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I’ve written my last ghost story. Altogether I’ve had over a hundred published; some of them have been reprinted many times and in half a dozen different languages. I merely mention these egotistical statistics to establish my bona fides—I should know what I’m talking about—not to suggest I’m any genius at the art. I make no pretence to that.

I believe ghost story writing to be a dying art. It’s just possible that another Montague Rhodes James may appear some day, but I profoundly doubt it. James had certain great advantages, besides his imagination and technique: he was an antiquary and an amateur. Antiquarian lore, old legends of antique places, old ruins and enigmas—from such worn stones and hallowed dust ghostly inspiration is readily breathed. And he was an amateur of amateurs. His comparatively sparse output was spread over a long life, and he never wrote save when the spirit moved him. His early tales were all composed for private circulation, and the financial aspect never, I believe, interested him much. And I can assure would-be aspirants that no one in his senses ever tried to write ghost stories for a living. Even James’s first tales were published in rather obscure periodicals, and it was only the sinister and superlative merits of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary which slowly secured him a wider public. Even so, it was never very wide.

Many—perhaps most—people simply can’t read ghost stories, those poor relations of fiction. They’d as soon read binomial theorem stories. A large number of strangers have written to me over the years to this effect: “Why concern yourself with such inane tripe? Why waste a small talent on this bogusness? You’re capable of better, saner things.” I’ve found that the cult of such tales is confined mainly to a small subset of highest brows. They are extremely hypercritical, somewhat resembling ballet-maniacs in their encyclopaedic knowledge and zeal for odious comparisons. Even so, I think I should use the past tense, for I doubt that many of them survive. So I think James was the last of the great ones; he closed an epoch. Why is this?

James, in a kindly review of one of my books, rather suggested, I thought, that the author of ghost stories need not be a very violent believer himself. That I categorically deny. Unless the writer can, at least temporarily, alarm himself, he will never alarm anyone else. While James was writing “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” I’m certain he was also casting a furtive inner eye at spectral heaped bedclothes forming into fearful shapes. No doubt he soon laughed the image away, but he must have known it for a time. But it is becoming ever harder to get and transmit those tremors because psychic phenomena are now being subjected to scientific treatment (whether they are yielding to that treatment is another matter) and the public takes it for granted that such phenomena are no longer subjects for fiction, and that the ghostly fictionist is an interloper and mere scarifyer. I think that’s partly why I’ve lost inspiration, too—that and advancing years.

But beware of supposing the mystery has been in any way solved. I must have read several million words on psychic research, most unremunerative words. Masses of alleged evidence, a welter of eager discordant theories—but the key to the maze remains perennially elusive. I doubt that the question, “Which phenomena are supernatural?” has been answered. Is telepathy supernormal? Is it not merely an extension of an old mystery—that of communication between man and man, though its modes are more flagrantly puzzling? Fooling about with marked cards seems to me the essence of futility. I’ve no doubt that some people are lucky with telepathic cards, just as some are “lucky” at bridge.

Why was I persuaded into this arduous (ghost stories are very difficult to write) and unremunerative game? I am a skeptic by temperament, though not, I hope, a wooden one, and the skeptical temperament is essentially a fair, open-spirited one, ever avid to examine and, if necessary, to accept evidence adverse to its creed. And I received such evidence during two weekends spent in a superficially charming and harmonious Queen Anne house about a mile and a half from Richmond Bridge. I mustn’t locate it more precisely because—and it is a significant fact—even the most rampant unbelievers often refuse to live in a reputedly haunted house.

And I can assure them they are very wise.

I visited this house in 1917, and during the previous thirty years it had known five suicides—the old gardener, strictly against orders, blurted out this ominous record in his cups, and it was verified. One had hanged herself in a powder-closet. One shot himself in the tool-shed. The others had drowned themselves in the river about a hundred yards away, always, it was said, at dawn. And now mark this! About a year after I went there, the valet of a famous nobleman also drowned himself in the river at first light. He was seen running down the path as though a fearful fiend were hard upon his heels and plunging in to his death. I think you’ll agree that gives one somewhat sombrely to think.

Someone who entered this house on a lovely summer day, knowing nothing of its record, remarked in astonishment, “How dark it is in here!” And that was so. Always it seemed unnaturally dim, as though seen through those “reducing” glasses artists use for toning down bright light.

The moment I passed its threshold, I knew a general feeling of devitalisation and psychic malaise, which remained with me till I left. The household were affected in varying degrees. Remember, some people simply cannot see or sense ghosts. The cook was one of them; she couldn’t begin to understand what the trouble was. But one of the maids twice encountered a stranger, once in the room with the powder-closet, and once on the stairs. She couldn’t “take it” and left. The lady of the house had one of those rare temperaments which are not frightened by ghosts, and yet she was always seeing and hearing something; for, particularly after dark, that house was sparking with venom, an obscure mode of energy, call it what you will.

My own particular bother consisted of a petrified insomnia. I lay awake till dawn, oppressed by a fear without a name. Call it just ghostly fear, if you like. I felt a craven and a worm, but I was utterly unable to snap out of it. Only those who have experienced something like it will sympathise. I had only one visual bother. I was sitting in the garden one afternoon under the mulberry tree and happened to glance up at the first floor windows. There was a blurred face at one of them. It was a man’s face, but there was no man in the house. I wrote my first story about that house and called it The Red Lodge. Last year, a quarter of a century later, it was republished for the sixth time in America, and a play based on it was done on the radio. It also appeared in a Dutch anthology of ghost stories. No credit to me—it must all be given to the permanent residents of the Red Lodge. That is why I disagree with James. Before you can scare others, you must be scared yourself. Ghostly fear is transmitted, not concocted.

