Spooky TV Shows II: How do you prove if ghosts are real?

Danny Robins: Uncanny (2023-25)

A few years ago I wrote a kind of round-up of supernatural TV shows past and present, with particular emphasis on the epically silly 28 Days Haunted. It seems that time has come round again. To quote from the film of Shirley Jackson's classic Haunting of Hill House:

No one will hear you, no one will come, in the dark, in the night.

Each of the shows I'll be talking about below seems to illustrate a different approach to that age-old conundrum - not so much whether or not ghosts exist, as how best to scare the pants off people by suggesting that they do.

One is British, another American, and the third from Latin America.

James Wan: True Haunting (2025- )

This set of TV shows is a bit different from the last lot, though. Each of them is excellent - in its own, idiosyncratic way. And all of them (even Los Espookys) have interesting points to make about the whole subject of paranormal phenomena.

Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega & Fred Armisen: Los Espookys (2019-22)

At this point, though, I'd better go back to the question in my title: Whether or not you can actually prove the existence of ghosts. If your own answer to that is: You can't - because they don't, then that's the end of the conversation. There's no point in indulging in further debates over the meaning of the word "ghost" - discarnate entities of some sort, or direct proof of life after death? You've made up your mind. You're closed to further discussion.

Danny Glover's show Uncanny - based on his award-winning podcast - gets around this one in a rather ingenious way. He's appointed two teams: "Team Sceptic" - represented by psychologist Dr. Ciarán O'Keeffe; and "Team Believer" - represented by Scottish author and (former) psychology lecturer Evelyn Hollow.

The two are careful not to stray from their preset roles: Ciarán to come up with naturalistic explanations of any odd phenomena; Evelyn to contextualise the events and issues under discussion in the larger field of paranormal lore. And while this certainly makes for interesting, fun TV, it does leave to one side what seems to me the most important conceptual issue raised by such discussions:

• What would constitute evidence of the existence of ghosts - or, for that matter, of life after death?

If Ciaran in "Team Sceptic" is secretly of the opinion that no evidence would ever be enough: that anything can be explained away naturalistically: because it must be - in order to maintain the integrity of the scientific laws of nature, then we have a problem. There's no point in trying to convince him, because he's impervious to any accumulations of data which might eventually constitute proof.

After all, he wouldn't be the first to maintain such certainty:

At the end of the 19th century ... it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement.

If Ciarán and Evelyn were to have a real debate, though, I think that "Team Sceptic" would have to commit themselves in advance to a statement of what might constitute actual proof in their eyes. That is, admittedly, a huge ask, but it's a necessary one if we're serious about wanting to discuss the question.

"Team Believer" is, of course, in a much safer place conceptually. They can cherrypick evidence and information just as they please. They don't have to believe in the details of any particular case, because their overall openmindedness to the possibility of paranormal phenomena makes any such concessions unimportant. They can be as credulous or as hard-headed as they wish: they're already open to the possibility that the evidence cited could be true.

This is how Samuel Taylor Coleridge summed up the dilemma in an 1818 diary entry, collected in the posthumous Anima Poetae (1895):

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Ay! and what then?

Rodney Ascher, dir.: Room 237 (2012)

A few years ago I wrote a post about the fascinating documentary Room 237, a compendium of all the crazy theories people had come up with to "explain" Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining (1980).

It wasn't just that I found most of these readings of the film unconvincing, it was more that it seemed to me that their originators had no idea of the actual rules of argument: the nature of the evidence which could be considered admissible in such discussions.

They would say (for instance) that Jack Torrance was using a German brand of typewriter. Therefore, The Shining was a commentary on the Holocaust. Or else they'd notice a poster in one corner of the Overlook Hotel rec room which vaguely resembled (from some angles) a horned bull. Therefore, the film is based on the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Their readings were, to my mind, a series of non sequiturs and conceptual leaps based on insufficient evidence. As I put it in my post, it's not so much whether or not I agreed or disagreed with these theories, it's more a question of the nature of truth. "There is no truth, only points of view," is a much-quoted (and variously attributed) adage which often comes up in such discussions. I remarked in my post:

The way I prefer to approach the word "truth" is by means of a question: Do you recognise the existence of error? In other words, is a misreading a possibility for you? For instance, if you were to read out a passage in a foreign language unknown to you, and then make guesses at the meaning of some of the words, would this be a legitimate "interpretation" of the passage - or simply a manifestation of ignorance?

The question of whether or not you can understand a foreign language is, I think, a good test of one's relation to truth and "alternate facts" (as they're now notoriously known):

There's a gag I read once in a British magazine about literary receptions abroad, the ones where someone comes up to you and says, "Hello, I your translator am!" So, no, I'm unable to concur with the view that all truths are relative, and all interpretations equal.

My French is not particularly grammatical, and I make a lot of mistakes when I speak it, but I can read a book in French and understand virtually all of it. Even a native speaker of a language has occasional headscratching moments when they can't quite follow a statement in their own tongue. But that doesn't alter the fact that my relation to the French language is different from that of someone who's never studied it at all.

Oliver Sachs: Hallucinations (2012)

So how does this relate to the question of the existence of ghosts? Well, of course it depends on a question I've left in the too-hard basket until now: what exactly is a "ghost"? What do you - or I - mean by the word? Almost all psychologists, para or otherwise, would accept that visual, auditory and even tactile hallucinations happen. Oliver Sachs wrote a fascinating book on the subject, which I would strongly recommend to any interested parties.

