H. R. Wakefield - Best Ghost Stories Of

[dem bones]

Richard Dalby (ed.) - The Best Ghost Stories Of H. R. Wakefield: (John Murray, 1978)

Richard Dalby - Introduction

The Red Lodge
"He Cometh And He Passeth By"
Professor Pownall's Oversight
"Look Up There"
Blind Man's Buff
Day-Dream In Macedon
Damp Sheets
A Black Solitude
The Triumph Of Death
A Kink In Space-Time
The Gorge Of The Churels
"Immortal Bird"
Death Of A Bumble-Bee

From the inside cover:

."We go from haunted houses like the classic The Red Lodge through haunted games of chess and golf courses, back to the First World War and away to colonial India. We meet Aleister Crowley and Lord Northcliffe in thin disguise. We watch horrified as one man is haunted to death by birds, another by his own ghost. Wakefield's quick and telling characterisation is a delight and there is an added bonus in the period detail.

A fourteen story collection is never going to do justice to the forty year writing career of H. Russell Wakefield, but this is certainly a great way of getting to know what he was capable of. Scandalously, this was the first Wakefield collection to be published in Britain since The Clock Strikes Twelve in 1940.

The Red Lodge, a story inspired by a "Haunted House" in the vicinity of Richmond Bridge visited by Wakefield in 1917, was his first ever story and widely held to be his classic. I've not reread it in four-five years now but can still picture those slimy green ghosts dashing toward the river and there's also a contender for best face at the window early on in the proceedings as the narrator is just coming to realise there's something not quite right about this place. Like the famous Crowley-inspired Black Magic story "He Cometh And He Passeth By" and the chess-themed black Comedy Professor Pownall's Oversight, it was included in his debut collection, They Return At Evening (Philip Allan, 1928), most of which Charles Birkin resurrected for his Creeps series the following decade.

Also includes:

The Triumph Of Death: Mrs Redvale the rector’s wife is concerned about Amelia, the young maid of all work at Carthwaite Place. The young woman is showing the strain of skivvying for the seriously embittered Miss Prunella Pendleham, the last of a notorious line who, disappointed in love has waged a war versus her own sex ever since. It doesn’t help that Carthwaite Place is haunted, quite possibly by Amelia’s immediate predecessors who were driven to their deaths (her ladyship delights in having Amelia read to her from the career of Gilles de Rais with the occasional M. R. James ghost story thrown in by way of light relief). Can Mrs Redvale persuade her spineless husband to stand up to Miss Pendleham and prevent another tragedy?

I’ve seen Wakefield’s post-1940’s work dismissed as rather misogynistic variations on well worn revenge themes, but this one certainly has a spirited nastiness about it.

Damp Sheets: Cardew House, Hallocks, Sussex: Free-spending Robert stands to gain a fortune on his uncle Samuel's death but the old bastard still keeps clinging on. So Agatha decides to assist him on his way with a fatal dose of pneumonia. The dead man takes this very badly.

Blind Man's Buff: Aylesbury, Herts. Mr. Cort learns why none of the locals will approach Lorn Manor after nightfall. In pitch darkness, He loses himself within a few feet of the front door and is pursued about the old house by unseen entities.

Another of Wakefield's more famous stories. In A Wave Of Fear, Hugh Lamb suggests that it's overrated when compared with the same author's The Frontier Guards which utilises the same setting and a similar plot.

[lobolover]

Well,it doesnt have "And he shall sing"-I nevr read any Wakefield till now, but from the description,Id say leaving that out is a tad weird.

[thecoffinflies]

demonik, is that a scan of the dustwrapper or the hard cover? or is it a paperback? just comparing it to my edition of the same book...

btw you forgot to mention Death of a Bumble Bee, without doubt the most perfectly titled ghost story ever.

[dem bones]

It's a hardcover, CF. I didn't even know there was a paperback. Walked into some remainder store in Baker Street back in the 'nineties and there were a pile of maybe twenty of them alongside similar sized stacks of various William Kimber titles and an Algernon Blackwood selection, so the old publisher's mantra - "short stories don't sell" - was depressingly accurate in this instance.

I'll have another attempt at some notes for Death Of A Bumblebee when next I read it.

Anyway, what do you make of HRW and his work: any particular favourites?

[thecoffinflies]

Oh, there probly isn't a PB then...mine is HB, has the skull implausibly balanced on the flying hourglass, but no words on the front at all. Have scanned it, but now don't know how to show it to you.

Anyway, that's why I asked about the dustwrapper. Mine is missing, and yours most likely isn't, I just wasn't sure from the pic.

Wakefield? I have great affection for him for some reason, but haven't read any for many years and can't recall most of the ins and outs. I think he's sometimes trying to do an Algernon Blackwood with descriptions of mental states, but he doesn't seem to suffer from hallucinations in the same way, so he lacks that hypnotic quality.

I'm just chuntering, really. Should re-read before passing judgement!

[unholyturnip]

I must admitt I was underwhelmed when I first read this book, as I'd heard so many rave reviews of Wakefield. Frankly his sense of plotting isn't as subtle as it could be, and his prose lacks precision. However, he's grown on me in recent months, and I do think his best stuff is at least on par with much of E.F. Benson's. He's in need of a new collection I think, as whilst this one is good, a more expansive one would be nice me thinks. I'm told his first two books in particular are excellent.

[lobolover]

Well, read his first colection since then, and I can safely say they should have put "And he shall sing" and (if I didnt miss it) "Duncaster" in.

[unholyturnip]

Duncaster is in there! It comes after Professor Pownfall's Oversight and before Look Up There.

