Welsh - Ghost: 97 Stories to Read With the Lights On

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To my niece, Sophie Sinclair

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...The time has been That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end. But now they rise again Macbeth , William Shakespeare

We love and miss our dead, but few of us would like them to return.

For Gods sake dont let it in, cries the old man in W.W. Jacobs The Monkeys Paw (1895), when the mangled son he has wished back to life comes knocking at the cottage door. Resurrection is a tricky business. It goes against the laws of nature and we would rather graves remain undisturbed, tombs locked and bolted.

Every civilisation has its ghosts. I imagine my ancient ancestors, clustered together around a smoky fire in some dank cave, casting nervous looks into the darkness beyond. One of them picks up a stick and pokes it into the flames, and then she begins to weave a story. A tale of ghosties, ghoulies, bogles and spunkies; substituted bairns and the disappeared who return aeons later, as young as they were, but strangely changed.

The endurance and plasticity of ghost stories remind us that we are drawn from the same stock as our ancestors and people of other nations and other cultures. Love, fear and mortality are common to us all. They are also at the heart of ghostly tales.

A great number of people nowadays are beginning broadly to insinuate that there are no such things as ghosts, or spiritual beings visible to mortal sight, James Hogg asserts in The Mysterious Bride (1830). I am among the naysayers. I do not believe in ghosts, but it is still possible to be disquieted by things we do not believe in. The libraries of disturbing tales I read while assembling this collection of one hundred haunting stories have resulted in bad dreams and broken nights. My selection begins circa 113 AD with Pliny the Youngers Haunted House and finishes in 2014 with James Robertsons The Ghost. It includes spine-chillers from Edith Wharton, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nathaniel Hawthorne; weird tales from H.P. Lovecraft, J.G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury. No collection of ghost stories would be complete without the walking dead, and so vampires are represented by Jewelle Gomez and Bram Stoker. Some ghosts are less frightening than others. Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse and Richmal Crompton are amongst those who invite us to laugh at our superstitions.

A few of the stories I have chosen are not stories at all. Kazuo Ishiguro has contributed a film script, Robert Burns a narrative poem, Mary Shelley a fragment of a novel. The collection contains classics of the genre from M.R. James, Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. It also includes lesser known and recently published tales.

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Ghost stories express fears that go beyond a glimpse of a ghoul draped in a white sheet. Many, such as the death of a child, are common to all peoples, all eras.

Toshiko, in Yukio Mishimas Swaddling Clothes (1955) worries too much. She looks, more like a transparent picture than a creature of flesh and blood. When we meet her she is upset by the contempt a doctor showed for her maids unexpected and illegitimate child, born earlier that evening on the living room floor. What kind of future will a child swaddled in old newspapers have? Guilt can open the door to strange spectres and Toshiko discovers the answer to her question sooner than expected.

In Elizabeth Gaskells The Old Nurses Story (1852), a ghost child tries to lure a living one out into the snow. Some phantoms are angry, but this dead child is lonely. Like Rosemary Timperleys Harry(1955), it seeks a playmate to keep it company. We do not want to think of the dead as being left adrift, but we dread the idea that they might return to take us with them.

Governess tales were a popular nineteenth century genre. Neither gentry nor servant, governesses occupied a liminal space in the household. Like ghosts they existed on the threshold of different worlds. Lonely, sexually frustrated and at risk to flights of fancy, their impressions were not necessarily to be trusted, even by themselves. Female servants precarious place in the world also made them vulnerable to other dangers, as the unfortunate Florence discovers in Elizabeth Taylors Poor Girl (1958), a story that owes a debt to Henry Jamess masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Newly engaged ladys maid Alice Hartley is wise to the pitfalls of her position, in The Ladys Maids Bell (1914) by Edith Wharton. When her employees husband looks her up and down she tells us:

I knew what the look meant, from having experienced it once or twice in my former places... The typhoid had served me well enough in one way: it kept that kind of gentleman at arms-length.

A reminder of the fate that might yet await Alice flits along the corridors of the servants quarters by night, the ghost of her predecessor.

It is notable how many of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers included in Ghost were supporters of the womens suffrage movement and other feminist and equal rights campaigns. Governesses and ladys maids were not the only people to be constricted and marginalised. Other classes had their trials too.

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is narrated by a woman who is confined to bed and mentally unravelling. The story was inspired by treatment Gilman received for postpartum depression. Her doctor advised her to, Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time... Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live. The cure turned out to be worse than the illness and Gilman eventually healed herself by quitting domesticity altogether.

The twenty-first century offers many of us a range of choices that would have been unimaginable to our forebears, but it seems that freedoms do not banish ghosts. The alternative lives we might have led can also inspire hauntings. In Jackie Kays The White Cot (2009) Dionne is on holiday with her girlfriend Sam. That wallpaper would drive me mad, she says, in a nod to The Yellow Wallpaper, but it is not the furnishings that are playing with her mind.

Madness is a recurring theme in ghost stories and gothic tales: ...nervous very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? asks Edgar Allan Poes narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart (1843). The story resonates with nerves strung tight to snapping point. Ghost stories place us on slip-changing sands where we are uncertain of our footing. A mad narrator is, of course, an unreliable narrator. But you do not have to be mad to be unreliable. Hilton is only seven years old in Tananarive Dues Prologue, 1963 (1995). Children have limited experience and vast imaginations, so we are not necessarily inclined to believe Hilton when he tells us that his Nana is a dead woman. The old lady walks, talks and gets on with her household duties but her flesh is, as cold as just-drawn well water. As cold as December.

Weather can turn our thoughts to the supernatural as Robert Burnss Tam OShanter (1791) discovers when roaring fou he at last makes his way home across the Ayrshire countryside in the dead of a stormy night.

The wind blew as twad blawn its last;The rattling showrs rose on the blast;The speedy gleams the darkness swallowd;Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellowed:That night, a child might understand,The deil had business on his hand.

Tam has been supping ale all day with his friend Souter Johnny, and a drunk man is many more times likely to come across devil worshiping witches in Alloway Kirkyard than a sober man. But his horses missing tail is evidence that her masters unlikely story may be true.

Tam OShanter is a trial to his wife Kate, but hes a cheerful, sociable drunk who we root for against the witches. The drunken man in Dylan Thomass The Vest (1939) is of another stamp. He is the danger we should run from, a man who might bring death into the cheeriest of public houses.

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