Image: Shannon Wise

Henry James And The Psychology Of Ghosts

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’ 1898 novella about a naive young governess and her desperate but misguided efforts to shield two children from a pair of predatory wraiths at a lonely country estate, may well be the most important ghost story written in the English language. Of course, some critics would claim that honor belongs to Shakespeare’s Hamlet—and they might have a point if only Hamlet’s single ghostly element—the demanding, vengeful shade of the eponymous protagonist’s father—were more central to the play. However, the spectral elder Hamlet has his final scene in Act III of the five act play, thereby making Hamlet—one of our most powerful literary works in so many other ways—something less than a full-fledged tale of the paranormal.

Another obvious contender is Charles Dickens’ classic novella, A Christmas Carol (1848). The story of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and Tiny Tim certainly is the world’s most popular and well-loved ghost story, by far. However, A Christmas Carol, with it’s pervasive sentimentality and shadowless moralism, contrasts as much more of a lighthearted (though, of course, still thought-provoking) entertainment and much less of a serious literary accomplishment when matched against the subtleties, ambiguities, and superb character complexities of James’ story.

Both books have had profound and long-lasting effects that extend even into our current popular culture. While Dickens’ book appealed to the conscience of Victorian society, permanently changed attitudes toward the working poor, and reshaped the spirit in which Christmas is celebrated, James’ work exerted a powerful influence on the literature and cinema of the 20th century—particularly on fictions that combined uncanny or fantastic elements with psychological ones.

The relative importance of the two books therefore depends on the lens one chooses to view them through. [Read more…] about THE TURN OF THE SCREW

Advice On Crafting A Scary Supernatural Tale

In the early 1800s, when Ivanhoe author Sir Walter Scott was writing, the short story was a fairly new fictional form, with novels having comprised most of the fiction published up to then. However, the rapid proliferation of newspapers and magazines throughout the 19th century made the short story both a practical and a highly popular commodity to produce.

Scott found this new form to be superior to the novel for telling his ghostly tales because he thought it was far too difficult to keep a reader sufficiently frightened over the course of several hundred pages. In his opinion, it was far easier and more effective to maintain that icy grip on the spine of his audience throughout a read that lasted only an hour. In his essay, On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition, he wrote: [Read more…] about HOW TO WRITE A GHOST STORY

Did You Hear The One About The Ghost?

So this ghost walks into a bar.

No, wait. That’s not right. A store. He walks into a store. And he doesn’t walk; he floats. Because he’s a ghost.

So this ghost floats into a store, drifts up to the counter, and he says to the cashier, he says, “I want to buy a pint of vodka.”

The cashier studies the ghost for a moment, and then he says, the cashier says . . . [Read more…] about GHOST JOKE

James: Master Of The Ghost Story’s Golden Age

The “golden age” of the ghost story ran from the early 1840s to the beginning of World War One—or from the start of Queen Victoria’s reign to just over a dozen years beyond her death. This was a period when there was a great deal of interest in all things ghostly. Ghost stories were extremely popular in both magazines and books—as well as well in front of the fireplaces of upper- and middle-class Victorian homes, where taking turns telling them, especially at Christmastime, had become a tradition.

Such famous writers as Charles Dickens, Robert Luis Stevenson, and Henry James turned out ghost stories along with their more “literary” work. But the genre also spawned a number of supernatural specialists, perhaps the most famous, innovative, and highly regarded of whom was the British author M.R. (Montague Rhodes) James (1862-1936).

James shunned the Gothic settings popular among many earlier authors of paranormal tales, and instead set his fictions in isolated corners of contemporary Britain and continental Europe. His stories tend to take place in remote villages along the coast, or out in the lonely countryside. [Read more…] about M.R. JAMES

Edith Wharton: Ghost Stories And A Pulitzer Prize

Edith Wharton was a celebrated early 20th century American author with 38 books to her credit. Much of her fiction had to do with New York’s high society and, like the works of her mentor and friend, Henry James, was notable for the psychological complexity of its characters. Her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence, made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, which she received in 1921.

Also like James, Wharton excelled at writing ghost stories, a genre that was extremely popular throughout most of her career. Her ghost-story collection, Tales of Men and Ghosts, was published in 1910 and included The Eyes, one of the finest examples of the psychological ghost story in the short-story form. Another ghost-story collection, Ghosts, appeared in 1937 and contained The Lady’s Maid’s Bell (1902), a well-known conventional ghost story with Gothic overtones. Ghost stories also appeared in several of her other collections. [Read more…] about TELLING TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS

Do Phantom Ships Have Skeleton Crews?

Ghost ships have been the subject of mythology and fiction, but they are also a factual phenomenon. The term refers to a ship that has no living crew, and no expectation of receiving one. Most real ghost ships are vessels that have been mothballed or abandoned because they are no longer seaworthy. Such derelict boats usually are old, weatherbeaten, and dark, and like abandoned buildings they inspire feelings of eeriness in people who see them.

However, over the past several hundred years there have been a number of strange reports of abandoned ships found floating on the ocean, purportedly with no clear explanation for the absence of their crews. One of the most famous such cases is that of the merchant ship SV Sea Bird, said to have run aground on the Rhode Island coast in the mid 1700s. According to some accounts, although there was no one aboard and the SV Sea Bird‘s life boat was missing, the sails were set and there was water boiling on a stove in the galley, indications that the vessel’s mysterious abandonment had occurred recently, and within sight of shore. A dog and a cat reportedly were on the ship. [Read more…] about GHOST SHIPS