Anne Boleyn, The Headless Horseman, And Roland: A Long Tradition Of Decapitated Phantoms
In 1978, when the late singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon, penned the lyrics to his haunting (and haunted) musical ballad, “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner,” he was adding the most recent strand to a braid of literature and folklore that Western storytellers first began weaving hundreds of years ago.
The Roland character in Zevon’s song is a Norwegian mercenary soldier fighting in Africa who, at the behest of the CIA, is betrayed and murdered by his comrades. Post-death he returns as a revenant—a headless one, due to his having been decapitated by a burst of automatic gunfire—and he wanders the earth seeking revenge.
Of course, the most well-known headless ghost—also a revenant—is Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman, who appears in the 1820 story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by American author Washington Irving. [continue reading…]
This World War I Submarine Is The Same Type Of U-Boat As The Ghost Sub
We All Live In A Haunted Submarine
Legends about ghost ships have circulated for hundreds of years. Many haunted vessels have been warships supposedly observed to be underway without any crew aboard. So, with the advent of widespread submarine warfare in World War I, it was probably inevitable that people would begin to hear reports of underwater maritime hauntings.
The most well-known legend of a haunted submarine is that of the German U-boat, U65. According to stories that circulated after the war, U65 seemed cursed from the start. Even before her launch in 1915, four men died in two separate accidents that occurred while the boat was being built. Then, on the U-boat’s maiden voyage, a man was swept overboard, and two others were killed by a leak of toxic fumes from the ship’s batteries.
While the ship was being outfitted prior to her second cruise, a torpedo accidentally exploded, killing the first officer and injuring nine others. It was shortly thereafter, when crew members claimed to have seen the dead officer walk back aboard the sub and disappear inside, that U65 first received her reputation for being haunted. [continue reading…]
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Birthplace In the Old Village Of Capelizod, Dublin City, Ireland. Photo: Damien Slattery
Sheridan Le Fanu: Father Of The Victorian Ghost Story
As we’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, the so-called golden age of the English ghost story—a time of immense popularity for the ghost-story genre—began near the start of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837 and lasted until the beginning of World War I, a dozen years after her death in 1901. So, a great many, though not all, ghost stories from this golden period can be considered Victorian literature.
M.R. James, who is still considered to be one of the greatest crafters of ghost stories, produced most of his work in the early 1900s. But of course he owed a large debt to the classic Victorian writers who came before him—and by his own admission, none more than the Irish writer, Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873). Le Fanu was also greatly appreciated by his contemporary, Charles Dickens, who in his capacity as a magazine editor enthusiastically promoted Le Fanu’s work.
Le Fanu is now widely regarded as the “father” of the Victorian ghost story. In the words of Julia Briggs, author of Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977):
The work of all these writers of the [eighteen] sixties and seventies, however, was overshadowed by that of one man, who has high claims to be considered one of the finest ghost story writers of all time, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. M.R. James considered that ‘he stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.’ . . . It is the quality of his insights which make his work remarkable; his intuitive understanding and vivid portrayal of fear, guilt and anxiety lifts his writing to true distinction, as his best critics have observed. . . . Behind Le Fanu’s imaginative descriptions of psychological states, especially the states of fear, lay a profound concern with the relationship between mind and body, and the way one might exert its influence over the other.” [continue reading…]
Words From The Masters On Writing A Chilling Supernatural Story. Image: Curtis MacNewton
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: [continue reading…]
Volume II of our print anthology, “21st Century Ghost Stories,” has just been published. It contains all of our Summer 2018 to Summer 2021 winning and honorable mention stories from The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award contest and The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition—30 fine supernatural short stories in all!
