The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Today, of course, the whole countryside from Cambridge to the coast of East Anglia is very different. But a story persists in King’s College that a ghostly cry is still sometimes heard on a staircase in Gibbs’ Building. The main authority for this is the ghost story writer, M. R. James, who came from Eton to Kings at the end of the 19th century and was allotted a room close to the staircase. He never heard the cry, James explained in his autobiography, Eton and King’s (1926), but he knew of other academics who had. Out of a similar interest, I have visited Cambridge on a number of occasions hoping to get to the bottom of the haunting. I had one fascinating discussion with a local author and paranormal investigator, T. C. Lethbridge, who suggested a novel reason why the city had so many ghosts. It was due to being near the Fen marshes, he said. During his research, Lethbridge had discovered that ghosts were prevalent in damp areas and came to the conclusion that they might be the result of supernatural “discharges” being conducted through water vapour. It was – and is – an intriguing concept.

But to return to the story of the Gibbs’ Building Ghost. Certainly there is some further evidence about it in the form of brief reports in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, which were given to the Cambridge University Library in 1991. However, though like M. R. James I have neither heard nor seen anything during my visits, there is a possible explanation as to its cause of the phenomena.

It seems that a certain Mr Pote once occupied a set of ground floor rooms at the south end of Gibbs’ Building. He was, it appears, “a most virulent person”, compared by some who crossed his path to Charles Dickens’ dreadful Mr Quilp. Ultimately, Pote was banned from the college for his outrageous behaviour and sending “a profane letter to the Dean”. As he was being turned out of the university, Pote cursed the college “in language of ineffaceable memory”, according to M. R. James. Was it, then, his voice that has been occasionally heard echoing around the passageways where he once walked? I like to think it might an explanation for a mystery that has puzzled me all these years – but as is the way of ghost stories, I cannot be sure.

It comes as no great surprise to discover that M. R. James, who is now acknowledged to be the “Founding Father of the Modern Ghost Story”, should have garnered much of his inspiration while he was resident in Cambridge. He was a Fellow at King’s and, as an antiquarian by instinct, could hardly fail to have been interested in the city’s enduring tradition of the supernatural. Indeed, it seems that he was so intrigued by the accounts of ghosts that he discovered in old documents and papers – a number of them in the original Latin – as well as the recollections of other academics, that he began to adapt them into stories to read to his friends. He chose the Christmas season as an appropriate time to tell these stories and such was the reaction from his colleagues that the event became an annual gathering.

When James was later encouraged by his friends into publishing his first collection of these tales, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, in 1904, the public response was equally enthusiastic. Within a few years the scholarly and retiring academic had effectively modernized the traditional tale of the supernatural into one of actuality, plausibility and malevolence well suited for 20th century readers – banishing the old trappings of antique castles, terrified maidens, evil villains and clanking, comic spectres – and provided the inspiration for other writers who, in the ensuing years, would develop the ghost story into the imaginative, varied and unsettling genre we know and enjoy today.

This book is intended to be a companion to my earlier anthology, Haunted House Stories (2005), as well as a celebration of the Modern Ghost Story ranging from the groundbreaking tales of M. R. James to the dawn of the 21st century. A collection that demonstrates how and why the ghost has survived the march of progress that some critics once believed would confine it to the annals of superstition. Defying, as it did so, the very elements that were expected to bring about its demise: the electric light, the telephone, cars, trains and aeroplanes, not forgetting modern technology and psychology and, especially, the growth of human cynicism towards those things that we cannot explain by logic or reason.