‘Ghost’ by Louise Welsh: Spooky tales on Halloween
‘One is almost made to feel that there is someone standing right behind you’
Ghost stories have been part and parcel of almost every culture and rites to honour the dead continue almost unchanged. We have all eagerly waited for those moonless nights, dimly lit, ghostly sessions of story-telling. The colonial ghosts, the witches with varied names, crossed feet or back to front heads make their way into these enthralling sessions, one is almost made to feel that there is someone standing right behind you. Not that ghosts need to take any shape remotely resembling humans; there are ghosts of animals and Stephen King has a terrifying line of haunted cars.
Every year, my husband gifts me a ghostly book for Halloween, well aware of my obsession for ghost stories. Thus this year’s pick was ‘Ghost: 100 Stories To Read With The Lights On’ by Louise Welsh.
Two thousand years of ghost stories make a pretty solid heft in the hand for something so shivery — the book. It is replete with haunted houses, mysterious counts, weeping widows and restless souls, a definitive anthology of all that would send shivers up your spine. Hand-picked by award-winning author Welsh, this beautiful collection of 100 ghost stories will delight, unnerve and even make you laugh!
Putting together a book this weighty takes time and it is not surprising that Scottish author, Welsh, spent 18 months picking over phantasmagoria before she came up with her selection. The stories are arranged chronologically in a historical timeline — the date being that of the first publication. Pliny the Younger’s Haunted House opens the book and the selection ends with a single page story written in 2014 by James Robertson. Between these two you will find every possible permutation and combination of ghost story available. What the book does is show how the ghost story has evolved over time.
It is Welsh’s theory that “the supernatural exerts such a powerful fascination simply because it allows readers to explore themes of love, death and remorse, secure in the knowledge that it can always be passed off as fiction.” After all, there are no such things as ghosts, are there?
Coleridge summed it up with his ‘woman wailing for her demon lover’ from which came the title of Elizabeth Bowen’s story. Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and MR James are, of course, represented, but so are some rather unusual stories like Truman Capote’s A Beautiful Child, which might not be called ghost story at all because it has a living Marilyn Monroe in it but focuses on the doomed, the walking dead in a sense. Vampires too make the supernatural cut in the anthology.
Scotland, known for its dark nights, witches and body snatchers is represented by Robert Burns, James Hogg and Ali Smith. Oscar Wilde makes a humorous appearance in the middle of all the darkness with his Canterville Ghost.
The Victorian stories typically make use of governess narrators since they are part of the house but not part of the family and can be described as leading a kind of ghostly presence to be seen and not heard. Governesses can be preyed on or haunted, the Turn of the Screw being the example everyone automatically thinks of, though here Welsh includes a tale by Mrs Gaskell which is a more manageable length.
Adding a different flavour to the selection are ghost stories from places like Japan, Scandinavia and Africa, with some Native American tales as well. However, the global selection gives readers a chance to compare the diverse fear factors.
That said, not the entire book is equally scary, though some of the tales certainly do deserve to be read with the lights on...
— The reader is a teacher based in Dubai.