There's even - some would claim - a phenomenon called a "mass hallucination", which covers those sights, or sounds, or feelings which are shared by more than one person. Ciarán O'Keeffe, in his discussions of particular cases on Uncanny, tends to supplement this particular grab-all, get-out-of-jail-free-card explanation with other old chestnuts such as urban legends, or curious visual and auditory phenomena such as the Brocken spectre or auditory pareidolia, where "the brain tries to find patterns in ambiguous sounds."

When you put them all together, along with the notorious unreliability of witness evidence - which tends, unfortunately, to increase over time, Team Sceptic would seem to have a pretty impregnable position to defend. "You're lying!" - or, more charitably, "You must be mistaken" - covers most other contingencies.

Which is why I think someone who's taken on the responsibility of espousing this view should have to answer whether any evidence - of any type - could ever convince them of the existence of discarnate entities, or ghosts, or spirits of any kind? As I said above, if the answer is a firm no, then the conversation is pointless. They'll always find an alternative, naturalistic explanation for any event, however puzzling, simply because they must: for the sake of their mental health (or, if you prefer, life lie).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Anima Poetae

In the case of Coleridge's flower, for instance - well, clearly it wasn't the same flower. It couldn't be. Coleridge was a notorious blabbermouth, and he'd probably been going on and on about this recurrent dream he'd been having, and some unscrupulous friend - perhaps that inveterate practical joker Charles Lamb - snuck in while he was asleep and put a flower in his hand. Har-de-ha-ha! Case closed. (That's if it ever happened in the first place. Which it probably didn't ...)

Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, Fred Armisen et al.: Los Espookys (2019-22)

The absurd conundrums of Los Espookys, where a group of friends whose love of horror movies and spooky shit generally has inspired them to form a business faking ghostly phenomena - monsters and mermaids designed to bring back tourists to a deserted beach resort; a fluffy alien who gets asthma attacks whenever he disobeys the authoritarian teacher of a kindergarten class (thus terrifying the other children into obedience) - might seem a little distant from these more serious lines of inquiry.

That's not entirely true, though. The series of abridged editions of classic texts produced in one episode by the functionally illiterate character Tati are hugely, unexpectedly successful. Before long Don Quixote (the Tati edition) and her versions of many other more-praised-than-read books - One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Old Man and the Sea, Moby-Dick - have begun to take over. We see major publishing houses vying for distribution rights, school-children answering questions about Tati's ending for the Quixote ("Tati saw a butterfly on her nose and put down her pen" - "Correct!"). In other words, anything promulgated with sufficient authority has a good chance of being believed.

It's a small step from "that's ridiculous" to "I'm not sure that's exactly what Cervantes had in mind ..." What better metaphor for the present-day industry of the Afterlife, where flimsy assertions about the nature of "moving on to the light," stone tape theory, or EVP (electronic voice phenomena) have become so familiar through constant repetition that we no longer question whether or not there's any real evidence behind them?

if you're actually interested in proof of the existence of discarnate entities - as I regret to say I still am - none of this "common knowledge" is really of any use. However, the various cases discussed in Uncanny - and rather more dramatically reenacted in True Hauntings - are. Solely, however, because they're also accompanied by research and careful questioning of as many actual witnesses as possible.

Whenever the master of macabre fiction, M. R. James, was asked if he actually believed in ghosts:

I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.

It's a pretty cautious answer, but I'm afraid that I may have to echo it. I continue to search for satisfactory evidence, but I have to say that Danny Robins' TV show, in particular, is the one of the best sources I've come across for a very long time.

Hasui Kawase: Snow Valley Climbers on Mt. Shirouma (1935)

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Danny Robins: Uncanny (2023-25)

Uncanny
(2 Series: 2023-25)
List of Episodes:

Series 1 (2023):


1. Case 1: Miss Howard

   Danny Robins asks if a young girl in rural Cambridgeshire was visited by the apparition of an Edwardian school teacher? He also examines a Canadian psychological experiment and a time slip in Liverpool.

2. Case 2: The Bearpark Poltergeist

   Danny investigates Ian's claims that his childhood home in County Durham was plagued by poltergeist activity. He investigates the area's mining history, the science of sleep paralysis and even the mechanics of a flushing toilet.

3. Case 3: The Oxford Exorcism

   The first series concludes with Danny looking into the case of a student house believed to be haunted by a malevolent entity. It is one of the most unsettling cases Danny has ever come across. But could it simply be a shared delusion?


Series 2 (2025):


4. Case 1: The Haunting of Hollymount Farm

   The return of the programme in which Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of seemingly paranormal encounters. Tonight, he meets Liam, who spent his youth terrified by a ghostly child on his family's Hollymount Farm.

5. Case 2: The Charity Shop Poltergeist

   Danny Robins meets Sibyl, the manager of a shop where multiple staff have witnessed the terrifying presence of a man who appeared to be watching their every move. Danny researches the building's past and explores Stone Tape Theory.

6. Case 3: Shadow Man

   In this third case, Danny Robins meets Julian and hears of one of the most frightening cases he's ever investigated - a young man tormented by a towering, terrifying shadow figure.

7. Case 4: Emily's Room

   Danny Robins meets a mother and daughter who believe they were haunted by a sinister figure intent on hurting them. But were the events truly supernatural?

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Facebook: True Haunting (October, 2025)

True Haunting
(1 Series: 2025)
List of Episodes:

Case 1:


1. Eerie Hall: Part 1

   Geneseo college 1984. Avid runner Chris Di Cesare is keen to start his freshman year until strange voices and inexplicable feelings of dread set in.

