Help me identify a story...!

[gilberninvaer]

Many years ago I read an old short story that I'm trying to identify.

It was included in a collection of stories (mainly supernatural thrillers) that I suspect was published in the 1930s, '40s or possibly '50s.

It was set in England possibly in the '20s or '30s and was written in the first person. I recall some key points in the plot: notably when the narrator visits an old churchyard and climbs down the steps to the door of the tomb of some historical figure (possibly an ecclesiastical personage). He looks up to see the vicar, who'd accompanied him to the churchyard, looking down at him with a "mocking" expression on his face. The narrator is then plagued by strange and disturbing happenings, similar to those that beset the incumbent of the tomb while they were alive. He researches it and discovers that his predecessor prayed that the presence bewitching him would be revealed to him and that when this happened - either on All Soul's Eve or New Year's Eve, I'm unsure which - it was a fiend so hideous that he killed himself. The story ends with the narrator sitting in his room on the appropriate evening (see above) with a gun (a newly procured "automatic pistol") in one hand and a Bible in the other waiting for "it" to come calling.

Various authors have been suggested including M.R. James, Walter de la Mare and even D.H. Lawrence, but I've been able to rule these out.

Does this story sound familiar to anyone out there and could they help me track it down?

[dem bones]

How frustrating! This sound very familiar, though damned if I can nail it. Surely it was written by one of MRJ's several disciples?

[Michael Connolly]

I think the story is "The Saint and the Vicar" by Cecil Binney.  It is in 50 Years of Ghost Stories, A Century of Ghost Stories and Ghosts and Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James (the anthology edited by Richard Dalby and Rosemary Pardoe).