Victorian strangeness from Harmsworths, Strand, Cassells &Co

[dem bones]

Recently excavated a passage through to a shelf of evil smelling bound Victorian volumes procured aeons ago from the long shut Sunday indoor market on Cheshire Street, so might as well have a dip.

Nellie K. Blissett - The Stone Rider!: (Harmsworths July, 1898)

Max Cowper

Narrator Bazarac travels to Hungary to meet Count Siebach von Salitz, internationally famous for his uncanny powers of thought-reading and prophecy. The Count, who inherited the family Castle and vast funds on the tragic drowning of an elder brother, treats Bazarac to a guided tour of the property. His guest is curious as to why a particular alcove is curtained off. A family legend, explains the Count, rather irritably, as he sweeps aside the velvet to reveal a life-size white marble statue of a knight on horseback. Novel touch; the stone rider is decked out in full suit of armour. What's the story?

"Oh, there are lots of legends," answered Siebach, offhandedly. "One says that the Ritter von Salitz in the thirteenth century caused a statue of himself, on his favourite charger, to be set up in the courtyard of the castle, and when he took prisoners of war, he chained them to the Stone Rider and flogged them to death. When he was about sixty he married for the second time. His wife was very young and very beautiful, and had been betrothed to his eldest son, whom he hated, and banished from the castle. One day he found his son and his wife talking together in the forest. He seized them, had them lashed to the statue, and directed his men to flog them to death, whilst he himself stood by and derided them. However, that was the last atrocity he perpetrated, for he soon after went mad, and died. And his spirit is doomed to ride the stone horse for ever."

To prove he's not in the least superstitious, von Salitz approached the rider, lifts the visor of his helmet, and strikes the white face with a glove.

That night ....

[dem bones]

Walter D. Dobell - The Face at the Door: (Harmsworth, October 1898)

S. H. Vedder

John Barton is under the horrible delusion that he is haunted by an evil, dirty face, peering around the door of any and every room he happens to occupy. Marriage brings no relief - in fact, the situation worsens as now the apparition is fixated with his Russian bride. Mrs Barton, for her part, has every reason to be fearful of the apparent spectre, having wronged him terribly. Not sure why I skipped this one until now. Much nastier than expected. Should you wish to try it for yourself, here's Project Gutenberg to the rescue.

S. H. Vedder

[Michael Connolly]

While this is not Victorian, this is one of the illustrations by A.C. Michael for “The Room in the Tower” by E.F. Benson (Pall Mall Magazine, Jan, 1912), which I had never seen before.  It looks like it's the climax. 



I found out about it here: www.facebook.com/groups/2343022578/permalink/10159184504552579/

Why's he so worried? All she said was "Can I do you now, Sir?".

[dem bones]

Paul Hardy:

Mrs Edith Cuthell - A Horrible Honeymoon: (The Strand, Jan. 1896). "'Wah! wah!', she croaked. ''Beautiful? I will make you beautiful — I'll dim those beautiful eyes of yours."

Narrator and husband Jim, the assistant magistrate at Purgeepoor, spend their honeymoon at 'Heart's Delight,' the Maharajah's summer palace. One day into the marriage, Jim, a keen huntsman goes off gallivanting in the wood. By nightfall he has yet to return. His bride is awoken by knife-wielding, semi-mummified maniac who is evidently under delusion that the white Shahzadi has stolen her husband! The plucky Englishwoman runs screaming from the room and straight into the crocodile infested ornamental pond, though don't get your hopes up. "Very much of it's time" as in rabidly xenophobic.

Paul Hardy:

Warwick Goble:

The Countess of Munster - A Mysterious Experience: (The Strand, Jan. 1896). True story. The Countess, then aged seventeen, nightly dreams of "a nasty, malicious, wicked face" while touring Europe. In Naples, elder sister alerts her to a coach driver glaring up at their balcony - it is the man with the horrible features! Shortly afterward, they are introduced to the blighter at a party. He's a powerful Italian Duke, known to be in the market for an English wife. The Countess wisely pleads illness and requests immediate return to the hotel. Some years later they learn that the Duke, now dead, did indeed marry an English woman, whom he ill-treated.