2. Eerie Hall: Part 2

   As Chris becomes increasingly isolated, a friend urges him to try communicating with the entity that haunts him. But his waking nightmares only worsen.

3. Eerie Hall: Part 3

   Rumors fly after a friend's harrowing encounter. After making an ominous discovery while running with his father, Chris decides to face the force alone.


Case 2:


4. This House Murdered Me: Part 1

   Eager to start fresh, a young family moves into a dreamy Victorian-style mansion. But the fixer-upper soon becomes costly and deeply disturbing.

5. This House Murdered Me: Part 2

   From burning sage to hiring paranormal investigators, April and Matt fight for the house. Can they face its horrifying history and win their home back?

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Interview: Julio Torres & Ana Fabrega (2022)

Los Espookys
(2 Series: 2019-22)
List of Episodes:

Series 1 (2019):


1. El exorcismo [The Exorcism]:
   (with Bernardo Velasco & Julio Torres)

   Four friends start a new business based on their shared love of horror.

2. El espanto de la herencia [The Inheritance Scare]:
   (with Ana Fabrega & Julio Torres)

   Los Espookys are tasked with scaring five would-be heirs to a millionaire's fortune.

3. El monstruo marino [The Sea Monster]:
   (with Ana Fabrega)

   Renaldo creates a new tourist attraction for a seaside town. Tico eyes a new partnership for Los Espookys.

4. El espejo maldito [The Cursed Mirror]:
   (with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, & Julio Torres)

   Los Espookys fake an abduction in exchange for work visas. Tico helps co-write a new horror film.

5. El laboratorio alienigena [The Alien Lab]:
   (with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

   Los Espookys help a high-maintenance researcher bring aliens to life; meanwhile, they remain divided on Bianca's screenplay.

6. El sueño falso [The Fake Dream]:
   (with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

   Andrés and Úrsula are left to plan a fake dream for an insomnia patient.


Series 2 (2022):


7. Los Espiritus en el Cementerio [The Spirits in the Cemetery]:
   (with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

   Los Espookys put their life changes aside to pose as ghosts for an incompetent groundskeeper hoping to get bereaved families off his back.

8. Bibi's:
   (with Bernardo Velasco) Fri, Sep 23, 2022

   Andrés searches for a new place to live as Tati's marriage deteriorates. Meanwhile, Los Espookys create a monster named Bibi's.

9. Las Ruinas [The Ruins]:
   (with Fred Armisen, Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

   Úrsula assists Mayor Teresa's bid for president, while Los Espookys, joined by Tico, help a professor stage a fake archaeological site.

10. Las Muchas Caras de un Hombre [One Man's Many Faces]:
    (with Yalitza Aparicio)

    As the group's paths diverge, Renaldo decides to investigate the death of slain pageant queen Karina, whose ghost continues to haunt him.

11. El Virus [The Virus]:
    (with Greta Titelman)

    An actor recruits an increasingly tense Los Espookys to cancel her sitcom, while Ambassador Melanie gets devastating news about a dream job.

12. El Eclipse [The Eclipse]:
    (with Carmen Gloria Bresky)

    Los Espookys stage an eclipse during Mayor Teresa's last election speech. Tico helps Andrés. Renaldo seeks closure over Karina's murder.

Cassandra Ciangherotti & Julio Torres in Los Espookys (2020)

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood: The Wendigo and Other Stories (2023)

'The Wendigo' (1910) remains my favourite story by Algernon Blackwood, and - indeed - one of my favourite horror stories of all time.

I know that H. P. Lovecraft preferred the earlier 'The Willows' (1907), and I certainly acknowledge the wonderfully atmospheric effects achieved by Blackwood in that story, but it just can't compare with the sense of cosmic terror, as well as the intensity of his descriptions of the Northern woods, in 'The Wendigo'.

M. Grant Kellermeyer: Classic Horror Blog (2019)

"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!"

If you haven't read the story (you can find an online text of it here), those words will sound very strange to you. If you have, they'll be only too meaningful.

But what exactly is a wendigo (or windigo, as it's also called)?

The wendigo is often said to be a malevolent spirit, sometimes depicted as a creature with human-like characteristics, which possesses human beings. It is said to cause its victims a feeling of insatiable hunger, the desire to eat other humans, and the propensity to commit murder. In some representations, the wendigo is described as a giant humanoid with a heart of ice, whose approach is signaled by a foul stench or sudden unseasonable chill.

- Wikipedia: Wendigo

This is far from Blackwood's description of it as a "moss-eater", with huge misshapen feet from its bounds up into the fiery upper air. In general he is careful to avoid its associations with cannibalism, a perennial problem for many of the Northern First Nations tribes, who often ran short of food in winter if the harvest had been bad the year before, and who therefore tended to be accused of acts of cannibalism by missionaries and colonisers (as historian Francis Parkman records in his 1865 account The Pioneers of France in the New World).

Here's a typical Windigo folktale, collected from a Chippewa informant by Lottie Chicogquaw Marsden:

One time long ago a big Windigo stole an Indian boy, but the boy was too thin, so the Windigo didn't eat him up right away, but he travelled with the Indian boy waiting for him till he'd get fat. The Windigo had a knife and he'd cut the boy on the hand to see if he was fat enough to eat, but the boy didn't get fat. They travelled too much. One day they came to an Indian village and the Windigo sent the boy to the Indian village to get some things for him to eat. He just gave the boy so much time to go there and back. The boy told the Indians that the Windigo was near them, and showed them his hand where the Windigo cut him to see if he was fat enough to eat. They heard the Windigo calling the boy. He said to the boy "Hurry up. Don't tell lies to those Indians." All of these Indians went to where the Windigo was and cut off his legs. They went back again to see if he was dead. He wasn't dead. He was eating the juice (marrow) from the inside of the bones of his legs that were cut off. The Indians asked the Windigo if there was any fat on them. He said, "You bet there is, I have eaten lots of Indians, no wonder they are fat." The Indians then killed him and cut him to pieces. This was the end of this Giant Windigo.

