Haunted Bench stories

[dem bones]

Particularly of the public variety, but all suggestions welcome.

[The Lurker In The Shadows]

Would The Demon Bench-End from Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror count?

[dem bones]

Indeed it would. Thank you, Lurkio! Am particularly interested in the park, high street and cemetery variety, but the more the merrier. 'True' ghost stories related to same also welcome.

[elricc]

I recall that there is one in John Whitbournes Binscombe Tales, Waiting for a Bus

[dem bones]

Thanks, Elric. Really should have remembered that one.

[ramseycampbell]

Perhaps Shamus Frazer's "The Fifth Mask"?

[dem bones]

Another contender. Valentin Katayev - Our Father Who Art in Heaven: (J. J. Strating, European Tales Of Terror, 1968). No ghosts as yet, but surely a haunted bench in the making.

[dem bones]

Dec 8, 2017 10:41:04 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Perhaps Shamus Frazer's "The Fifth Mask"?

Does Mackintosh Willy qualify? I take it the shelter in Newsham Park has a bench - Willy may even be slumped on same in Craig Forrester's striking illustration for Steve Holland's Fantasy Fanzine Index: Vol 1, (BFS, 1987).

[vaultadventcalendar]

My sincere thanks to the reader who kindly contributed the following authentic haunted bench story.

My grandmother went to the cemetery to visit various relatives' graves. She sat on a bench about 50 yards from her husband's grave to arrange some flowers she had brought with her. She was busy splitting the flowers into bunches, and happened to look up and spot a man walking directly towards her down a path. He was nondescript, just very ordinary looking, but elderly. As he reached my grandmother he turned off onto another path and she distinctly heard him say "I'm going home." She just nodded and said something like "Oh, right, okay." She looked down for a couple of seconds, then back to where the man should have been, but he was not there. She was startled as there was nowhere for him to have gone in such a short time. My grandmother was a plucky woman who stood no nonsense, typical of those brought up around the time of the Great War - she was born in 1906 and worked in service until her marriage. She got up to make sure he was not hiding behind a gravestone, but there was no sign of him. She visited that cemetery hundreds of times until her death in the mid-90s but never saw the man again. I don't remember exactly how she came to tell me the tale. I think it because I doubted the supposedly "true" accounts of ghosts I had been reading about.

[ramseycampbell]

Dec 10, 2017 8:41:40 GMT dem bones said:

Dec 8, 2017 10:41:04 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Perhaps Shamus Frazer's "The Fifth Mask"?

Does Mackintosh Willy qualify? I take it the shelter in Newsham Park has a bench - Willy may even be slumped on same in Craig Forrester's striking illustration for Steve Holland's Fantasy Fanzine Index: Vol 1, (BFS, 1987).

Come to think, you're right!

[dem bones]

Michael Chislett's The Whistle Thing in the current and last (but don't panic!) Ghosts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter includes a wonderful park bench sequence involving a randy discarded black bin liner.

[dem bones]

R. Chetwynd-Hayes, The Wanderer, in The Elemental, (Fontana, 1974).

[dem bones]

Jacqui Cooper - The Haunted Bench: (The People's Friend, 9. Sept 2017). Mrs. Denby had a sad story to tell, and Sara knew what she had to do to help ... Sara is irritated to find a granny sitting on "her" bench at lunchtime, but it doesn't take long before they get to nattering. Mrs. Denby tells Sara the park was formerly a graveyard. Her twins are buried here - she often sees their ghosts playing beneath a tree. She thinks they may be looking for a toy car. Sara decides to join the search ... condemning herself and poor dumb reader to a "supernatural" experience of crushing banality.

Robert E. Vardeman - Incident on Park Bench 37: (Twilight Zone, March 1982). It was fun to sit and watch the world go by ... and some things not of this world. Pigeon-feeding old timer in the park shares bench with miserable guy in a sparkly jacket which, once removed, vanishes into thin air. When this happens on three occasions, he asks the latest to pull the trick what it's all about? Surly fat slob explains that he's a murderer. In the far future, violent criminals like himself are transported back in time to 1976. And they call the death penalty "inhumane"?

[dem bones]

Lindsay Stewart - Strictly For The Birds: (Herbert Van Thal [ed.], 9th Pan Book of Horror Stories[/color], 1968). Admittedly there's nothing to suggest the bench in question is haunted, but this report from Primrose Hill park is really too ghastly to resist.

Elliott O'Donnell - Phantoms From My Notebook: (Casebook Of Ghosts, Foulsham, 1969). It's the page long opening sequence concerns us here, a creepy episode in Greenwich Park, South London, during the summer of 1898. In this instance, it's not the bench but an Elm tree set directly behind and it is haunted by something spectacularly dreadful concealed in the foliage.

Elliott O'Donnell - Hauntings in Other Parks and Commons: Downloaded a copy of this from Horror Masters [RIP] about a decade back. Been unable to identify the original source. Essentially, it's a Ghost Hunter's guide of St. James Park, aka Green Park, Westminster, via the possibly frenzied imaginations of O'Donnell and several destitute alcoholics he befriended. One episode features something which sounds like a close relative of the Greenwich Park monstrosity. Overall highlight is 'the Pig-faced thing' which transforms every woman it appears before into a psychopathic man-hater.

Should anyone be interested in the O'Donnell extracts, have spliced them together into a lo-fi pdf file. Just drop me a PM if you want to read it (will require an email address).

[Dr Strange]

I recently bought Glimpses Of The Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories (2018, British Library: Tales Of The Weird) and the first story in the collection is about a haunted bench. It's called "On The Embankment" and is by Hugh Esterel Wright (1919). This is him: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_E._Wright. According to Mike Ashley's introduction, "he wrote a few horror stories". This haunted bench is situated on the Embankment, "midway between the Avenue and Westminster Bridge".

Here's the full contents of Glimpses Of The Unknown -

Introduction - Mike Ashley
On the Embankment - Hugh E. Wright (1919)
The Mystery of the Gables - Elsie Norris (1908)
The Missing Word - Austin Philips (1907)
Phantom Death - Huan Mee (1900)
The Wraith of the Rapier - Firth Scott (1911)
The Soul of Maddalina Tonelli - James Barr (1909)
Haunted! - Jack Edwards (1910)
Our Strange Traveller - Percy James Brebner (1911)
A Regent of Love Rhymes - Guy Thorne (1905)
Amid the Trees - Francis Xavier (1911)
The River's Edge - Mary Schultze (1912)
A Futile Ghost - Mary Reynolds (1899)
Ghosts - Lumley Deakin (1914)
Kearney - Elizabeth Jordan (1917)
When Spirits Steal - Philippa Forest (1920)
The House of the Black Evil - Eric Purves (1929)
The Woman in the Veil - E. F. Benson (1928)
The Treasure of the Tombs - F. Britten Austin (1921)

I've read the first six and the last two stories now. "On the Embankment" is probably the best of those; most of the others were OK, but very much "of their type"; a couple were a bit tedious, viz "The Wraith of the Rapier" (haunted antique sword) and "The Soul of Maddalina Tonelli" (haunted Stradivari violin). Amongst the better ones, "The Missing Word" has a ghostly telegraph message identifying a murderer, and "The Treasure of the Tombs" involves three British ex-soldiers doing some tomb-raiding in Iraq just after World War 1 - it has a bit of a Weird Tales vibe to it, but was published in The Strand in 1921.