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Post by dem bones on Apr 21, 2021 20:00:46 GMT
Mediums, Table-rappers, spiritualists & Co Current book on the go is Nigel Pearsall's splendid The Table Rappers (review ASAP - I hope) and his off the cuff remark to the effect that Spiritualist movement hadn't inspired any particularly great ghost stories got me to wondering. Didn't take hardly any effort to come up with this listing of relevent titles, and I'll bet there are loads more - EFB must have written a few (isn't there a seance scene in Mrs Amworth?) and I'm sure Ramsey's had more than one, so please add! Lettice Galbraith - In the Séance Room: ( New Ghost Stories, 1893: The Shadow on the Blind & Others, 2007). Christopher Blayre - The Thing That Smelt: ( The Purple Sapphire & Other Posthumous Papers, 1921) E. F. Benson - Mr. Tilly’s Séance: ( Munsey’s Magazine, Dec 1922: Visible and Invisible, 1923, & Co.) Agatha Christie - The Last Séance: ( Ghost Stories, Nov. 1926, as The Woman Who Stole a Ghost: The Hound of Death, 1933: Van Thal [ed.], Pan Horror 2, 1960, & Co.) Olga L. Rosmanith - Séance: ( Strange Stories, #8. Apr. 1940) Robert Bloch - Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper: ( Weird Tales, July 1943: Allan Barnard [ed.], The Harlot Killer, & Co). Robert Bloch - The Indian Spirit Guide: ( Weird Tales, Nov. 1948: The Living Demons, 1967). Sydney J. Bounds - Terror Stalks The Seance Room: ( Suspense Stories #2, Sept. 1954: Time For Murder, 2012) R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Gatecrasher: ( The Unbidden, 1971) R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Elemental: ( The Elemental, 1974) David Halliwell - Meriel, The Ghost Girl: ( Irene Shubik (ed.) - The Mind Beyond, 1976) Ramsey Campbell - Dead Letters: (Charles L. Grant, Shadows, 1979: UK, Shadows II). R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Growth: (Mary Danby [ed], Fontana Horror, 15, 1982) Rebecca Bradley – Tea Leaves: ( Pan Horror 28, 1987) Sydney J. Bounds - Second Victim: (Philip Harbottle (ed.) - Fantasy Adventures # 13, 2008). |
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 21, 2021 22:45:39 GMT
Mediums, Table-rappers, spiritualists & Co Current book on the go is Nigel Pearsall's splendid The Table Rappers (review ASAP - I hope) and his off the cuff remark to the effect that Spiritualist movement hadn't inspired any particularly great ghost stories got me to wondering. Didn't take hardly any effort to come up with this listing of relevent titles, and I'll bet there are loads more - EFB must have written a few (isn't there a seance scene in Mrs Amworth?) and I'm sure Ramsey's had more than one, so please add! I've got/read The Table-Rappers (but it's by Ronald Pearsall), though I don't remember much about it now other than that I enjoyed it. There's a couple of EF Benson stories featuring seance action I can think of: The Thing in the Hall (from The Room in the Tower & Other Stories, 1912) and Inscrutable Decrees (from Visible & Invisible, 1923). Then there's the Arthur Conan Doyle classic with the you-know-what in it, Playing With Fire ( The Strand Magazine, March 1900). A more recent one is And The Dead Shall Speak by David Williamson in The Eleventh Black Book of Horror (ed. Charles Black, 2015). |
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Post by humgoo on Apr 22, 2021 15:28:54 GMT
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Apr 22, 2021 15:44:48 GMT
This might be my favorite séance story and my favorite Priestley story. |
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Post by dem bones on Apr 22, 2021 16:50:35 GMT
I've got/read The Table-Rappers (but it's by Ronald Pearsall), though I don't remember much about it now other than that I enjoyed it. Goddamn it, Ronald Pearsall - where the hell did I get bloody "Nigel" from? Anyway, being a fan of his Nights Dark Angels which, for all it's head shaking and solemn "this must never happen again" posturing, is essentially a gleeful wallow in all things Nineteenth century sadism, Selwynism, misery, vice and hypocrisy, I was excited to land a copy of his Collapse of the Stout Party, a study in 19th Century humour, only to grow bored stupid of the subject after thirty or so mirth-free pages and pass it on to the Little Free Library. Happily, to date The Table-Rappers has proved of infinitely greater interest (it is also a lot funnier). Will try provide some kind of 'commentary' at a later date. Ronald Pearsall - The Table-Rappers (Book Club, 1975; originally Michael Joseph, 1972). Introduction
Mesmerism and the Growth of Spiritualism
Mesmerism
The Birth of Spiritualism
Table-Rapping
Seance
The Appeal of Spiritualism
D. D. Home's Gift
The Technique of Spiritualism
Seance Phenomena
Materialisations
Spirit Writing and Drawing
Spirit Photography
Clairvoyance
The Tearing of the Veil
Hallucinations
Collective Hallucinations
The Haunted Situation
The Haunters
Poltergeists
The Walking Dead
Beyond the Veil
The Moment of Truth
Family reunion
Theosophy; The Break-away Movement
The Spirit of Enquiry
The Scientific Case
A Personal Assessment
Bibliography
References
IndexBlurb: Many people still believe in ghosts. As Dr Johnson said, 'All argument is against it, but all belief is for it'. The Victorian age was the most haunted of them all. At dark seances spectators goggled at spirit hands descending from above, and fondled ‘spirits’ who had coyly emerged from cabinets. The efforts of science to explain spiritualism away were coldly ignored; the age of reason had done away with the supernatural. The Victorians wanted it back, and they made certain they got it. Astrology and fortune-telling enjoyed a boom, and in country districts the witches and the 'cunning men' plied their arts, selling and casting spells, and applying the evil eye.