Sophia Cathryn: Wendigo (2022)

As you can see from the illustration above, Wendigos are generally depicted as being cadaverously thin, ravenously hungry, and prone to eating their own faces and limbs if no other food is available - hence their blood-stained teeth. They can also pass on this curse to others, which may account for the return of the French Canadian guide Défago in altered form at a crucial point in Blackwood's story. They don't always have horns, so it's not necessarily easy to identify them at first.

It's just one of many stories Blackwood set in the wilds of Canada. One of the best of the others is "A Haunted Island" (1899), though "Skeleton Lake" (1906) runs it a close second.

Algernon Blackwood: John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908)

Probably the most impressive of his many collections of mostly fantastic and supernatural stories is John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. John Silence is clearly an heir to Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr. Martin Hesselius, the psychic physician, as well as Bram Stoker's Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, bane of vampires everywhere.

John Silence is, however, more of a spectator than an active participant in the events he witnesses. He's probably at his best in "Secret Worship," set at a haunted boys' school in the Black Forest of Germany, but all of the six stories he figures in (five in the original book; another, "A Victim of Higher Space," collected later) are well worth reading.

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936)

It's true that many of Algernon Blackwood's fictions offend against one or other of the three rules for effective ghost stories laid out by his close contemporary M. R. James in the preface to his own collection More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911):

I think that, as a rule, the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet or hear any day. A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself, ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’ Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story. Again, I feel that the technical terms of ‘occultism’, if they are not very carefully handled, tend to put the mere ghost story (which is all that I am attempting) upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than the imaginative.

Algernon Blackwood: Ancient Sorceries (2022)

1. the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet or hear any day ...
Blackwood, by contrast, is fond of setting his stories in Canada, or on the lower reaches of the Danube, or on an island in the Baltic, or in a mysterious small town in France. That is, in fact, part of their attraction. One feels, in almost every case, that he's writing about a place familiar to him, and describing the kinds of characters encountered by him in his adventurous early life.


2. the ghost should be malevolent or odious ...
This is probably true of the Wendigo itself (though that's debatable), but as a general rule, Blackwood's ghosts and occult manifestations of various kinds tend to be largely indifferent to mankind: they operate according to their own rules, for reasons that remain largely obscure to us. The danger comes from the intersection of these otherwordly entities with our own quotidian concerns.


3. the technical terms of ‘occultism’ tend to put the mere ghost story upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than the imaginative.
It seems probable that James had Blackwood specifically in mind when he wrote this sentence. There's a lot of 'quasi' (or pseudo-) scientific discourse in a good many of his stories, particularly the ones which star John Silence, though in this he was following the example of such classic supernatural novellas as Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" (1859).

Algernon Blackwood: The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906)

There's an expansiveness and range to the best of Blackwood's early stories which far surpasses his later work in the genre, influenced (as it was) by the need to provide stories short enough to broadcast or to fit into the increasingly restrictive demands of magazines.

Despite this, over time he built quite a reputation as a reader of his own stories on radio, and (eventually) on the burgeoning medium of television. But he should really be seen - along with Wilkie Collins, M. R. James and Sheridan Le Fanu - as one of the principal ornaments of the golden age of ghost stories, roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War.

It's a shame that there's no really comprehensive collection of his work in this genre, uneven in quality though it undoubtedly is. Perhaps the best introduction to his work remains E. F. Bleiler's careful selection, published by Dover in 1973.

E. F. Bleiler, ed.: Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1973)

Mind you, the wendigo itself has gone on to become one of the standard 'cryptids' - along with Bigfoot, the chupacabra, the Loch Ness monster, and the Jersey Devil - investigated by proponents of the pseudoscience known as Cryptozoology. It also bears an obvious resemblance to the Slender Man figure in contemporary pop culture.

It's even inspired a couple of feature films, as well as numerous stories, comics, novels and even role-playing games.

Larry Fessenden, dir. & writ.: Wendigo (2001)

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Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Henry Blackwood
(1869-1951)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Novels:


1. Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909)
2. The Education of Uncle Paul (1909)
3. The Human Chord (1910)
4. The Centaur (1911)
5. A Prisoner in Fairyland [sequel to The Education of Uncle Paul] (1913)
6. The Extra Day (1915)
7. Julius LeVallon (1916)
   • Julius LeVallon: An Episode. London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1916.
8. The Wave (1916)
9. The Promise of Air (1918)
10. The Garden of Survival (1918)
11. The Bright Messenger [sequel to Julius LeVallon] (1921)
12. Dudley & Gilderoy: A Nonsense (1929)

Children's Books:


13. Sambo and Snitch (1927)
14. The Fruit Stoners: Being the Adventures of Maria Among the Fruit Stoners (1934)

Plays:


15. [with Violet Pearn] The Starlight Express. Music by Edward Elgar (1915)
16. [with Violet Pearn] Karma: A Reincarnation Play (1918)
17. [with Bertram Forsyth] The Crossing (1920)
18. [with Violet Pearn] Through the Crack (1920)
19. [with Bertram Forsyth] White Magic (1921)
20. [with Elaine Ainley] The Halfway House (1921)
21. [with Frederick Kinsey Peile] Max Hensig (1929)

