The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Festive Season Chillers

Only A Dream . . .

Rider Haggard

Location:  Ditchingham, Norfolk.

Time:  October, 1905.

Eyewitness Description:  “There it is again – a dreadful sound; it makes the blood turn chill and yet has something familiar about it. It is a woman’s voice calling round the house. There, she is at the window now, and rattling it, and, great heavens she is calling me . . .”

Author:  Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was an innovator as well as one of the greatest adventure story writers whose classic novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) has continued to influence the genre to the present day. Born in Norfolk, he was educated at Ipswich Grammar School, but spent much of his early life in South Africa, which was to fire his imagination with its mysteries and strange peoples. After the success of his most famous lost-race story, he wrote several sequels and short stories about the hero, Allan Quatermain, and revealed an increasing interest in the supernatural as he grew older in titles like The Wizard (1896), The Ghost Kings (1908), which he plotted with his friend, Rudyard Kipling, and Love Eternal (1918), about spiritualism, which owes more than a nod to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Haggard was also an early enthusiast of the “story for Christmas” tradition that grew rapidly in the popular illustrated magazines of the 20th century. His curious tale of a haunted man on the day before his marriage – which has been said to stand comparison with the stories of M. R. James – must have made startling reading for his admirers as they huddled round their fires and opened their edition of the popular writer and illustrator Harry Furniss’s Christmas Annual in December 1905.

Footprints – footprints – the footprints of one dead. How ghastly they look as they fall before me! Up and down the long hall they go, and I follow them. Pit, pat they fall, those unearthly steps, and beneath them starts up that awful impress. I can see it grow upon the marble, a damp and dreadful thing.

Tread them down; tread them out; follow after them with muddy shoes, and cover them up. In vain. See how they rise through the mire! Who can tread out the footprints of the dead?

And so on, up and down the dim vista of the past, following the sound of the dead feet that wander so restlessly, stamping upon the impress that will not be stamped out. Rave on, wild wind, eternal voice of human misery; fall, dead footsteps, eternal echo of human memory; stamp, miry feet; stamp into forgetfulness that which will not be forgotten.

And so on, on to the end.

Pretty ideas these for a man about to be married, especially when they float into his brain at night like ominous clouds into a summer sky, and he is going to be married tomorrow. There is no mistake about it – the wedding, I mean. To be plain and matter-of-fact, why there stand the presents, or some of them, and very handsome presents they are, ranged in solemn rows upon the long table. It is a remarkable thing to observe when one is about to make a really satisfactory marriage how scores of unsuspected or forgotten friends crop up and send little tokens of their esteem. It was very different when I married my first wife, I remember, but then that marriage was not satisfactory – just a love-match, no more.

There they stand in solemn rows, as I have said, and inspire me with beautiful thoughts about the innate kindness of human nature, especially the human nature of our distant cousins. It is possible to grow almost poetical over a silver teapot when one is going to be married tomorrow. On how many future mornings shall I be confronted with that teapot? Probably for all my life; and on the other side of the teapot will be the cream jug, and the electro-plated urn will hiss away behind them both. Also, the chased sugar basin will be in front, full of sugar, and behind everything will be my second wife.

“My dear,” she will say, “will you have another cup of tea?” and probably I shall have another cup.