THE TABLE-RAPPERS deals with all aspects of the Victorian occult — the credulity of believers certain that a thing of gauze and muslin was their dead aunt, the venom of the professional mediums who sabotaged each others’ seances, and the still unexplained phenomena — levitations, the ‘fire test’ where mediums handled red-hot coals, and strange materialisations where both mediums and spirits were in the room at the same time. The book deals with Victorian witchcraft, slumbering but not dead, occasionally erupting in violent fashion, with hauntings and vile apparitions with demonology and Satanism. It probes at the motivations of those who cultivated the weird and the uncanny, exposes the pretensions of those who sought to jump on the band-wagon, seeks to unravel the skeins of fact, fiction, and downright insanity.
Mr Pearsall uses a wealth of previously unpublished material, uncovers dark corners in the spiritualist movement — seances used as introducing-houses for vice, homosexuality, and drug-taking — and asks new questions about the plethora of hauntings: not whether ghosts were seen, but why they were seen.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 22, 2021 18:00:27 GMT
I've got The Table-Rappers as a Sutton Publishing paperback from 2004 -  I had read the post about Night's Black Angels but never made the connection. I know nothing about the author other than what I have just read in some posts here and what it says in his wikipedia entry (and the latter doesn't tell me much, other than he had published a lot more books than I expected, including a couple of Sphere horror novels). The back cover of this paperback says he was "a journalist, a professional musician and a lecturer for the British Council and the army", while Wikipedia doesn't mention any of those but says "he held other jobs as a shoe shop assistant, cinema manager and store detective". He sounds like he might have been an interesting guy. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 22, 2021 19:05:46 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Apr 22, 2021 20:29:49 GMT
I think it's more likely because Mr. Pearsall's book is on a shelf directly above this screen, sat next to a copy of Nigel Cawthorne's The Sex Secrets of Old England (Piatkus, 2009). Exposure to all that perversion clearly got to me. I had read the post about Night's Dark Angels but never made the connection. I know nothing about the author other than what I have just read in posts here and what it says in his wikipedia entry (and the latter doesn't tell me much, other than he had published a lot more books than I expected, including a couple of Sphere horror novels). The back cover of this paperback says he was "a journalist, a professional musician and a lecturer for the British Council and the army", while Wikipedia doesn't mention any of those but says "he held other jobs as a shoe shop assistant, cinema manager and store detective". He sounds like he might have been an interesting guy. Justin reviews the Sphere novels, The Exorcism and The Possessed in Pulp Horror #1, doesn't seem to have got on with them at all, which isn't to say somebody else wouldn't. Both apparently concern fake mediums, and "at times Pearsall is too eager to rub our noses in the harsh reality of Victorian living conditions, especially in one scene when Marshall navigates stairs littered in human excrement as he visits a ravaged prostitute with no teeth and venereal disease." In other words, very Night's Dark Angels meet The Table-Rappers. Justin also mentions that Pearsall's non-fiction works include " Worm in the Bud (1969) a study of Victorian sexuality, which, apparently, Malcolm McLaren once tried to make into a musical and was serialised over four weeks in the salacious Sunday tabloid, The News of the World." From Night's Dark AngelsRonald Pearsall was born and educated in Birmingham and his first book, a paperback thriller, priced 8 d. was published when he was fifteen by a two-man firm in Chancery Lane, which subsequently went broke.