Short story collections:


22. The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906)
23. The Listener and Other Stories (1907)
24. John Silence (1908)
    • John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. 1908. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1912.
25. The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910)
26. Pan's Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (1912)
27. Ten Minute Stories (1914)
28. Incredible Adventures (1914)
29. Day and Night Stories (1917)
30. Wolves of God, and Other Fey Stories (1921)
31. Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches (1924)
    • Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches. 1924. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, n.d.
32. Shocks (1935)
33. The Doll and One Other (1946)

Short Story Selections:


34. Ancient Sorceries and Other Tales (1927)
35. The Dance of Death and Other Tales (1927)
    • The Dance of Death and Other Stories. 1927. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
36. Strange Stories (1929)
37. Short Stories of To-Day & Yesterday (1930)
38. The Willows and Other Queer Tales. Ed. G. F. Maine (1932)
39. The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1938)
40. Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1942)
    • Selected Tales: Stories of the Supernatural and Uncanny. 1943. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.
41. Selected Short Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1945)
42. Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (1949)
    • Included in: Tales of Terror & Darkness: Part One: Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural / Part Two: Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre. 1949 & 1967. Spring Books. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1977.
43. In the Realm of Terror (1957)
44. Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1964)
45. Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967)
    • Included in: Tales of Terror & Darkness: Part One: Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural / Part Two: Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre. 1949 & 1967. Spring Books. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1977.
46. Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories (1968)
    • Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories. 1906-1908. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
47. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. Ed. Everett F. Bleiler (1973)
    • Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. Preface by the Author. 1938. Ed. E. F. Beiler. New York: Dover Books, Inc., 1973.
48. The Best Supernatural Tales of Algernon Blackwood. Ed. Felix Morrow (1973)
    • The Best Supernatural Tales of Algernon Blackwood. 1929. Introduction by Felix Morrow. New York: Causeway Books, 1973.
49. Tales of Terror and Darkness (1977)
    • Tales of Terror & Darkness: Part One: Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural / Part Two: Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre. 1949 & 1967. Spring Books. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1977.
50. Tales of the Supernatural. Ed. Mike Ashley (1983)
51. The Magic Mirror. Ed. Mike Ashley (1989)
52. The Complete John Silence Stories. [with "A Victim of Higher Space"]. Ed. S. T. Joshi (1997)
53. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi (2002)
54. Algernon Blackwood's Canadian Tales of Terror. Ed. John Robert Colombo (2004)
55. Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories (2022)
56. The Wendigo and Other Stories. Ed. Aaron Worth. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Matt Fox: Illustration for The Wendigo (2015)

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The King in Yellow

Michael Cimino, dir. & writ.: Heaven's Gate (1980)

"Heaven's Gate - like the movie?"

- Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book
(Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2019): 217

Elizabeth Knox: The Absolute Book (2019)

[WARNING: this post contains significant plot spoilers - proceed no further unless you don't care about such things, or are not actually intending to read the book]:

One of the most interesting lapses in Elizabeth Knox's latest novel The Absolute Book comes quite early on, where her heroine Taryn Cornick is discoursing learnedly to an M.I.5. spook:

"... The Necronomicon is a fictional forbidden book, like M. R. James's Tractate Middoth or Robert Chambers' Yellow Sign. Someone handing me a card with Abdul Alhazred on it would mean to say: 'I am the master of forbidden knowledge'." [76]

Abdul Alhazred: The Necronomicon

Alas, not so. Mind you, H. P. Lovecraft's imaginary Necronomicon, ostensibly composed by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred" is indeed precisely what Taryn claims, but M. R. James's allegedly "forbidden" book is not. It is, rather, a perfectly respectable and well-known portion of the Jewish Talmud, as a few minutes of online searching should have revealed:

Dalia Marx: Tractates Tamid, Middot and Qinnim: A Feminist Commentary (2013)

Tractate Middot (Hebrew: מִדּוֹת‎, lit. "Measurements") is the tenth tractate of Seder Kodashim ("Order of Holies") of the Mishnah and of the Talmud. This tractate describes the dimensions and the arrangement of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and the Second Temple buildings and courtyards, various gates, the altar of sacrifice and its surroundings, and the places where the Priests and Levites kept watch in the Temple.

- Wikipedia

Robert W. Chambers: The King in Yellow (1895)

The Robert W. Chambers error is more interesting - and possibly more revealing. The book in question is not called The Yellow Sign but The King in Yellow.

It's notorious among fans of supernatural fiction not so much for the quality of its prose, which is fairly standard 1890-ish Wardour Street tushery, but for the sheer force of the idea behind it. Each of the first four stories references The King in Yellow, a "forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it."

Aaron Vanek, dir.: The Yellow Sign (2001)

It's true that one of those four stories is entitled "The Yellow Sign." More to the point, though, The Yellow Sign was the name of a 2001 movie based on Chambers' stories, made by indie film director Aaron Vanek.

The idea of the literally unreadable book has been used many, many times since - perhaps most amusingly by Martin Amis in his 1995 novel The Information, where his writer protagonist's novel Untitled - "No, it's not untitled, that's the book's name: Untitled," as he is forced to explain again and again throughout the narrative - causes nosebleeds, nausea and even brain tumours in anyone who attempts to read it.

