Australian Ghost Stories

So it seems that Australians had something of an inferiority complex when it came to gothic fiction: in the introduction to Australian Ghost Stories, editor James Doig explains that Australia was often not considered ‘old’ enough by its inhabitants to possess the key ingredients for a spooky chill-fest. Largely ignoring the potential of a vast, unexplored frontier land full of deserted mining towns, deserts, jungles and aboriginal folklore (later utilized so effectively in Picnic at Hanging Rock) for weird fiction, Australian writers instead bemoaned the lack of such superficial characteristics as ancient castles or ghostly traditions.

This is not a trivial point- it shows that writers of the 19th and early 20th century (the providence of Wordsworth, who trade exclusively in out-of-copyright material) drew a distinction between European and aboriginal folklore- the former was considered a kind of ‘real’, mature culture, and useful for the plotting of effective stories, while the latter was not. ‘There never were any fauns in the eucalyptus forests, nor any naiads in the running creeks,’ says Rosa Campbell Praed at the beginning of her tale, The Bunyip, almost apologizing for her use of indigenous folklore. ‘No mythological hero left behind him stories of wonder and enchantment. No white man’s hand has carved records of a poetic past on the grey volcanic-looking boulders.’ Thus with a broad stroke, the entire potential of the brooding landscape and wonderful mythology of the Dreamtime is swept aside.

What a waste. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel- read this lengthy quote from one Marcus Clarke:

What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry- Weird Melancholy… The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade… In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, out from the bottomless depth of some lagoon the bunyip rises, and, in form like a monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out of the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.

Wow. What an evocative piece of writing. No master of fantastic fiction could create a more suitable setting for tales of the macabre and the extraordinary. Could anybody still be in doubt that Australia has the chops for gothic/weird fiction? Why has this location not been utilized as the American frontier has been? And yet, what’s disappointing about Australian Ghost Stories is how some of the best stories have very little to do with Australia at all.

Many colonial writers who wished to utilize the gothic style simply set their stories in England, for example the Irish/Australian Mary Fortune, who wrote The White Maniac: A Doctors’ Tale. It’s a typically gothic tale that takes place in England. A doctor becomes obsessed with a family who live in a house in which everything is painted white. They are, of course, keeping a terrible secret, and the twist at the end of the story is very of its time, but entertaining nonetheless. Apart from my disappointment with the lack of ‘Australia-ness’ in the story, it’s one of the best in the collection.

Other Australian writers wrote spooky stories in the manner of English gothic novels without utilizing any real Australian elements. The Mystery Of Major Molineaux by Marcus Clarke is a similar tale that takes place in Australia, not that you’d notice. It’s still a cracking tale with a kind of Le Fanu feel, and it’s one of the spookiest of the lot.

There are entries here that make good use of the Australian culture and countryside: The Haunted Pool, A Haunt of The Jinkarras, Spirit Led, The Bunyip and others do introduce us to ghosts and creatures that haunt the deserts and sweltering frontier towns, but as stories, their plots aren’t crafted quite as well as the gothic shorts mentioned above. Of these, A Strange Goldfield is probably my favourite- it’s an effective story about a bunch of men who discover a ghost town deep in the Australian desert that’s still haunted by its former residents. Another find is The Devil of the Marsh by H. B. Marriott Watson, in which a man keeps a tryst with a mysterious woman in a horrible swamp at night- a perfectly rendered gothic masterpiece. Below is an illustration for this story from the cover of another collection.



The editor clearly had to stretch his definition of an ‘Australian ghost story’ somewhat in order to fill the book- he includes a couple of south-seas tales, as well as a couple of pieces in which mysterious happenings turn out not to be supernatural (no spoilers on which ones they are!) And there is one story in the collection in which a really creepy, effective build-up leads to such an absolutely stupifyingly strange conclusion that it leaves me quite unsure how to rank it.

Overall, the volume is worth looking into. And Wordsworth editions are very attractively priced (usually 3-5 euros in the Republic), so you rarely go wrong with them. This one of varied enough in settings and action that it’s usually entertaining, even if there are few stone-cold classics. I still feel that the Australian location has been rarely used to its full potential (Picnic at Hanging Rock is an exception). I have a feeling that some Australia-related fiction may appear soon at Odds and Ends.

The Walsingham Ghosts: An Update

2020 UPDATE: This is an article from a very long time ago. For ten years, it floated about on the internet, containing a very serious error. Originally, I mistakenly attributed the popularisation of the Walsingham Ghost tale to the famous London journalist W.T. Stead, in his 1891 book Real Ghost Stories. I then proceeded to tell various stories about Stead, including his connection to the infamous British Museum 'cursed mummy-case' and his death on the Titanic.

