Writing Ghost Stories

One December, when I was eleven years old, I was allowed to stay up late to see a BBC production called “A Ghost Story for Christmas.” It was a adaptation of an M.R. James ghost story, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. The story is about a clergyman who gets tired of waiting for the person above him to die, so he arranges a fatal accident for his superior. After he takes over his predecessor’s position, he slowly becomes aware of dark supernatural forces building up around him – noises and disturbances, all somehow related to a set of gruesome wooden carvings in the church.

What I remembered most about it was the way the tension of the story slowly increased, even though there’s very little you actually see. The horror came from the growing anticipation.

The pace of the film was very slow – probably too slow for today’s audiences – but in the 1970s it was a very effective piece of horror, and, I later discovered, quite faithful to the original story.

Many M.R. James have been adapted for TV over the years, often as BBC Christmas specials. Perhaps the best of the lot was one of the first, by comedian-turned-director Jonathan Miller. In 1968, he made a low budget version of Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. A professor visiting the windswept coast of England finds an old bone whistle near a grave. He cleans the bone whistle and discovers a Latin inscription: “Who is it who is coming?” Then, rather foolishly, he blows the whistle… and senses that something is coming…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYjtxHHjZ00

This adaptation, which was directed by Jonathan Miller, and looks like it was made on a shoestring budget, very skillfully adapts the style of M.R. James into a TV format. The pace is deliberately slow. There’s no gore – the horror is based on mounting sense of evil.

Miller also finds other ways to build the suspense. Conversation is often faraway and indistinct. It’s the television equivalent of a campfire narrative, where the storyteller speaks more and more softly, forcing the audience to listen harder, and sensitizing them to the scare that may be coming.

Montague Rhodes James – who published as M.R. James – is widely considered one of the greatest writers of ghost stories. He was a medieval scholar, and was provost (senior administrator) at Eton College as well as Cambridge University – the height of establishment respectability. But he had some secrets, one of the biggest being that he was gay.¹Reggie Oliver, “A Warning to the Curious, A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James. http://www.hippocampuspress.com/warnings-to-the-curious-sheaf-of-criticism-on-m.-r.-james (In Jonathan Miller’s adaptation, there’s a suggestion that the main character’s discomfort with women is at the root of his ghostly encounter.)

M.R. James’s stories are usually about people like himself – bachelor academics, who delve too deeply in some dark matter.

James wrote a number of good tips on writing ghost stories.²M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories, Appendix https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/mr/collect/appendix.html

He points out that ghost stories are a small, unusual genre. They seem to work best as short stories. This carries over into modern media – ghost stories seem to work well as one-off films, but, unlike detective stories, have a harder time sustaining a series.

The goal of a ghost story is to inspire “a pleasing terror in the reader.” That’s easier if the story is set somewhere familiar, and people talk in an ordinary way. You want the reader to feel that something like this might happen to them. (It’s funny to think that his characters, Edwardian professors visiting ancient sites, seemed like the most ordinary of people to the author. Today they seem a little unusual and eccentric.)

While an everyday setting was best, James believed that it was also helpful to give a ghost story a slightly old-fashioned feel, “a very slight haze of distance,” and a narrator describes events that happened a few decades ago. James himself usually tells stories with this kind of introduction. The old-fashioned style carries through to the language in his case. Although he was writing in the early 1900s, up to the 1930s, his stories have a Victorian feel to them, slightly ponderous and academic. But, assuming a reader isn’t put off completely by this style of language, it builds very nicely. His fusty language would be a bad thing in a detective or science fiction story, but it works for ghost stories about men who move in a world of ancient writings, tombs and artifacts.

He believed the ghost should be evil, otherwise the story tends to shift from ghost story to fantasy. (The film Ghost is more a romantic fantasy than a ghost story.) A Christmas Carol is full of ghosts, but it’s not a ghostly horror story, although the opening, with the appearance of Marley, follows the form quite well. (Dickens could write scary ghost stories when he wanted to. His story The Signalman is a classic.)

James suggests writers should avoid technical explanations of how ghosts work. Many ghost stories fall into this trap. Too much explanation of how ghosts “work” turns the ghost story into science fiction. You see the same storytelling effect in a film like Ghostbusters – teeming with ghosts, but not deeply frightening because these are ghosts that can be caught with lasers and contained with bottles. An interesting counterexample was a 1972 BBC production of by Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. It seems to offer a scientific explanation of ghosts as a harmless psychic recording in the stone, then cleverly undermines it by suggesting the presence of something more horrible and mysterious, moving the narrative back into the realm of the ghost story.

Ghosts need mystery and obscurity to work well.

…the greatest successes have been scored by the authors who can make us envisage a definite time and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail, but who, when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark as to the working of their machinery. We do not want to see the bones of their theory about the supernatural.

Ghosts that are overly active also become less ghostly. James describes one story, from another writer, about ghosts that played tricks with the victim’s bed, squirted water, threw torches into his room, stole his clothes. James comments that they sound more like goblins than ghosts.

M.R. James considered the writer J.S. Le Fanu to be one of the best ghost story writers – especially the slow pace of Le Fanu’s stories. He used the same style himself. James’s own stories develop very slowly.

After we’ve met the characters in the course of their normal lives, the atmosphere changes as something evil enters the story, first with hints and apprehensions, then building to a horrible peak.

There is the touch on the shoulder that comes when you are walking quickly homewards in the dark hours, full of anticipation of the warm room and bright fire, and when you pull up, startled, what face or no-face do you see?

He also disliked the addition of sex to a ghost story, and felt it spoiled the story. Again, he may have had some personal motives here. (As a counterexample, the 1981 film Ghost Story mixed ghosts and sex quite effectively.)

He distinguishes between stories that use horror and stories that are merely nauseating. This is another easy trap to fall into. As he notes, it is much easier to be nauseating, wallowing in images of rotting flesh. But a little gore goes a long way. (In movies, you see a similar distinction between horror built with suspense and horror that comes from gruesome special effects.) The ghost story, like all stories, emerges from the context of a world. The main task for the author isn’t to create horrific events, but to build up the world in a way that makes those events seem plausible, and therefore horrific.