It may be my favourite tale of his actually that I've read. There's so much that's unanswered and unexplained in it, that I find it scarier the more I read it.

I usually find the more blanks there are for me to fill in, the more I return to a tale, and the more scared I get by it. My least favourite tales are those where, at the end, a character, usually a servant or some such, explains the whole back story of what's just happened. Once you know what's driving the machinery of the tale, it ceases to be as interesting.

[jonathan122]

Odd that there's nothing from The Clock Strikes 12 in there - I'd have thought "Lucky's Grove" and "The First Sheaf" would be strong contenders for any Wakefield best-of. Copyright issues perhaps?

[dem bones]

Could be, although I think Mr. Dalby was onto a hiding to nothing, trying to present a 'Best' of H. R. W. in such a slim (232 page) collection. I'm not so sure Day-Dream In Macedon or Gorge Of The Churels would make the list of most readers' top 13. Lucky's Grove and The First Sheaf certainly wouldn't have disgraced themselves in this company, and I'd have liked to see Old Man's Beard in there too.

[enoch]

Does anyone happen to know which actual house is the inspiration for "The Red Lodge"?  Wakefield describes it as "...a superficially charming and harmonious Queen Anne house about a mile and a half from Richmond Bridge." 

[dem bones]

Aug 10, 2022 16:46:51 GMT enoch said:

Does anyone happen to know which actual house is the inspiration for "The Red Lodge"?  Wakefield describes it as "...a superficially charming and harmonious Queen Anne house about a mile and a half from Richmond Bridge." 

Hi Enoch. I think he may have had Ham House in mind, or, perhaps more likely, a composite of 'haunted' sites he knew of?

Whether we take him at his word or not, Wakefield's [then] recent history of The Red Lodge is inspired. Should anyone not have seen his introduction to Strayers from Sheol, it runs in part;

"I mustn't locate it more precisely because - and it is a significant fact - even the most rampant unbelievers often refuse to live in a reputedly haunted house.

And I assure them they are very wise

visited this house in 1917, and during the previous thirty years it had known five suicides — the old gardener, strictly against orders, blurted out this ominous record in his cups, and it was verified. One had hanged herself in a powder closet. One shot himself in the tool-shed. The others had drowned themselves in a river about a hundred yards away, always, it is said, at dawn. And now mark this! About a year after I went there, the valet of a famous nobleman also drowned himself in the river at first light. He was seen running down the path as though a fearful fiend were hard upon his heels and plunging in to his death."

Such a shame he never got around to writing a Ghost Gazetteer.

[enoch]

Hi, dem bones, thanks for answering!  If Wakefield is to be believed, it was certainly one house that inspired the story.  Wakefield says in "The Red Lodge" that some houses immediately psychically impress one with their friendliness ("wag their tails at you like a friendly dog," I believe he put it), while others can immediately depress or unnerve you.  I've never experienced the latter, but I have been in houses that have "wagged their tails" at me so to speak, so I know exactly what he's talking about there.

[dem bones]

Aug 12, 2022 5:54:26 GMT enoch said:

Hi, dem bones, thanks for answering!  If Wakefield is to be believed, it was certainly one house that inspired the story.  Wakefield says in "The Red Lodge" that some houses immediately psychically impress one with their friendliness ("wag their tails at you like a friendly dog," I believe he put it), while others can immediately depress or unnerve you.  I've never experienced the latter, but I have been in houses that have "wagged their tails" at me so to speak, so I know exactly what he's talking about there.

You could be right. From his introduction to The Clock Strikes 12, "Why I write Ghost Stories."

Actually I am convinced there are perfectly authenticated cases of most versatile psychic phenomena, for the very good reason that I have experienced them myself. Quite recently I was living in a "disturbed" area. Believe it or not, two days before I left, a spoon hopped from the kitchen shelf and fell to the floor — the last of many such oddities! I defy anyone to find an orthodox explanation of this. A story I wrote, called The Red Lodge, was most displeasingly founded on fact.

I'd love to take him at his word ...

I'm sure you'll have read it, but just in case — Ghost Hunt?

[enoch]

Aug 12, 2022 10:57:38 GMT dem bones said:

Aug 12, 2022 5:54:26 GMT enoch said:

I'm sure you'll have read it, but just in case — Ghost Hunt?

Absolutely, but I first encountered it in audio form via an old Suspense broadcast.  Excellent story, and Suspense did a very good job with it.  This is one of many stories plagiarized by EC Comics (a very GOOD plagiarization, I hasten to add).  Wakefield was certainly ahead of his time with this one; it's kind of an early "found footage" thing, preceding that craze by 50 years or so.

Wakefield may or may not be exaggerating with his stories of psychic phenomena.  I myself once had a weird experience in an old house, but I'm skeptical and do not believe in ghosts of course, so I'm not going to just assign something I can't explain to the most illogical explanation I can think of.  But those kinds of things can certainly make one wonder, and I can see where they would be instant fodder for stories by people more creative than myself.

I do like Wakefield's hypothesis that some people are more psychically aware than others, and that some people simply "can't see ghosts."  He mentions in "The Red Lodge" that one couple lived in the house a long time and never experienced anything strange and came to no harm, whereas the narrator immediately notices something off about the place.  I recently re-read W. W. Jacobs' "The Toll-House" and got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that Jacobs may have had the same idea.  Of the four friends who spend the night in the haunted house, it's the most skeptical one who seems to sense the evil of the place whereas the other three, who claim to believe in ghosts, treat the whole thing as a sort of joke until the situation escalates.