Index to 'Ghost Stories' magazine

[dem]

C. F. Cazedessur jnr (ed.) - Ghost Stories (Opar Press, 1973)

C. F. Cazedessur jnr - Introduction: Stories Of Ghosts
James Seiger - Ghost Stories: Index By Author
Sam Moskowitz - Neglected Repository Of Supernatural Fiction

The Editor - This World And The Next (editorial, Ghost Stories, July 1931)
James Taverer (Robert E. Howard) - The Apparition In The Prize Ring (Ghost Stories, April 1929) [introduced by Glenn Lord]
Noble Forrest - The Ghost Of The Clergyman's Wife (Ghost Stories, April 1929)

The brainchild of 'health crusader' and fabulously successful pulp magazine publisher Bernarr Macfadden (True Detective, True Story, True Romances, Physical Cultureetc, Ghost Stories, launched in July 1926 survived six different editors and 64 issues before bowing out in January 1932. It's stock in trade was the purportedly 'true' supernatural encounter. The Apparition In The Prize Ring for examples, comes complete with the byline, "Was it true? Did he really receive uncanny aid? Read the facts!" while readers of Noble Forrest's The Ghost Of The Clergyman's Wife were reassured "This is an absolutely true story. The author is a county health officer in the State of Virginia"! Other highly credible sources include such luminaries as the Reverend Cowley Cowles (My Wreath Of Death, Nov. 1927) and Lieutenant 'Pinky' Martin.

Ghost Stories also featured a generous selection of classic reprints from Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, H. G. Wells, A. M Burrage, Algernon Blackwood (whose The Woman's Ghost Story became The Specter Who Asked For A Kiss for the occasion), Wilkie Collins & Co., offset with the occasional originals from E. F. Benson (The Flint Knife, Dark And Nameless) and various Weird Tales/ Strange Tales heavyweights including Hugh B. Cave, Paul Ernst, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard (pseudonymously), Victor Rousseau and Bassett 'brain transplants' Morgan (The Punishment of Barney Muldoon, Oct. 1928). Even Lon Chaney seems to have been persuaded to join in, nominating H. G. Wells' Pollock And The Porrah Man as 'My Favourite Ghost Story'. Other slightly less familiar names to see their work published in the magazine include Archie Binns, Muriel C. Eddy (friend of Lovecraft and wife of Clifford M. of The Loved Dead notoriety), Russian-born phantom-fighter Achmed Mysteries Of Asia Abdullah, and Urann Thayer whose The White Domino is regarded as something of a minor vampire classic.

James Taverer (Robert E. Howard) - The Apparition In The Prize Ring: Did a ghost help with this savage fight? Ask Ace Jessell 'John Taverel', we're told, is "one of the greatest managers in the history of the fight game", which certainly adds an authentic touch to his account of Ace Jessell's unlikely triumph over the undefeated 'Mankiller' Gomez, "Son of the Black Jungle .... His soul was abysmal. He was ape-like, primordial - the very spirit of the morass of barbarism from which mankind has so tortuously climbed, and toward which men look with so much superstition ...." The plucky Ace believes he owes victory to the intervention of his hero, Tom Molyneaux, the first negro champion of America, but .... how can that be? Molyneaux died a hundred years ago!

[dem]

Mike Ashley (ed.) - When Spirits Talk: The True Story Of Ghost Stories (GSS Special Booklet #2, 1990)

Alan Hunter

Mike Ashley - Introduction: What The Spirits Told

Victor Rousseau - Child Or Demon: Which?
Urann Thayer - A Soul With Two Bodies

Good as both stories are (will come back to them later), the ever-dependable Mike Ashley's impeccably researched introductory essay is the highlight of this, the second of the five pre-Rodens Ghost Story Society 'special booklets'.

First some corrections to above. Forget all that rubbish i said about Benson's contributions being original to the magazine because they'd already seen UK publication in Hutchinson Story Magazine. Also, far from being a 'classic reprint', Agatha Christie's The Woman Who Stole A Ghost (Nov. 1926), later retitled The Last Séance, is easily the most famous story to make its début in Ghost Stories.

H. P. Lovecraft's verdict, as expressed in a letter to Frank Belknap Long in October 1926, was an uncompromising "You will find it quite hopeless - even worse than Weird Tales. Indeed, it's chief merit is to me the proof it affords that a magazine can be worse than brother Farnie's." Perhaps FBL agreed as his first appearance in Ghost Stories (The Man Who Died Twice, Jan. 1927) was also his last.

Weird & shudder pulp legend Hugh B. Cave was present and correct with The Affair Of The Clutching Hand (May 1931) and The Strange Case Of Number 7 (Jan. 1931), both of them revived in the career-spanning Murgunstruum.

Amazingly Ghost Stories was one of few weird pulps August Derleth was unable to crack, and not through any lack of trying. The Panelled Room - to my mind, one of his very best - was turned down as "not quite up to the standard we have set", as was, among others, a version of The Shadow On The Sky, later to open his Not Long For This World. Although Robert E. Howard made the cut with his pseudonymous phantom boxer yarn, he too accumulated his fair share of rejection slips - Out Of The Deep would wait three decades before it saw posthumous publication in Robert A. W. Lowndres' Magazine Of Horror # 18 (Nov 1967).

