Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres

[Steve]

Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres
Edited by Charles Molin
Puffin, 1971 (First published by Hamish Hamilton, 1967)

_{cover by Philip Gough}

The Canterville Ghost - Oscar Wilde
Teeny-Tiny - Anonymous
The Signal-Man - Charles Dickens
The Strange Visitor - Anonymous
Madam Crowl's Ghost - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
A Ghostly Wife - Anonymous
Legend of Hamilton Tighe - Richard Barham
The Phantom Ship - Captain Marryat
The Brown Hand - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Ghost-Brahman - Anonymous
The Ghost-ship - Richard Middleton
The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall - John Kendrick Bangs
The Inexperienced Ghost - H.G. Wells
The Buggane and the Tailor - Dora Broome
Laura - Saki
The Betrayal of Nance - R. Blakeborough
The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Being Bagged - Anonymous
The Beast with Five Fingers - W.F. Harvey
The Night the Ghost Got In - James Thurber
The Story of Glam - Andrew Lang

You know when you're suddenly reminded of a book you had when you were a kid... but you can't remember the title, or who wrote it (or in this case who the editor was), or anything much about it at all except perhaps the cover or one particular story...

Having read Dem & Franklin's posts on Barbara Ireson's anthologies earlier (especially Haunting Tales for Puffin), I was immediately plagued by memories of another Puffin ghost book that had terrified a small, impressionable Steve many years ago. I remembered the cover with its painting of wispy ghosts flying through a dark, misted graveyard... then proceeded to spend hours and bloody hours on Google, driving myself madder, racking my addled brain to disinter what I now know to be the book pictured above.

I inherited this one from my sister, who was an avid devourer of Puffins as a child but decided at some point that she didn't like ghosts (and was presumably none too keen on spooks and spectres either). First published by Puffin in 1971, and reprinted several times throughout the seventies, I'm not sure exactly when I first got hold of her copy but I can't have been very old at all.

I often seem to find myself reminiscing about how such & such a story was "one of the first horror stories I ever read", but Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres must surely be the first collection of ghost stories I encountered. Of the stories themselves I remembered very few, although many of them are old chestnuts (I had thought that W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" was included, which sent me off up a blind alley at one point - I think I must have been confusing it with W.F. Harvey's "The Beast with Five Fingers", which I must admit I do rather a lot). The one story I still remember from reading it for the first time here - and the story that eventually led to me tracking the book down - is "The Brown Hand", though I'd completely forgotten it was written by Arthur Conan Doyle (In case you were wondering, Andrew Lang's "The Story of Glam" isn't what you might be thinking from the title - even though the book was published in the seventies).

All told, not a bad little supernatural starter for the nippers. Charles Molin keeps the tone fairly light throughout but if there is any particular reason why I've always been scared of my own shadow, this is probably it.

I've also learnt that later (1978 to be precise) this formed part of a 4 book boxed set of ghostly Puffins called Ghosts and Ghouls. The other books included were; Richard Carpenter's The Ghosts of Motley Hall, Barbara Ireson's Haunting Tales, and Peter Haining's The Ghost's Companion - all of which have featured previously in this little corner of the Vault.

[dem bones]

steve said:

I often seem to find myself reminiscing about how such & such a story was "one of the first horror stories I ever read", but Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres must surely be the first collection of ghost stories I encountered.

Not sure if it was the first ghost story I ever read, but certainly the first I remember being read to me - by a school teacher who seemed to have a taste for macabre fiction - involved two children who ignore all warnings and walk widdershins around the kirk-yard. Years later, I found a copy - it's in Christine Barnard's 1st Armada Book of Ghost Stories - but I couldn't tell you the author or title having stupidly got rid of it again during a massive clear out! Unless my memory is playing tricks, the same teech also treated us to George Manville Fenn's spoof spook Haunted By Spirits from Hugh Lamb's Victorian Nightmares.

Wasn't aware of Ghosts, Spooks & Spectres until your post but it's a neat selection (although i could cheerfully live without any further encounters with Teeny- Bloody-Tiny). These days, I'd still pick it for up for the striking Philip Gough cover.

[hugegadjit]

oh yeah, I remember this - they had some sort of book club thing going on at school and I got a copy of this out of it. The cover always traumatised me, that's a great illustration

[thecoffinflies]

I've had this book since the age of about nine, when I already thought it lacked nastiness. I liked nastiness when I was a boy...Haining's The Ghost's Companion was better if only for Blackwood's The Haunted Island, far more atmospheric than it ought to have been.