Peter Haining - Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts

[dem bones]

Peter Haining [ed.] - Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts (Severn House, 1987)

Jacket design by John Costelloe and Trevor Newman

Peter Haining -Introduction

Lord Lytton The Haunted and the Haunters
Ambrose Bierce - A Fruitless Assignment
Rudyard Kipling - Haunted Subalterns
Edgar Wallace - The Death Room
Robert S. Carr - Phantom Fingers
E. F. Benson - Thursday Evenings
Seabury Quinn - The Poltergeist
Elliott O’Donnell - The Mystery of Beechcroft Farm
Mary Elizabeth Counselman - Parasite Mansion
Laurence Housman - Maggie’s Bite
William F. Harvey - Miss Cornelius
Peter Dare - The Beam
August Derleth - A Knocking in the Wall
Charles Duff - The Haunted Bungalow
Nigel Kneale - Minuke
Kurt Singer - Poltergeist!

Blurb:

The poltergeist is the most evil and deadly of spirits. Believed to manifest its presence not only with acts of mischief, but sometimes with deeds of malicious intent, the 'racketing ghost' is bent on disturbing the peace of mind of those it haunts.

No ordinary phantom this, the wicked activities of the poltergeist can be seen, heard and felt. Not simply content with frightening the wits out of its victims with strange and chilling sounds, this most feared of all spirits has been known to hurl objects, to wreak havoc in the homes of its hosts and even physically to assault humankind.

This new collection of the very best short stories about poltergeists by some of the leading writers of horror stories is prefaced with an introduction tracing the tradition of the phenomenon, which has been recorded from as far back as Ancient Greece and Rome and is still widespread today

C. C. Senf

Robert S. Carr - Phantom Fingers: (Weird Tales, May, 1927). Alfred Meyes, drug fiend, attends a seance at the home of Mr. Addison, an elderly gent with long tapered fingers and phenomenally powerful hands. The medium - the host's obligatory beautiful daughter - duly materialises the belligerent spirits of, first his father, then a Mr. Roger Kane, casualty of his reckless driving.

Later, cranked up on cocaine, Meyes returns to the Addison house intent on stealing a valuable painting and silver vase. When the old man intervenes, Mayes shoots him dead and climbs the stairs to the girl's room with molestation in mind ...

Charles Duff - The Haunted Bungalow: (John Gawsworth [ed.], Thrills, 1936). Shortly after the Great War, three soldiers lease a bungalow on the Norfolk Broads for usual suspiciously minimal rent. The poltergeist runs through an impressive routine; violent rapping on the front door; physical assault; unpleasant laughter; disembodied hands and floating eyes; etc. Trio are also briefly visited by a phantom Cavalier. Previous owner was Hungarian doctor prone to "evil experiments in the supernatural."

Laurence Housman - Maggie’s Bite: (Strange Ends and Discoveries: Tales of This World and the Next, 1948). When he was a boy of eleven, Maggie's brothers encouraged him to give her a kiss. Maggie didn't take to being slobbered over and furiously threatened "I'll bite your thumb! I'll bite your thumb!" Now fifty years later he revisits the old Welsh farm. Maggie is years dead but it seems she'll not lie down until her blood-lust is satisfied.

'Peter Dare' [M. P. Dare] - The Beam: (Unholy Relics, 1947). "Two days later, the priest came over again, heralding his arrival as before with many groans, stenches and explosions ..."

Mount Stanton, a Worcestershire mining village. Fourteen-year old Eileen Smith comes under attack from a poltergeist. Busy-body Gregory Wayne advises the removal of a stout oak beam running the length of her bedroom which was purchased from the local mill after its owner hung himself. Am unclear where the hideous, disembodied apelike arm fits into all this, but it's spectacular manifestation is a highlight.

[dem bones]

Elliott O’Donnell - The Mystery of Beechcroft Farm: (Pearson’s Magazine, 1932: Charles lloyd [ed.], Terrors, 1933). When Angela Vining fails to return home from visiting friends in London, her niece, our narrator, raises the alarm. Several railway staff vouch for Mrs. Vining boarding the Rugby-bound train, and at least two eyewitnesses claim to have seen her climbing into neighbour Miss Kranz's car at the station. The niece and her maid pay Mrs. Kranz a visit. The hospitable young Austrian denies seeing the girl's aunt, though the missing woman's rain-mac flapping on a coat-stand and a knife floating from the kitchen drawer suggests otherwise. When the headless ghost of the missing woman flounces downstairs there can be little doubt of foul play, but the police find no material evidence to support a prosecution.

Ambrose Bierce - A Fruitless Assignment: (Current Literature, July, 1889). Henry Saylor, a journalist on the Cincinnati Commercial, is tasked by his editor to spend a night at a vacant property on Vine Street which is widely held to be haunted. The singularly imperturbable Saylor samples all the wild phenomena the Roscoe house has to offer - culminating in a mob of spectral lunatics playing football with a woman's severed head - but is too much the cold fish to find the experience newsworthy.

