The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Tristram began to feel very odd. For a moment he surveyed the scene, not quite comprehending what it all meant. Mrs Plugg had swooned, which merely caused the wastepaper-basket on her head to drop from the vertical to the horizontal. Her son was clearly about to be sick. Julius Plugg, himself supine but undaunted, was making wild signals with his famous eyebrows to be released.

Then, something in his nebulous inside going queerly click, Tristram realized what was happening. At last he had been a hero. At last he was free. The hail of bullets had smashed up not only Boccaccio but his father’s curse . . .

Debating, with the exquisite detachment of the poet, whether the Pluggs would be free before the gangsters recovered, he faded imperceptibly and left them to it.

Who or What Was It?

Kingsley Amis

Location:  Fareham, Hertfordshire.

Time:  August, 1971.

Eyewitness Description:  “I was very alarmed. Because the Green Man wasn’t only the name of the pub in my book; it was also the name of a frightening creature, a sort of solid ghost conjured up out of tree branches and leaves and so on . . .”

Author:  Sir Kingsley Amis (1922–95) was born in Norwood, South London and educated at Norbury College, whose only other famous pupil, he liked to say, was Derek Bentley, who was hung for the murder of a policeman. In 1954, Amis wrote Lucky Jim, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and has since proved to be one of the great comic creations of 20th century fiction. In subsequent works, he has proved to be a master of invective and comedy as well as revealing his interest in the supernatural in several short stories and the chilling novel, The Green Man (1969) described by The Times as “an accomplished ghost story in the M. R. James style, under appreciated when it first came out, but winning some belated admiration when it became a television serial in 1990.” A clubbable, generous-hearted, though often irascible man, Amis created a furore when he published this story in Playboy in 1972. It was written in its original form as a radio broadcast intended to make listeners believe it was a factual account. The whole idea backfired, however, when – like Machen before him – he found people, including close friends, believing it was true. Indeed, despite the fact he repeatedly stated it was “a lying narrative, fiction disguised as fact,” this misapprehension, like the theme of the story, haunted Amis for the rest of his life.

I want to tell you about a very odd experience I had a few months ago, not so as to entertain you, but because I think it raises some very basic questions about, you know, what life is all about and to what extent we run our own lives. Rather worrying questions. Anyway, what happened was this.

My wife and I had been staying the weekend with her uncle and aunt in Westmorland, near a place called Milnethorpe. Both of us, Jane and I that is, had things to do in London on the Monday morning, and it’s a long drive from up there down to Barnet, where we live, even though a good half of it is on the M6. So I said, Look, don’t let’s break our necks trying to get home in the light (this was in August), let’s take it easy and stop somewhere for dinner and reckon to get home about half-past ten or eleven. Jane said okay.

So we left Milnethorpe in the middle of the afternoon, took things fairly easily, and landed up about half-past seven or a quarter to eight at the . . . the place we’d picked out of one of the food guides before we started. I won’t tell you the name of the place, because the people who run it wouldn’t thank me if I did. Please don’t go looking for it. I’d advise you not to.

Anyway, we parked the car in the yard and went inside. It was a nice-looking sort of place, pretty old, built a good time ago I mean, done up in a sensible sort of way, no muzak and no bloody silly blacked-out lighting, but no olde-worlde nonsense either.

Well, I got us both a drink in the bar and went off to see about a table for dinner. I soon found the right chap, and he said, Fine, table for two in half an hour, certainly sir, are you in the bar, I’ll get someone to bring you the menu in a few minutes. Pleasant sort of chap, a bit young for the job.

I was just going off when a sort of paunchy business type came in and said something about, Mr Arlington not in tonight? and the young fellow said No sir, he’s taken the evening off. All right, never mind.