More Ghostly Goings On
Wednesday October 10, 2007 in ghost stories |
Some more ghost stories for your consideration as I continue with my October thrills.
H.G.Wells wrote The Inexperienced Ghost for The Strand magazine in 1902. The opening of the story is very similar to his classic The Time Machine, with a group of gentleman sitting round a fireside to settle into hearing an intriguing story. The fireside technique is always a good start to a story, the cigars and general good humour settling the reader in before the thrills start, and one I’m sure has been used many times before and since. The Inexperienced Ghost is essentially a comic ghost story, and the tale doesn’t really get serious enough to scare. However, it’s as well written as you would expect and so still required reading for Wells completists.
Eerily, I found the style of The Inexperienced Ghost quite similar to a story by W.W.Jacobs called The Toll House, which I recently found online at Online Literature (some interesting stuff here if you can put up with the awful ads) and which was also written in 1902. It features another group of excitable gentlemen, who this time get exactly what they were bargaining for in an empty, abandoned house. Why do people in ghost stories always elect to spend the night in haunted houses? I suspect for exactly the same reasons that we enjoy reading ghost stories…
And now I’ve settled you in, I’ll just finish with Bram Stoker’s The Squaw. More humour here, although this time not wholly intentional. A man and his wife decide to take a companion along with them, already bored on the second week of their honeymoon. They also decide to do another romantic thing and visit a notorious tourist attraction called The Torture Tower. Black cats feature prominently and some well worn instruments of torture enjoy a new lease of life…
The Squaw has an inevitably gruesome ending, although still satisfying for a horror story and it stands up quite well for one written in 1893. It reminded me of the Amicus films of the 1970s, the portmanteau collections of scary tales that were always worth sitting up for.
Judge for yourself, this one’s also online as a PDF at Horrormasters...