[dem bones]

The Countess of Munster [Wilhelmina FitzClarence] - A True Ghost Story: (The Strand, July 1895)

Miss Florence K. Upton

"Some years ago, I became the object of the infatuated adoration of a person of my own sex." Miss L _________ plagued by appalling health, dies young and still madly in love with her best friend, the now married Countess. On the first anniversary of her death, she very briefly materialises in her beloved's bedroom before vanishing forever. So slight as to be plausible.

Miss Florence K. Upton

[dem bones]

W. H. Margetson

The Duke of Argyll, K.T. - Real Ghost Stories: (London Magazine, Nov. 1901). His lordship, a sceptic in matters supernatural, cocks a snook at habitual "spook seers", women who claim bedroom visits from spectral gallants and/ or phantom harpsichord players, superstitious household pets, and young people. Very jolly. Culminates in a faithful account of the legend of Ticonderoga. Six pages, an attractive illustration on each.

W. H. Margetson

[dem bones]

Anonymous - In a Haunted House: (Argosy, Dec. 1883).

Frank Dadd and R & E Taylor, presumably.

But at the lower end of the corridor, facing the door, I came upon two portraits in a double frame, placed quite apart from the rest, and utterly unlike them. A lovely woman attired in the garb of a nun, with sorrow and heart-break looking out from her beautiful dark grey eyes. And a tall stalwart man of thirty, dark as a Spaniard, wearing the armour of a knight. His large dark eyes were bent upon the lady, his face was sad and stern, clouded with the disappointment of a restless and unsatisfied heart. On a double shield above the portraits were carved the names, “Sir Raphael and Lady Aloysia Saxon." While a single shield below the frame bore, in raised black letters, the strange and terrible legend:

"DOOMED, BUT TOGETHER"

Kate, Hilda and their brother, Gervase, answer Sir Rufus Saxon's request for person or persons to sit the Glass House, Dulworth in Midlandshire for three months while he travels Europe. A country house, rent free? There simply has to be a catch! And there is; several respondents to Sir Rufus's advertisement have already be driven from the property by it's ghosts in residence. Will the three young people fare better?

[andydecker]

These illustrations are so beautiful. To think that these were just nothing special at the time. Thanks, Dem.

[dem bones]

C. Shepperson

Katharine Tynan - The Picture on the Wall: (English Illustrated Magazine, Nov., 1895). Geoffrey Annesley and Millicent Grey are passionately in love, but whenever he raises the subject of matrimony she changes the subject. Fearful of losing him, Millicent reluctantly agrees to introduce him to the family at their mansion in the Northumberland Woods. It's a horrible weekend. When Sir Ronald Grey, a cheerless, charmless soul, callously allocates his prospective son-in-law the room with a haunted portrait of an insane cavalier, we are hopeful of a thoroughly miserable ending. Will M. Tynan deliver?. As revived by Montague Summers in Victorian Ghost Stories (1933).

Alan Wright

Anon - The Torture of the Mirror: (The Strand, June 1897). Fiendish as any Devil, the tribunal of inquisition condemn a hapless prisoner to their latest diabolical contraption. "During the night the walls, roof and floor of my cell had been changed for mirrors of the same size. Even the places where the door and window had been were now glass." A day of shrinking from the glare of a thousand reflections of himself unhinges our man to the point of insanity - but worse is to come!

Tidy set up, fetching illo's, dreadful ending.

Alan Wright

[dem bones]

Irving Montagu

Irving Montagu - Ghosts: (The Strand, Dec 1891). A light-hearted compendium of the author's favourite ghost legends. Includes the skeleton horseman of Hainault drowned in a failed attempt at rescuing his ladylove from a swamp; the lovers reunited on the scaffold; the clergyman's exorcism of the phantom skinflint of Rosewarne Hall; and - the pick of the bunch, to my way of thinking - a spectre bridegroom for Nancy Trenoweth!