Ghost Stories On The Patio

[poliphilo]

Our next door neighbour who makes fence posts on an industrial scale is burning his spare lumber. It has been a warm day, with a chill breeze that was about just bearable- and I've been sitting out on the patio, soaking up the rays and breathing in the smoke. Also reading ghost stories. I have a collection edited by Herbert Van Thal which I've owned since I was nine or ten. It's an odd collection because several of its pieces aren't ghost stories at all- and I can't help wondering whether Van Thal may not have compiled it from memory, thinking that stories that scared him when he was a child contained a supernatural element when actually they don't- and not bothering to re-read them to find out. Mrs Gaskell's The Squire's Story is creepy but not a ghost story. Wilkie Collins's Terribly Strange Bed is alarming but not a ghost story. Stevenson's Markheim has a supernatural element but whether the visitant with the wavy outline can be classified as a ghost is debatable. Markheim, by the way, is a very good story- somewhat in Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde vein- with a suggestion of Poe about it and a suggestion of Dostoevsky. Stevenson, of course, was a very great writer and a more accomplished artist than either of them....

Great Ghost Stories has pictures by Edward Pagram. They're quite striking. Here's one of his illustrations to Markheim.