Seabury Quinn - The Poltergeist: (Weird Tales, Oct 1927). An occult adventure of Jules de Grandin - an old-fashioned ghost-tale, with an unusual twist. Evidently a favourite of the editor who had included it in the previous year's Supernatural Sleuths.

E. F. Benson - Thursday Evenings: (Pears’ Annual, 1920: More Spook Stories, 1934). Nothing must be allowed to prevent Mrs. Wallace hosting her famous Thursday evening conversaziones promoting 'the Golden Age of Victorian Art.' On her death, the house is bought by musical composer Humphrey Lodge and his wife, Julia, the Cubist portrait painter, or, as Mrs. Wallace might have put it, purveyors of modern rubbish. The battle lines are drawn.

[dem bones]

Lord Lytton [Edward Bulwer-Lytton] - The Haunted and the Haunters: Or, the House and the Brain: (Blackwood's, August 1859). From the editor's introduction. "After its initial publication in Blackwood's, the story was shortened for publication in a book and has rarely been reprinted in full. The neglect is remedied here." In other words, this is the version where, visiting his London club, the narrator briefly meets with and is mesmerised by the centuries-old Black Magician responsible for the haunting.

The gist of it. The narrator learns of a haunted house in a dull but respectable thoroughfare off Oxford Street in London's West end. According to the landlord, no two people experience the exact same phenomena though the result is the same in every case. All tenants quit the house within three nights, citing unspeakable horrors, never daring to return.

The narrator and his plucky young servant, who have long wished to spend a night in a house of such frightening reputation, make the necessary arrangements. They are not to be disappointed. The premises are indeed comprehensively haunted. Eerie whispering on the stairs. Phantom footprints advance through the dust. A disembodied female hand clutches love letters. A room is lit by flickering eyes minus a face, make that body. "Run - run! It is after me!" screams the servant as he bolts downstairs and out the door. The next we hear of him, he's living with his brother in Australia. Narrator's bull-terrier dies foaming at the mouth, its neck broken. Still our man holds his nerve. Now the ghosts take more substantial form. A spectre in nineteenth century dress runs his phantom sword through the breast of elaborately costumed woman. A ghastly drowned man takes a bow. We may or may not catch sight of a murdered daftie boy.

It is over with the dawn.

On the narrator's advice, the landlord has the worst-affected room demolished. Its walls fall away to reveal a hidden chamber wherein they find clothes, papers and strange magical apparatus, most notably a saucer of magnetic liquid. A miniature portrait depicts a serpent-eyed fellow dressed in the fashion of a century long past. The landlord recognises the subject who, watching from the street below, takes a keen interest in the renovation work.


As with the recently revisited Machen horror classic, The Great God Pan, I first read this one in Best Ghost Stories (Hamlyn, 1977) - it really is a superb selection.

[dem bones]

Matt Fox (Weird Tales, July 1951).

Rudyard Kipling - Haunted Subalterns: (The Civil and Military Gazette, May 27, 1887). "It's either a first-class fraud for which someone ought to be killed or else you've offended one of those Indian Devils. It stands to reason that such a beastly country should be full of fiends of all sorts."

British soldiers Horrocks and Tesser are persecuted by a poltergeist prone to mindless vandalism and accomplished banjo picking. If you can envisage a supernatural episode of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum you're on the right lines.

Nigel Kneale - Minuke: (Tomato Cain, 1949). Shortly before World War II, the Pritchards move into their brand new home, a jerry-built bungalows on a coastal road. A combination of roaming furniture, pathological plumbing, collapsing chimneys, and dinners rotting even as they're served ensure the family don't stay long. Far the most spectacularly, maliciously haunted of the blighted properties to date.

August Derleth - A Knocking in the Wall: (Weird Tales, July 1951). No one could be inside the wall, yet the knocking came from there ... polite, diffident, but determined. Hobart Maclain, 50, corporate lawyer and world's least imaginative man, is forced to concede that the house he recently moved into is haunted. Maclain learns via automatic writing that the ghost is that of Mrs. Elizabeth Hopper, drugged and walled-up alive by want-away husband Kilvert in May 1933. The killer has since relocated to Canada. The persistent knocking gets on top of the lawyer but fortunately for him Julia Bennet, his faithful secretary, takes command of the situation. Miss Bennet unearths Mrs. Hopper's bones and frees her vengeful spirit to do what it must.

[dem bones]

"The Case of the Herrmann House created an International furore ..."

William F. Harvey - Miss Cornelius: (Beast With Five Fingers, 1928). When Science teacher Andrew Saxon correctly identifies a house-guest, Miss Cornelius, as the focal point for poltergeist activity at Meadowfield Terrace, she responds with fury. "You will know what it is to pray that your tongue might have withered at its roots rather than it should have said the things it has said tonight." So it proves when the phenomena transfers to his own home. A contrite Saxon offers an apology, but the twisted old fiend is enjoying herself too much to draw a halt to the persecution. No 'harmless mischief' about this spook. Among the objects hurled in the Saxon household are a bread-knife and tube of vitriol.