Whether through sloppy research or a genuine mix-up, my younger self was seriously in error. Stead never wrote about this story at all. The first book to reprint this newspaper story was in fact True Ghost Stories, written in 1915 by Hereward Carrington. Getting the names of these two books mixed-up is understandable, and Stead is not an unlikely source for stories like this. He was a prominent spiritualist, and he did after all write collections of 'true' ghost stories. However, not going back to primary sources to check was poor journalism on my part.

Carrington was an interesting character himself - a British-born investigator of the strange who moved to America at the turn of the 20th century. He was an SPR member, maintained an odd balance between skepticism and belief in mediums, and was probably best-known for investigating and writing about the 'Amherst Mystery' poltergeist case - that of the infamous 'Esther Cox, You Are Mine To Kill' quote.

I’ve written before about the Usborne Supernatural Guides. When I read them now, I’m struck by the lack of verification for each story. Some of them are well-known cases of the paranormal, but many are not. So where did these stories come from? How did the writers decide which ones to include? With this in mind, I attempted to track down the origins of one of the most interesting tales in the Ghosts, Spectres & Haunted Houses book: The tale of the Walsingham Ghosts. Boy, did this one scare me as a kid, especially with those patented Nightmare Fuel Usborne oil painting illustrations. One particular image was so terrifying to me that I learned where it was in the book so that I could skip the page whenever I read it. I still loved the book even though I was scared of it, so this was quite necessary. The story starts when a farmer called Walsingham moves into a new house in Georgia in the Deep South. According to the illustrations, it was a damn-creepy Gothic mansion, to boot. He finds a bunch of bones in the house and throws them out. Locals warn that they may be human remains, but Walsingham’s a tough customer and he doesn’t care, not even when hideous moans and groans begin to ring out through the house. Soon, invisible forces begin to cause havok within the house. The artist chose to portray all of these as being the work of an evil-looking blue spectre. Here he breaks the neck of the family dog. The family has a teenage daughter. One night she’s doing her makeup when she feels an icy-cold hand on her shoulder, but can see no reflection of it in the mirror- it’s that horrible blue man again. An invisible bare-footed man follows Dad around in the garden one day. Now things get serious- another family has come over for a dinner party, but the ghosts ruin things once again. A horrible moan is heard from upstairs, then blood starts to drip from the ceiling onto the dinner table, forming a huge pool. The Walsinghams run upstairs, but there is nothing to be found. They rip up the carpet, but there is no explanation for the blood that continues to drip onto the table. Next day, a reputable chemist examines a sample of the blood and declares that it’s human blood. This entire scene should be stolen to add to the best horror movie script ever. The Walsinghams justifiably abandon the house, and according to locals, it sits empty for some time, as more moaning and screaming echoes from within. Then a guy called Horace Gunn agrees to spend a night in the house for a bet. He experiences a number of horrifying things, climaxing with this horrible image (the eyes, the eyes!)- Brr. I’m glad that’s over. Horace runs from the room, but that old blue man is still hanging around, and ‘icy’ hands grip his ankles, knocking him to the ground and then trying to choke him. By the time he escapes, he’s reportedly wound up in an asylum. Poor, brave Horace Gunn. Hope he won some money for that.

Carrington's book cites, as his source, an article in the San Francisco Examiner. Here's the beginning of it, dated to 29th Nov 1891, and locating the haunted house in the town of Oakville, near Savannah Georgia.

Another newspaper version of the story I turned up comes from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, dated Dec 5th 1891.

These seem to be the earliest available versions of the story.

The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

The plot here is basically the same as in the later movie version: two of Wheatley’s three modern day (by which I mean the 1930s) ‘musketeers’, the aristocratic Duc de Richleau and two-fisted American playboy Rex Van Ryn suspect that their close friend Simon Aron is in a spot of bother. Why? Well, neither of them have seen him for months because he’s been so busy with his new ‘friends’- a dodgy conglomerate of Johnny foreigners and deformed people. Clearly, something is not right. The friends bust Aron right in the middle of an ‘astronomy’ session at his new house, and the Duke forces him to admit that he’s been messing about with ‘black magic.’ Of course, the sacrificial black cockerel and white hen kind of gave the game away.

The rest of the novel details the three chums’ attempts to outwit the grand Epissimus, one Mr. Mocata, and his coven of acolytes. There are some memorable set-pieces, including a car chase through the English countryside, a black Sabbat on Walpurgis Nacht, and a tense night spent within the safety of a specially-prepared pentangle.

