The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins’s face. He could not, though he knew how perilous a sound was – he could not keep back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leapt towards him upon the instant, and the next moment he was halfway through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open, and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bed-clothes.

Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself keeping everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed; and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed, for the rest of the night. Early on the next day Rogers arrived, more welcome than he would have been a day before, and the three of them held a very long consultation in the Professor’s room. At the end of it the Colonel left the hotel door carrying a small object between his finger and thumb, which he cast as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it. Later on the smoke of a burning ascended from the back premises of the Globe.

Exactly what explanation was patched up for the staff and visitors at the hotel I must confess I do not recollect. The Professor was somehow cleared of the ready suspicion of delirium tremens, and the hotel of the reputation of a troubled house.

There is not much question as to what would have happened to Parkins if the Colonel had not intervened when he did. He would either have fallen out of the window or else lost his wits. But it is not so evident what more the creature that came in answer to the whistle could have done than frighten. There seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it save the bed-clothes of which it had made itself a body. The Colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

The House at Treheale

A. C. Benson

Location:  Grampound, Cornwall.

Time:  October, 1903.

Eyewitness Description:  “Something seemed to rush up the stairs and past me; a strange, dull smell came from the passage: I know that there fell on me a sort of giddiness and horror, and I went back into the room with hands outstretched, like Elymas the sorcerer, seeking someone to guide me . . .”

Author:  Arthur Christopher Benson (18 62–1925) was one of M. R. James’ closest friends at Cambridge and like him wrote only a handful of ghost stories, notably “The House at Treheale” which he read at the Christmas gathering in 1903. One of three writing sons of E. W. Benson, an Archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur trained as a teacher and after a period as a housemaster at Eton moved to Cambridge in 1903 where he was later appointed Master of Magdalene College. A curiously nervous and melancholic man, he loved music and its use in this story of a musician whose personality is warped by his contact with the supernatural is also interesting because Benson composed the words for a number of songs including “Land of Hope and Glory” for Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance march. It is known that he wrote a number of other ghost stories – several of which were read to his university friends – but the manuscripts disappeared after his death. Had they survived they would surely have enhanced his reputation as an equal of M. R. James.