Dan Gilroy, writ. & dir.: Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Another, more recent twist on the idea can be found in the netflix movie Velvet Buzzsaw where an unscrupulous art critic (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) is destroyed by a set of paintings he has connived in stealing from a dead artist's apartment. Unsurprisingly, various references to The King in Yellow can be seen in the paintings themselves.

Elizabeth Knox

At first sight there do seem to be an unusual number of simple errors of nomenclature in Knox's book. For instance, when describing a large public sculpture outside a library in Aix-en-Provence which the heroine is visiting, she says:

Three giant-sized books had been reproduced in enamelled steel ... In order, they were The Little Prince, leaning; Molière's Les Malades in the middle; and Camus's The Stranger, which was nearest to Taryn. [89]

Why are two of the titles in English, and the other one in French? More to the point, though, what's this "Molière's Les Malades" when it's at home? Molière did indeed write a play called Le Malade imaginaire [The Imaginary Invalid, or - if you prefer - the Hypochondriac] - it was, in fact, his very last work for the stage - but he never wrote one called Les Malades.

Honoré Daumier: Le Malade imaginaire (c.1860)

[UPDATE (4/2/20): I've just found the image below online, on Pinterest]:

Cassandra Claims: Broken pencil tips

This clearly represents the scene described in the novel, and yet ... as I prognosticated above, not only are all three titles in French, but the middle one is, indeed, Le Malade imaginaire rather than the quoted "Les Malades." Vindication - of a sort, at any rate.

Again, we find further down:

According to folktales, and later literary productions, the fairy took pretty children, like the boy Oberon and Titania squabble over in A Midsummer Night's Dream. They stole away bards like Yeats's Ossian, or beautiful knights like Tamlin. [243]

Yeat's bard is named Oisin [pronounced Osheen], not Ossian. It's true that Ossian is a legitimate variant of the name - the one used by James Macpherson in his series of eighteenth-century epic poems adapted from the Gaelic, in fact - but Yeats's 1889 poem is called The Wanderings of Oisin (though in later editions he occasionally spelt the name 'Usheen' - perhaps for easier pronunciation). A small lapse, admittedly, but one which would definitely lose you the point in Mastermind or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

W. B. Yeats: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)

Yet again, still further down, in a discussion of the disposition of the family library on which so much of the plot hinges:

'There were quite a few things your grandad packed up himself. With personal notes. ... And there were one or two large crated consignments of books, like his whole set of Gibbon. [547]

'Like his whole set of Gibbon.' Huh? Wha ...? Edward Gibbon's great work on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire first appeared in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. Subsequent reprints have sometimes swelled this to seven or eight volumes, but seldom more than that. As for his other miscellaneous works, the most compendious (Swiss) edition of these ran to seven octavo (i.e. small) volumes (1796), but the more standard English edition of 1814 is in five volumes.

Edward Gibbon: Miscellaneous Works (3 vols: 1796)

Would you really need a separate crate for eleven books? Taryn's grandfather may, of course, have been a mad Gibbonian who collected innumerable different versions and reprints, but in that case why is the reference to his 'whole set of Gibbon' rather than his many, many copies of the same book?

I guess the problem here is that if you're not really familiar with his work, the mere fact that Gibbon is a classical historian famous for his verbosity and longwindedness ('Another damn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?', as the Duke of Leicester reportedly remarked when presented with volume one of his long-awaited history) might lead you to suppose that his collected works would reach quite a bulk.

They do not. Gibbon is in fact the most terse and pithy of writers, with sentences packed to hold the utmost possible meaning.

Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788-89)

A much better choice here would have been one of his more prolific contemporaries, such as Voltaire, the most recent edition of whose collected works runs to 144 volumes. He might well merit a packing case to himself. Or, for that matter, Diderot, whose Encyclopédie (1751-80) fills 35 huge volumes. As the Encyclopédie Méthodique (1782-1832), it was eventually expanded to 166.

Denis Diderot, ed.: Encyclopédie (28 vols: 1751-66)

We are left, then, with two alternatives - either the author (and editor) of The Absolute Book didn't bother to check any of the bibliographical 'facts' it contains, but instead decided to rely on the by-guess-and-by-God system of literary divination. Or, alternatively, that early reference to 'The Yellow Sign' is meant as a code for a system of hidden correspondences underlying this book, also.

Perhaps (I'm guessing here), as with the Navaho, intentional errors had to be inserted to stop the book starting to ... operate upon its readers?

Stranger things happen in the plot itself, after all: we've hardly got stably located in one world than we're dashing off to another - Fairyland, Purgatory, Auckland - you name it.

Perhaps, too, the long (and rather irrelevant) description of a celebrated session at the 2016 Auckland Writers' festival, is meant as a part of this coding. That conversation hinged on the subject of saffron (I know because I was there).

Paul Muldoon (2016)

Basically, the person she refers to as 'the Irish poet' (Paul Muldoon) was being interviewed - or, rather, subjected to a long rambling monologue - by C.K. Stead, who (in his defence) had been roped in at the last minute to replace Bill Manhire, who was ill. They somehow got onto the subject of saffron - "You mean, what I use to colour my rice?" observed Stead hopefully - and Muldoon claimed he could write a whole book about it, like "those books about salt, or coffee, or cod" [315].

