The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“I didn’t dare. He could have tackled me easily if he had known what he was tackling. He kept moving about. It had to be done suddenly. I counted on just that moment of weakness when he really thought a dead body had come to life to defend you. Now I’m going to harness the horse and drive you to the police-station at Crittenden. And they’ll send and lock him up. Everyone knew he was as mad as a hatter, but somebody had to be nearly killed before anyone would lock him up. The law’s like that, you know.”

“But you – the police – won’t they—”

“It’s quite safe,” said Verney, dully. “Nobody knows but the old man, and now nobody will believe anything he says. No, he never posted your letters, of course, and he never wrote to your friend, and he put off the Psychical man. No, I can’t find Lopez; he must know that something’s up. He’s bolted.”

But he had not. They found him, stubbornly dumb, but moaning a little, crouched against the locked grating of the vault when they came, a prudent half-dozen of them, to take the old man away from the Haunted House. The master was dumb as the man. He would not speak. He has never spoken since.

The Light in the Garden

E. F. Benson

Location:  West Riding, Yorkshire.

Time:  July, 1921.

Eyewitness Description:  “A shadow seemed to cross the window looking on to the gardens; on the road a light had appeared as if carried by some nocturnal passenger; and somehow the two seemed to have a common source, as if some presence that hovered about the place was striving to manifest itself . . .”

Author:  Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) was the middle of the three literary Benson brothers and also the most famous, largely due to the huge success of his shocking novel, Dodo (1893), mocking society and “its lies and swank”. Like his brothers, he was classically educated and formed a deep interest in archaeology, although he had no desire to settle for the life of a scholar as they had done. He was, though, invited to M. R. James’ first Christmas reading in 1893 and soon afterwards was busy creating the supernatural stories which he said were “deliberately written to frighten”: a number of them having subsequently become the favourites of anthologists, particularly the nauseating “Caterpillars” (1912) and his two gruesome vampire tales, “The Room in the Tower” (1912) and “Mrs Amworth” (1922). The majority of Benson’s stories were later collected into popular volumes, Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928) and More Spook Stories (1934), but a few, like “The Light in the Garden” which he wrote for the Christmas 1921 issue of Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, escaped the net and it is now brought back into print as another reminder of the grisly fare being offered – even to female readers – around Edwardian fireplaces at the Festive season.

The house and the dozen areas of garden and pasture-land surrounding it, which had been left me by my uncle, lay at the top end of one of those remote Yorkshire valleys carved out among the hills of the West Riding. Above it rose the long moors of bracken and heather, from which flowed the stream that ran through the garden, and, joining another tributary, brawled down the valley into the Nidd, and at the foot of its steep fields lay the hamlet – a dozen of houses and a small grey church. I had often spent half my holidays there when a boy, but for the last twenty years my uncle had become a confirmed recluse, and lived alone, seeing neither kith nor kin nor friends from January to December,

It was, therefore, with a sense of clearing old memories from the dust and dimness with which the lapse of years had covered them that I saw the dale again on a hot July afternoon in this year of drought and rainlessness. The house, as his agent had told me, was sorely in need of renovation and repair, and my notion was to spend a fortnight here in personal supervision. I had arranged that the foreman of a firm of decorators in Harrogate should meet me here next day and discuss what had to be done. I was still undecided whether to live in the house myself or let or sell it. As it would be impossible to stay there while painting and cleaning and repairing were going on, the agent had recommended me to inhabit for the next fortnight the lodge which stood at the gate on to the high road. My friend, Hugh Grainger, who was to have come up with me, had been delayed by business in London, but he would join me tomorrow.