If some may sniff at my testimony as that of a suspect romancer, let me cite some very famous names in my support. The philosopher Kant, a genius of the most cautious and judicial mind, after examining the evidence, asserted he was convinced that authentic apparitions were sometimes seen. The great Richet spent a lifetime in psychical research, and declared in his final summing-up that such phenomena indisputably occurred, though they defied explanation. F. S. Smithe, the famous mountaineer, makes at least three references in his books to apparitions which crossed his high paths—one in Scotland, one on the face of Mt. Blanc, one near the very peak of Everest. The word of such a man is impossible to doubt, is it not?

The great difficulty about ghosts is the number of essentially unverifiable explanations of them. Some are, of course, hallucinations. Hallucinations are very interesting and complex things about which much might be said, but I’ll reluctantly disregard them. Then there are projected images. Everyone, with the possible exception of certain Oxford professors, sees images in his head. Some children and a very few adults can project them externally on to the screen of space in front of them. I have projected some myself. One was a vision of great beastliness, which has remained most vividly as an interior image, to this day. It was easy to mistake for a ghost, but I believe it was an image. Are hallucinations and eidetic images sufficient to explain ghosts away? I’m afraid not, for they are often seen by several persons simultaneously, which refutes their subjectivity, presumably.

I have no intention of pretending to a profundity I don’t command, and I’m not going to say anything the meaning of which is not reasonably clear to me. It’s so easy to talk windily, impressively and vaguely about psychic matters, and the temptation must be rigorously resisted. And it is absurd to suggest that I can succeed where Richet failed. I will first quote a remark of the famous philosopher, William James—“We can easily conceive of things that shall have no connection whatsoever with each other. We may assume them to inhabit different times and spaces, as the dreams of different persons do. They may be so unlike and incommensurable and so inert towards each other as never to jostle or interfere.” That is only another way of saying that it is the extreme of egoism to suppose we perceive all there is to be perceived.

Our senses, our faculties, are designed for the practical purpose of successfully surviving and are, therefore, extremely limited in their range. Visually, we are almost blind. As Max Weber wrote, “These things (that we see) are only an infinitesimal part of the countless forces flashing through the immensity of the cosmos. The ‘solid matter’ we come up against is nothing less than a mask, a continual disguising of energy.” The whole subject of perception is, of course, a venerable field of perennial battle, littered with dead, or merely shamming-dead, theories, and brave with the banners of discordant erudition, but, I suppose, we groundlings have a right to try and force a way through the sour and swaying scrummage. So if I say I believe ghosts are conceivably the sort of things William James imagined and that poltergeists are one of those disguised modes of energy, I am within my rights. We who have seen will believe. Those who have never seen will continue to scoff.

I will say one other thing. I firmly believe all such psychic intrusions possess negative survival value and should in no way be encouraged. We have lost the power generally to experience them, for the very good reason that, as we’ve evolved, we’ve luckily, perhaps inevitably, lost touch with them. In my view, the cultivation of telepathy is a retrograde step. Highly and generally developed, it would lead to immense mental confusion. Again, when you see someone or something, you need to be sure it’s “real” and not a ghost. Communication with the dead, if it occurs, should never be attempted; it inevitably confuses and distresses. As for precognition, could we face the future if we knew the future? Even eidetic images are a nuisance. That is why savages and, perhaps, the higher animals, are far more than ourselves susceptible to psychic shows. They are lower in the evolutionary scale and suffer accordingly. Only if psychical research were liable to reform us, make us less savage and corrupt, would I advocate it, and I see no reason why it should. At the same time, there is this to be realised and accepted: it is quite certain man will not leave psychic phenomena alone, he will play with these fires. And, perhaps, it is impossible to study the mind of man without casting a curious and studious eye on abnormal psychic intrusions. Experiments will go on. Researches will be carried to the final barrier. That is well enough, provided such experiments and researches are rigorously and scientifically conducted, and their evil, dangerous potentialities fully taken into account.

So that is why I’ve ceased to write ghost stories. Science has usurped their function and, I suppose, made a mockery of it. For example, fictional ghosts are usually and rightly malicious, malignant, hunting haunters, but there is no reason to suppose science will find them to be such. But wait! Why should I, in so defeatist a spirit, curmudgeonly spoil the market for those prepared to snatch the sinister torch from my failing hand? Why shouldn’t ghosts be malignant, striving to destroy, or at least scare the wits out of us? They may be! They may very well be! Put that little whistle to your trembling lips and blow a tiny, far-carrying blast. What’s that? A sea-gull’s wing against the storm-wracked window? Let’s hope it was nothing more! But look! Look! Those bedclothes forming into a horrid crouching shape! A scream bursts from your choking throat, and when the rescuers dash in, your face is the colour of those haunted sheets. A very narrow escape from death—and worse! Remember, too, those who galloped like crazed beasts from the Red House to their doom in the reeds!

No, don’t be too sure that none of the old magic endures!

H. Russell Wakefield

London, England

February 17, 1961