Unfortunately this roused the ire of a young man in the audience who trooped down to the microphone at the front of the auditorium to ask a rather long and involved question:

"... the guy said he read feminist poetry, and poetry by people of colour, and trans people. Poetry with politics in it. How he made a point of doing that. And then he said, 'I haven't read your books and I might find they're full of beautiful poetry, but where is it coming from?'" [316]

Renee Liang's account of the event, posted at the time on The Big Idea, was somewhat different:

In One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, after the title of [his] most recent collection, Irish-US poet Paul Muldoon was interviewed by ‘last minute ring in’ CK Stead. Muldoon kicked off the session by announcing that Stead’s The New Poetic had profoundly influenced him as a young poet. The two old acquaintances then had a leisurely chat, seemingly forgetting the hundreds watching [my emphasis]. Muldoon on writing poetry with a jolt factor: “If I know what I’m doing, it’s almost certain everyone else will too. If I write what I don’t know, I might have the element of surprise.” He and Stead wandered gently around the subject of poetry, with seemingly unrelated side trips: “Now, saffron. You could write about saffron forever.”

Things became more lively when, with 20 minutes to go, Muldoon asked for the lights to be brought up on the audience. “Ah, there you are. You must have some things to ask?” Up first, a young man with a challenge: “I’m young, gay and Irish. Why are you talking about saffron? If you have that talent – do you not have a responsibility to use it?” Muldoon gently admonished him. “Subject matter is irrelevant. Any subject in the world could be illuminated through the prism of saffron. Or tea, for that matter. Now, a cup of tea is not a simple thing – it carries so much weight of history. Look at all the trouble tea caused in Boston Harbour.” It was hard not to admire a man who can turn anything into a metaphor ...

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

It reminds me a bit of that old anecdote about the London cabbie: "I have lots of famous people in my cab. The other day I had Bertrand Russell in there. The philosopher. And I said to him, 'Well then, Bertie, what's it all about?' And, d'you know, he didn't have an answer!"

Knox's account of the event concludes with a few bitchy put-downs of the PC young man, and some vaunting of the poet's 'gentle reply', with a suggestion that the whole thing could have been settled by asking, 'Excuse me, is there a question in your question?' [316].

Perhaps that's a stock author's perspective - motivated principally by the fear of getting just such a grilling oneself. Renee concludes with some oblique praise of Muldoon's ability to 'contort time' - and a suggestion that if he were a working mum, he might find it a bit harder to contemplate saffron in such a leisurely way.

For myself, I guess that the whole thing was just a huge disappointment. I adore Muldoon's poetry (which, unlike - I suspect - most of the other commentators, I have read, and taught, and discussed, at length). All this bullshit about saffron was so far from what I wanted to hear from the author of 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ or 'Incantata' that I found myself resenting most of all the conference organisers' decision to pair him off in a 'conversation' rather than simply letting him read. But perhaps I'm the one going off at a tangent now ...

So what (if anything) links all of these things?

Robert W. Chambers: The King in Yellow: Annotated Edition

• Forbidden books (or works of art): - In this case, a book such as The King in Yellow, deliberately misnamed (or should I say misleadingly named) to draw the attentive reader.


• Sickness (or disease generally): - This takes the form of Molière's Les Malades [the sick people] - an obvious distortion of the title Le Malade imaginaire to stress the fact that this particular malady is far from imaginary:

  In 1673, during a production of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid, Molière, who suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, was seized by a coughing fit and a haemorrhage while playing the hypochondriac Argan. He finished the performance but collapsed again and died a few hours later.
  

  - Wikipedia

• Poetry (or bardic verse): - This is underlined by reference to the abducted Fenian bard Oisin (or Usheen, or Ossian) - clearly misnamed, despite the fact that this is one of best-known of Yeats's early poems.


• Size (or number): This arises from that passing reference to the bulk - or, in this case, otherwise - of someone's 'whole set' of Edward Gibbons' works. But Gibbon did indeed propose the publication of a collected edition of the historical materials used by him in reconstructing the history of Europe during the late Roman Empire, the Byzantine period and the Dark Ages. If Taryn's grandfather had access to Gibbon's list of works - or had taken the initiative to compile such a monumental collection himself - that really might have occupied an entire packing-crate.

Geoffrey Keynes: Edward Gibbon's Library (1940)

One could perhaps summarise as follows:

1. Madness
2. Disease
3. Abduction
4. Size

James Gillray: The Promis’d Horrors of the French Invasion (1796)

All in all, it sounds to me rather like a warning of some kind. I also note, parenthetically, the tendency of each of these works to group in the fin de siècle of each of the last few centuries: 1789 (the year of the French revolution) for Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 1889 and 1895 for (respectively) Yeats' and Chambers' books, 1673 for Molière's fatal last play ...

Burned Classical Scroll from Herculaneum

The ostensible subject (or should I say 'The MacGuffin'?) of Knox's work is a book referred to only as 'the firestarter', which is presumed to have been the cause of several of the most celebrated library fires in history. It takes the form of a sealed, almost indestructible box, which contains:

a scroll made from the skin of an angel. The skin is tattooed with words, in an ink made of the angel's own blood. The scroll is a primer of the tongues of angels, otherwise known as the Language of Command. A language which, like the language of the Sidhe, has no written form. The primer is ... in the Roman alphabet, with the phonetics of Latin used to approximate the sounds of the words of the language of Command [622-23]

It also contains, we discover a bit later - after the original scroll has been used to buy off the demons who have been making trouble throughout most of the book - 'in Latin as well as the language of angels,' a letter from the mother of the character Shift, a minor god who plays a major part in the action of the book:

She apologises for all the deceptions she practised on me. And for hiding me. [632]

"By virtue of its being the same text written in two languages, it is also a cipher key," comments Hugin, one of Odin's two ravens of wisdom, also an important character in the plot.

