Joan Passey [ed.] - Cornish Horrors

[dem bones]

Joan Passey [ed.] - Cornish Horrors: Tales From The Land's End (British Library, July 2021)

Mauricio Villamayor

Joan Massey - Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe - Ligeia
Anonymous - My Father's Secret
Robert Stephen Hawker - Cruel Coppinger
Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Colonel Benyon's Entanglement
M.H. - The Phantom Hare
Clara Venn - Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House
Mary E. Penn - In the Mist
Mrs. H.L. Cox - The Baronet's Craze
Bram Stoker - The Coming of Abel Behenna
Arthur Quiller-Couch - The Roll-Call of the Reef
Elliot O'Donnell - The Haunted Spinney
E.M. Bray - A Ghostly Visitation
F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
F. Tennyson Jesse - The Mask

Blurb:

A mariner inherits a skull that screams incessantly along with the roar of the sea; a phantom hare stalks the moors to deliver justice for a crime long dead; a man witnesses a murder in the woods near St. Ives, only to wonder whether it was he himself who committed the crime.
Offering a bounty of lost or forgotten strange and Gothic tales set in Cornwall, Cornish Horrors explores the rich folklore and traditions of the region in a journey through local mythology, mines, shipwrecks, the emergence of the railway and the rise of tourism.
With stories by Gothic luminaries such as Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe, this new collection also features chilling yarns of the haunted peninsula penned by a host of underappreciated writers from the past two centuries.
JOAN PASSEY is a lecturer at the University of Bristol specialising in transhistorical Gothic fiction. She is the author of the forthcoming book Cornish Gothic (University of Wales Press) and co-founder of the Haunted Shores research network. She has presented her research on BBC Radio 4 and for Curzon Cinemas nationwide.

At 384 pages, the largest of the 'Tales of the Weirds' I've seen to date. Very pleased that it revives a few unfamiliar tiles.

Anonymous - My Father's Secret: (All the Year Round, 9 March 1861). A boy grows up in fear that he may be a werewolf - why else would his neurotic father be both cold and overprotective toward him? The truth is revealed when the house is disturbed by horrible shrieks on consecutive nights and the child receives a terrifying visitor at his bedside — a haggard woman in loose, shapeless gown, massaging his throat before frantically washing her hands at the sink. What can it all mean? Supremely overwrought grisly Victorian melodrama is what!

Robert Stephen Hawker - Cruel Coppinger: (All the Year Round, 15 Dec., 1886). By the author of the oft-anthologised The Botathen Ghost'. Sadistic exploits of a Danish pirate, wrecker and murder devil who washes ashore off the Harty Pool during a storm which claims the lives of his crew. Cruel Coppinger begins life in Cornwall as he means to go on, manhandling the first young woman to catch his eye (he and miss Dinah Hamlyn are married within a week), forming a gang from the district's most psychotic cut-throats and criminals to wage bloody war on the days Customs & Excise men/ anyone he doesn't like the look of, until; "No revenue officers durst exercise vigilance west of the Tamar; and to put an end to all such surveillance at once, it was well known that one of the 'Cruel' gang had chopped off a gauger's head on the gunwale of a boat, and carried the body off to sea." Coppinger eventually takes his leave of the village in as spectacular fashion as he arrived.

[Dr Strange]

I didn't get on too good with this one. And there seems to have been a printing error with "Colonel Benyon's Entanglement", where the ending is missing.

[dem bones]

Clara Venn - Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House: (St. James's Magazine, Dec. 1878) Pampered twin sisters Fanny and Emmie spend a no mod cons Christmas holiday at 400-year-old Waddonscombe manor, Nectansham, as guests of a school chum's family. The girls excitedly ask if there is a ghost, but the hostess dashes their hopes. Best she can do is bore us all rigid with an account of a dreary haunting she paid ear-witness to at a previous residence. Another forgotten ghost story better left undisturbed.

E. M. Bray - A Ghostly Visitation: A True Incident: (The Sphere, 23 Nov. 1907). Guest at Cornish hotel is given a choice of bedrooms; that on the ground floor is pokey and "miserable", upstairs spacious and much better furnished. Landlady seems miffed when narrator opts for the former, being too lazy to climb stairs. That night she is visited by the unquiet spirit of a tall, dark handsome woman in full mourning regalia who seeks release. A brief prayers does the trick. Grateful ghost is carried off across the sky in the arms of a giant figure.

[dem bones]

M. H. - The Phantom Hare: (Argosy, May 1879). Ruined by a cruel rake, Miss Agnes "Beauty" Garth, eighteen, the darling of Penryn, ends her life in the swamp. Now handsome Hubert Arlegh is back to cast a lascivious eye over the remaining local talent. Arlegh's amorous plans are thwarted by the ghost of his victim, for, as local folklore has it; "When a young girl gets treated in that way and dies of it, she comes back in the form of a white hare, whenever his own death shall be nigh at hand, comes back in love by to give him warning of it." Arlegh sinks to his ghastly doom while surveyors are dredging the marshland he has just bought for a nominal fee.

As resurrected by R. Chetwynd Hayes in his very first anthology, Cornish Tales of Terror, half a century ago (!), not that I remembered anything about it. Typical of the period, long-winded, but a whole lot more fun than the dire Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House.

[helrunar]

I remember reading that story in Cornish Tales of Terror. Good yarn with an interesting folkloric element.

I know you are well aware of this, Dem, and that I am stating the obvious, but if one does not like long-winded prose, it's best to steer clear of Victoriana (and Edwardiana, for that matter).

H.

[dem bones]

Favourite of the stories new to me.

F. Tennyson Jesse - The Mask: (English Review, Jan 1912: Beggars on Horseback, 1915). "A red bridal, lass, a red bridal!" Vashti Bath could have her choice of eligible bachelors among the small Perran-an-zenna mining community. She eventually settles on James Glasson, a humorless, solitary soul who is, nonetheless smitten by her good looks same as every other guy. Disappointed suitor Willie Strick, a handsome, younger fellow, threatens to leave Cornwall to return only when he's made his fortune, but never gets around to it. Vashti soon grows to regret her choice, the more-so when husband loses an eye and much of his face in an explosion. Vashti surprises her critics by nursing James to health in the manner of the most dutiful, loving wife, even stitching him a mask from off-cuts of her finest black silk. Then she takes up with Willie behind his back. Events move toward a grim conclusion at the disused Wheal Zenna mine shaft.