and spirit medium Sybil Ingram, which includes <\/em>A Haunting Reprise and <\/em>The Last Serenade. Visit amanda dewees website<\/a> to learn more about her books.<\/em><\/p>\n You can also read Amanda\u2019s overview of some classic female authors of the supernatural here: <\/em>http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/forever-new-women-supernatural-fiction\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n And a reminder that the <\/span>Pavane Press anthology, <\/span>A Winter\u2019s Tale: Horror Stories for the Yuletide, <\/i><\/span>is available now, in Kindle and print \u2013 including ghost stories \u2018Haunted Harbor\u2019 by Amanda DeWees<\/span> and \u2018The Heron in Winter\u2019 by John Linwood Grant<\/span>:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n amazon us<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today, dear listener, we are pleased to have an examination of the more romantic and human side of classic ghost stories, penned especially for us by ace Gothic and Romantic author Amanda DeWees. Amanda examines stories by Margaret Oliphant, Mary E Wilkins, Algernon Blackwood and E F Benson, and provides links for you to read … Continue reading GHOST STORIES – THE HUMAN TOUCH<\/span> ![\"ghost](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/129978926_1582682801940900_5272763915192907590_o.jpg?resize=350%2C525\")
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\nTHE OPEN DOOR<\/h2>\n
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\nTHE LOST GHOST<\/h2>\n
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\nTHE WOMAN’S GHOST STORY<\/h2>\n
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\nHOW FEAR DEPARTED FROM THE LONG GALLERY<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>The thought inspires her with an idea: to plead for mercy. \u201cShe had not hurt them or laughed at them, and they, they were but babies when the wicked and bloody deed had sent them to their burning death. Surely the spirits of these children would not be inaccessible to the cry of one who was of the same blood as they, who had committed no fault that merited the doom they brought.\u201d Kneeling, she starts to beg for mercy, but then in the very midst of her plea undergoes a change of perspective: \u201cHer tender girl\u2019s heart thought no more of herself, but only of them, those little innocent spirits on whom so awful a doom was laid.\u201d With \u201cthe enlightenment of pity…her fear fell from her\u201d and she says, \u201cDears, I am so sorry for you….It is not your fault that you must bring me what you must bring, but I am not afraid any longer. I am only sorry for you. God bless you, you poor darlings.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/a>amazon uk<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n