'The phonetics of Latin.' Well, even that is not quite so easy as it sounds. Anyone who's ever tried to learn Latin knows that it has at least two systems of pronunciation:

• The first is the established Continental system, used by the Catholic church, which roughly equates its sounds with those of a modern Romance language such as Italian.
• The second is the nineteenth-century British pronunciation which attempted to reconstruct the 'original' classical sounds of the letters by analogy with transliterations in other languages (such as Greek). Hence the infamous 'Wainy, Weedy, Weeky' sounding of Caesar's epigrammatic'Veni, Vidi, Vici' [I came, I saw, I conquered]. Hence, too, "Kikero" for "Cicero", and (of course) "Kaiser" for "Caesar."

What if you got it wrong? Surely a certain precision must be employed whilst intoning the sounds of this 'Language of Command'? Unless it's all a cunning plot on the original angel's part to make his scroll unusable by any but those previously initiated into his system of pronunciation?

Alan Garner: The Moon of Gomrath (1963)

In his author's note at the end of The Moon of Gomrath, Alan Garner remarks:

The spells are genuine (though incomplete: just in case)

Are Knox's instructions to initiated readers similarly "incomplete: just in case"? It's tempting to think so. It's hard, therefore, to conjecture just what the final message of the book might be.

It certainly involves danger (The King in Yellow) - though what that danger is is not quite clear. Is it madness, as in Chambers' original play? Abduction to the Other Side, to Fairyland (or, if you prefer, Swedenborgian space) - like Yeats's Oisin? Is it death, as in Molière's own play?

Joseph Noel Paton: The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon (1847)

It's just a suspicion, but I feel that the question of size is crucial here. Opnions differ on the precise dimensions of Faerie. Modern writers have poured scorn on the idea that Fairies are of diminutive size, with gossamer wings and diaphanous dresses. Another world might well be ruled by an entirely different set of dimensions, however. Oisin may well have shrunk when he followed his fairy princess to the three islands of Yeats's poem - "Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose" - even though he resumed his original giant-like dimensions on his return to St. Patrick's Ireland.

Enough said, perhaps. I cannot say message received, as that would be mendacious in the extreme, but certainly I remain poised for further communications from the other side. Size, yes, and saffron. That particular reddy-yellow spice comes up again and again, and is perhaps the most important ingredient to be gathered from this colourfully encoded work.

Persian Saffron

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Michael Cox

Jerry Bauer: Michael Cox (1948-2009)

Admittedly this is rather a strange follow-up to Sheridan Le Fanu, but Michael Cox gets the nod because he's such an inspiration to nerdy bookworms everywhere.

In one of those classic don't-say-it's-over-till-it's-over turn-ups for the books, Cox published his first novel in 2006, in his late fifties, after a lifetime of compiling anthologies and chronologies and other humble aids to readers, only to find it a runaway success, sold to its eventual publisher John Murray at auction for £430,000!

Is The Meaning of Night actually any good? Well, perhaps not in the absolute sense, but it's a very competent and entertaining pastiche of High Victorian Sensation Gothic, not up to the mark of Wilkie Collins or Le Fanu at their best, but clearly the fruit of passionate adoration of their works.

I suppose my main problem with it is its hero, who veers from amoral Poe-like maniac ("William Wilson") to moony lover with scant consistency. Nor can I quite see why his aristocratic ambitions are of such great interest to so many of the people he meets (a criticism which applies even more sharply to its sequel, The Glass of Time).

I do in many ways prefer this second novel, though: Esperanza Gorst is a far more attractive and sprightly protagonist than her whining papa - though her taste in men is a little difficult to fathom (with the best will in the world, Cox is unable to make her ghastly pompous cousin Perseus seem in the slightest degree plausible as a love interest).

The great thing is, after editing all of those books of other people's work (including a very interesting biography of M. R. James), Cox finally nerved himself up to enter the arena himself. Then, tragically, he died of cancer a couple of years later.

Mind you, he credited his diagnosis with giving him the incentive to finish his long-meditated fiction project. Without it he might well have continued to pile up odd pages without ever finishing either book. However you take it, I think it has to be seen as a very encouraging story for all of those half-completed novels languishing in so many desk drawers. Never say die! Even without the worldwide success and the hugely swollen pre-publication price, Cox would still be a winner.

Seeing how others did it failed to intimidate him: he put himself out there, and his two books bid fair to become minor classics in their own right! Nor is his work as an editor and anthologist likely to be forgotten, either.

The list of his works below is not exhaustive - there are many anthologies missing: of golden age detective stories, thrillers, and a variety of other genres - but it does include all of the really significant highlights in his career as a ghost story writer and fancier (I hope):

•


Eiko Ishioka: Victorian Gothic Lolita (1983)

Michael Andrew Cox (1948-2009)

Biography:




M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (1983)



• M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fiction:




The Meaning of Night (2006)



• The Meaning of Night: A Confession. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2006.




The Glass of Time (2008)



• The Glass of Time: The Secret Life of Miss Esperanza Gorst, Narrated by Herself. 2008. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2009.

Edited:




The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986)



• The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert. 1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.




The Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1986)



• The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. Ed. Michael Cox. Illustrated by Rosalind Caldecott. 1986. London: Tiger Books International, 1991.




‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories (1987)



• James, M. R. ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.




The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu (1988)



• The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu: Ghost Stories and Mysteries by a Master Victorian Storyteller. Equation. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Thorsons Publishing Group, 1988.




The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991)



• The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.




The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories (1996)



• The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.




The Oxford Chronology of English Literature (2002)



• The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Ed. Michael Cox. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Michael Cox