After service in the army, he studied at Birmingham College of Art before coming to London, playing the piano in dance bands, and working as a journalist. His first non-fiction book, a study of Victorian sexuality, Worm in the Bud, was published in 1969 and later appeared in paperback. He followed this with The Table-Rappers, an investigation of the Victorian occult, and three books on collecting Victoriana." |
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 22, 2021 20:41:03 GMT
Some snippets from Pearsall's obituary in The Guardian (21st Oct 2005) -
"Best known is his study of sex in Victorian society, The Worm in the Bud (1969). Reprinted in 2003, it was a pioneering work, the sometimes troubling material tackled with irrepressible cheerfulness. In the late 1970s punk maestro Malcolm McLaren was interested in producing a musical derived from the book, but it came to nothing.
Pearsall also wrote an important book on Victorian spiritualism, The Table Rappers (1972), reprinted 2004, and popular books on many other aspects of Victorian society and culture. These included Victorian Sheet Music Covers (1972); Victorian Popular Music (1973); Collapse of Stout Party: Victorian Wit and Humour (1975); Night's Black Angels: The Forms and Faces of Victorian Cruelty (1975); and Tell Me Pretty Maiden: The Victorian and Edwardian Nude (1981).
But Pearsall was no specialist. He considered himself a professional and would write about anything that was asked of him. His output (more than 60 books) included thrillers, comic books (Is That My Hook In Your Ear? 1966, on angling), children's books (under the name Ronald Rawlings), books on antiques (he contributed to many of the Connoisseur's Guides) and painting (he was also an artist), travel books, even pornography (under another pseudonym).
A rebel from the outset, he left school at 14. Two years later [in 1941] his thriller, The Scarlet Mask, was published. There followed an interlude in the army and a bewildering variety of jobs. He worked as an assistant in WH Smith and in a shoe shop, as a currency cashier in a travel agency, a hotel receptionist, insurance agent, cinema manager, and store detective. He moved to London in 1954, and in the late 1950s began to establish himself as a freelance writer. Meanwhile, he taught himself to play the piano and did the rounds with various dance bands in the early 1960s.
The success of The Worm in the Bud brought in some money and unexpected consequences. Parts of the book, suitably spiced up, were published in four weekly installments in The News of the World. The newspaper also financed a trip to Copenhagen, then the sex capital of Europe, so that Pearsall could obtain some more up-to-date experience."
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Post by dem bones on Apr 23, 2021 19:05:37 GMT
Arthur Conan Doyle - Playing With Fire: ( The Strand, March, 1900: illustration, Sidney Paget: Robert Aickman [ed.], 2nd Fonana Book of Great Ghost Stories, 1966, & Co.). Perhaps the most famous example this side of Agatha Christie's The Last Seance. Occult dabblers materialise a .... unicorn. Bron Fane [R. Lionel Fanthorpe] - The Seance: ( Supernatural Stories #14, Feb. 1958). The lights were dim, and the letters on the board spelt the name of one long dead . . .. Val Stearman first met La Noire. Read on the splendid peltorro.com archive. John Miller Gregory – Talking Glass: ( Ghost Stories, Apr. 1927: John Locke (ed.) – Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers: Vol1. 2010). Should imagine GS published several contenders - fiction, non fiction, and "non-fiction" - over it's brief but productive lifespan.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 25, 2021 12:12:15 GMT
"Best known is his study of sex in Victorian society, The Worm in the Bud (1969). Reprinted in 2003, it was a pioneering work, the sometimes troubling material tackled with irrepressible cheerfulness. In the late 1970s punk maestro Malcolm McLaren was interested in producing a musical derived from the book, but it came to nothing. Thanks for mentioning this! It came immediately on the list, alongside his Edwardian Life and Leisure. Both sound fascinating topics, and the Penguin edition of the first one looks nice. |
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Post by johnnymains on Apr 26, 2021 19:42:20 GMT
Catherine Lord - 'The Curious Story of Susan Styles: A Psychical Romance' (orig The Ludgate, March 1893, Our Lady of Hate, 2020)
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Post by dem bones on May 6, 2021 18:45:31 GMT
 C. C. Senf: ( Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). When Miggles, the Persian cat, confronts a demonically possessed oak table, there can only be one winner and one squashed, bloody pulp of a loser. Fiend-ridden furniture also guilty of wanton vandalism and murderous attacks on narrator Val, Yvonne and their guests. Ghost is that of the late Prof. William Percival, fanatical dabbler in table-turning, spiritualism and astral projection.  Hugh Rankin |
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Post by Dr Strange on May 7, 2021 11:49:49 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Jun 28, 2021 8:45:37 GMT
Kim Newman - Is There Anybody There?: (Stephen Jones [ed], Haunts, 2011: Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, 2019). Madam Irene, gifted nineteen-twenties medium, taps into twenty-first century dark web chatroom during a seance.
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