Edgar Wallace - The Death Room: (Cassell’s, March 1923). Detective Inspector John Gillette of Scotland Yard and Ella Martin - job title: pretty young reporter - team up to investigate a death in the famous "haunted room" at Tatton Corners. The sixteenth century country house is home to financier, Mr. Bonner, whose most recent guest, a Russian moneybags of dubious repute, proved no match for that which roams in the night! Despite a keen interest in spiritualism, Gillette rules out ghosts. As far as the DI is concerned, this is a clear case of murder, and he intends to collar the culprit!

Kurt Singer - Poltergeist!. "All the bottles in the house are blowing their tops!". 'Factual' piece charting the noisy career of 'Popper,' the Poltergeist of Seaford, Long Island, tormentor of the Herrmann family throughout 1958. Not the most dynamic note to end on (predictably, Haining's introduction is far the more entertaining of the two non-fiction entries), so we haven't.

[Swampirella]

Nov 4, 2019 9:59:54 GMT dem bones said:

"The Case of the Herrmann House created an International furore ..."

William F. Harvey - Miss Cornelius: (Beast With Five Fingers, 1928). When Science teacher Andrew Saxon correctly identifies a house-guest, Miss Cornelius, as the focal point for poltergeist activity at Meadowfield Terrace, she responds with fury. "You will know what it is to pray that your tongue might have withered at its roots rather than it should have said the things it has said tonight." So it proves when the phenomena transfers to his own home. A contrite Saxon offers an apology, but the twisted old fiend is enjoying herself too much to draw a halt to the persecution. No 'harmless mischief' about this spook. Among the objects hurled in the Saxon household are a bread-knife and tube of vitriol.

Edgar Wallace - The Death Room: (Cassell’s, March 1923). Detective Inspector John Gillette of Scotland Yard and Ella Martin - job title: pretty young reporter - team up to investigate a death in the famous "haunted room" at Tatton Corners. The sixteenth century country house is home to financier, Mr. Bonner, whose most recent guest, a Russian moneybags of dubious repute, proved no match for that which roams in the night! Despite a keen interest in spiritualism, Gillette rules out ghosts. As far as the DI is concerned, this is a clear case of murder, and he intends to collar the culprit!

Kurt Singer - Poltergeist!. "All the bottles in the house are blowing their tops!". 'Factual' piece charting the noisy career of 'Popper,' the Poltergeist of Seaford, Long Island, tormentor of the Herrmann family throughout 1958. Not the most dynamic note to end on (predictably, Haining's introduction is far the more entertaining of the two non-fiction entries), so we haven't.

Thanks for all the synopses, Dem! I'm looking forward to reading it via Arch*ve

[dem bones]

Nov 4, 2019 12:20:30 GMT Swampirella said:

Thanks for all the synopses, Dem! I'm looking forward to reading it via Arch*ve

Hope you get as big a kick from it as I have. For some reason I didn't have the highest hopes for Poltergeist!; shows you what I know. It's been another exciting read, judicious mix of fairly familiar tales by dependable old stalwarts - Bulwer-Lytton (overlong, but the ghosts are spectacular), EFB (in light-hearted mood), Harvey (the complete opposite) - augmented by lesser known sparklers courtesy of Charles Duff, Derleth, Elliott O'Donnell, and;

Hannes Bok

Aug 6, 2012 20:28:45 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Mary Elizabeth Counselman
Counselman wrote 30 stories for WT, so there are plenty of options here. Many, but not all, are collected in the various editions of Half in Shadow. My personal favorite among the ones I've read is Parasite Mansion (1942), a poltergeist tale that emphasizes the scares more than most of her work.

Mary Elizabeth Counselman - Parasite Mansion: (Weird Tales, Jan. 1942). A Curse - Vicious, Soul Destroying - Was Upon the Beautiful Old House. Marcia Trent, 26, a student in abnormal psychology, crashes her car when a disturbed young man with a hunting rifle takes a pot-shot as she's driving through the Alabama mountains. On recovering consciousness, Marcia finds herself laid up in bed at an eerie old farmhouse, a giant of a man tending her wounds as a mummy-like crone cackles maliciously from a chair. The good neighbour is Victor Mason, a qualified doctor who gave up his practice to care for his little brother, Renny, and kid sister, Lollie. Renny, the youthful sniper, is still bent on killing Marcia, but Lollie, sixteen and one of life's innocents, realises the truth; the pretty lady is the kind fairy. As if to prove the girl correct, Marcia gifts her a sparkling bracelet ... which, once handed over, goes hurtling across the room! Gran finds this hilarious, even more-so when angry welts appear on Lollie's skin.

Later, when they take dinner, Lollie comes under almost constant attack from unseen forces. A distraught Victor explains: "That's the shadow on our house. For three generations we've lived with this, plagued by - something that science declares non-existent."

Now the stranger is in on the family secret, the Masons, fearful that Lollie will be committed to an institution should the authorities learn of her condition, can't afford to let her leave. Her one hope of freedom is to end the haunting, and Marcia believes that, with Victor's help, she may be capable of doing so. If her theory is correct, the "poltergeist" is a ruse, a convenient decoy fabricated by the real cause of the Mason family's misery: a vindictive fiend with telekinetic powers to rival those of Carrie White.