I’d sandwich Wheatley somewhere between Iain Flemming and P.G. Wodehouse. He was massively popular in his day for writing page-turning thrillers, but with a very early 20th century British twist. Even though his attitudes have not aged well, his writing certainly has: he uses a very clean, economical style that feels oddly modern, especially compared to other works from this time. In a way, he’s a bit like a 1930s Stephen King- known not only for his gripping books about the supernatural, but also for his smooth, no-nonsense prose style.

Wheatley has been frequently criticized for the racist, elitist elements in his books. In The Devil Rides Out, the Duke and his friends reflect Wheatley’s own sympathetic vision of the European aristocracy that he feels is about to pass into history. In an early chapter, the Duke’s living style is described-

'His forebears had ridden with thirty-two footmen before them, and it caused him considerable regret that modern conditions made it impossible for him to drive in his Hispano with more than one seated beside his chauffeur on the box. Fortunately his resources were considerable and his brain sufficiently astute to make good, in most years, the inroads which the tax collectors made upon them.'

Spoken like a true enemy of socialism (which Wheatley certainly was). We also learn that the Duke-

'-did not subscribe to the canon which has branded ostentation as vulgarity in the last few generations, and robbed nobility of any glamour which it may have possessed in more spacious days.'

All the characters in The Devil Rides Out live in a world that has since passed into memory- a world of footmen, butlers, country houses and private aeroplanes. Of course, for the reader today all this is part of the charm. Wheatley was also an expert on wines, and an inordinate amount of dialogue in the book is spent discussing when and what the characters shall have to drink. When the plot calls for them to fast for a time, one character bitterly laments that he has been denied that most basic and necessary of civilizing things- a fine rose with Morecambe bay prawns.

The racism in the novel is slightly trickier. Non-whites are treated as being inherently different rather than inferior- in fact, it’s mentioned that many Eastern races are formidable in matter of magic because they are more accepting of it.

'Very few white men can really get inside a Negro’s mind and know exactly what he is thinking- and even fewer blacks can appreciate a white’s mentality.'

This is a kind of Orientalism rather than outright racism (though many believe them to be the same). Knowledge of the power of magic is said to be an especially Eastern thing- the Duke learned all he knows of it during his time in the East, and the various magic practitioners have roots in the rituals of Africa, Madagascar and the Deep South. Mocata’s servant is a Malagassy, and he has the power to appear as a terrifying specter in an early chapter.

Over the course of the book, pretty much every supernatural or mystical idea you could think of is mentioned by the Duke, as he’s a shocking know-it-all, and he’s the mouthpiece for Wheatley’s impressive research into the occult. He is liable to bring up any aspect of the paranormal- witches, werewolves, Egyptian mythology- and give it a good airing. I’d imagine this book was the most elaborate and accurate rundown of the occult most people in England at the time were familiar with. Most of these ideas are introduced with astonishing clarity and consistency. Early on, the Duke convinces Rex of the reality of the supernatural using reasoning that is oddly persuasive even today.

The place of religion in The Devil Rides Out is rather unusual- for a novel about ‘satanism’, there’s surprisingly little mention of Christ or God. Wheatley’s characters are up against genuine Dark Forces, and while they do use crucifixes and prayers, the Duke explains that these are merely symbols that have been charged by centuries of powerful spiritual thoughts; had they been in the East, a Hindu swastika or horseshoe symbol would have been just as effective. ‘He who thinks right, lives right,’ he explains to them as they seek sanctuary in the positively charged (if pagan) shrine of Stonehenge, in the absence of any Christian churches. Makes a refreshing change from righteous religious dogma, doesn’t it?

But, as it turns out, thinking and living right are quite conditional. Early on, the Duke twigs that Simon’s new friends are clearly up to no good because they look unsavoury- an Oritental, an albino, etc. Their diabolical celebration of the Sabbat consists of everything any right-thinking 1930s Englishman would consider downright evil- eating and drinking to excess, dancing naked and engaging in a little free love. Wheatley makes much of their unattractiveness when naked- each is bloated or swarthy or just plain old. Compare this to the American Rex, whom the narrator is constantly telling us is tall, strong and totally in tune with Wheatley’s uptight mores.

Despite any such misgivings, it’s a cracking novel, and the abhorrent attitudes remain but a culturally interesting artifact of times gone by. The plot moves quickly, the set-pieces are excellent, and you’re never more than a page or two away from one of De Richleau’s lectures about the occult.