R. A. W. L. had been a fan of Ghost Stories in his youth, and revived the occasional fondly remembered title from its pages during his legendary stint at Health Knowledge/ Acme Publications. Victor Rousseau's The Blackest Magic Of All (July 1928) became Medium For Justice in Startling Mystery Stories #4 (Spring, 1967), and Urann Thayer's vampire in The White Domino returned from the grave for #14 (Winter, 1969). Over at companion title Magazine Of Horror, Nell Kay's The Haunted Taxi-Ride (July 1928) reappeared in #20 (March 1968) as The Voice (Kurt Singer later swiped it - along with much else from MOH - for his Tales Of The Uncanny).

Christine Campbell Thomson revived Edmund Snell's adorable The Black Spider (Jan. 1927) for Gruesome Cargoes, though Mike is of a mind that she discovered it in one of the Hutchinson publications.

Don't have a copy but Wildside press have published a facsimile copy of the June 1931 issue as part of their Pulp Classics series. By this stage Ghost Stories had sadly dropped the staged photographs used to add a touch of authenticity to it all, but otherwise, business as usual. you can read bits and bobs of it on googlebooks.

Pulp Classics: Ghost Stories, June 1931 (Wildside Press, 2004)

George Wren

The Editor - This World And The Next
How our magazine is the link between them
Donald Wylie - When Fear Rides
Unforgettable Horror follows these Riders of the Dead
Jack D'Arcy - Talisman Of Fate
What a difference when three wishes are reversed!
Louis Rice - Your Destiny In Your Scribble
The famous handwriting expert will read yours for you if you send it in
Stuart Palmer - Chicago's Flying Horror
Right under the noses of the Windy City police, too!
True Ghost Story Corner: Conducted by Hereward Carrington, Ph.D.
Taken from the daily life around us.
Arhur T. Joliffe - The Phantom Menace Of The Screen
El Toroso alias Magnus plans a release of Universal Evil!
Dr. Paul Bronson - There Is No Medicine For This
Remedies are in vain when lovers are parted forever.
Conrad Richie - The Toad Man Specter
Why did ether fumes always precede this hideous apparition?
Florence Campbell, M. A. - Find Your Life Numbers
Hers is Number 1. Watch for your own, if this is not it.
E. & H. Heron - Who Was The Strangler?
Something was at work in these three murders beyond human belief.
H. Thomson Rich - The House In The Fog
A whirlwind finish to a story that has shaken your very bones!
Stella King - Were You Born In June?
Your future according to the starry signs
Count Cagliostro - Spirit Tales
Proves again that wonders are everywhere for the seeking
Margaret Rowan - What Do Your Dreams Mean?
Hundreds of you have asked for this department - and here it is.
The Meeting Place
Many readers relate experiences in the psychic world.

Blurb:
The legendary pulp magazine Ghost Stories published an odd mix of supernatural fiction and “true tales” of the supernatural . . . though their “truth” was frequently in doubt, since they were penned by pulp fiction writers. (Even Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, wrote a “true tale” for Ghost Stories under a pseudonym.)

The June l93l issue features contributions from Conrad Richie (best known as the author of The Light In The Forest) and a story by E. & H. Heron (the pen name used by Mrs. Kenneth Prlchard and her son, Mr. Hesketh Prlchard) featuring their psychic detective, Flaxman Low.

[dem]

As threatened, illiterate ramblings on some hits and misses from Ghost Stories, starting with the two reprinted in Mike Ashley's booklet.

Victor Rousseau - Child Or Demon: Which?. (Oct. 1926). Yonkers, New York. Baby Robert is possessed by his aunt Emma Wishart, "a morbid, imaginative, embittered old maid". who died in the mistaken belief that, had it not been for her younger, far more attractive sister, Thyra, Richard Adrian would have taken her for his wife. The child becomes a hideously bloated energy vampire, feeding off its parents who Emma is sworn to destroy. Enter Dr. Martinus and his personal Dr. Watson, Eugene Branscombe, but can even their expertise save the day?

Urann Thayer - A Soul With Two Bodies: (Feb. 1928). Rousseau's story is wonderful, but this, the second story from the GSS booklet, taken on it's own bizarre terms, is .... incident packed. Great if slightly improbable ending, too. An American soldier fighting on the Italian front during WWI takes refuge for the night in what he takes to be a deserted château. He's not as alone as he thought. The owner, a sadistic Austrian Count, is in the process of molesting Myra the peasant girl and is not best pleased at being shot in the head. One day, he warns the soldier, you will return here to meet your doom.

After the war, a chain-smoking spectre torments the soldier via a series of mediums until, on a psychic plea for help from Myra, he returns to the château for a final confrontation. But the Count is a being of exceptional powers, including the ability to transfer his spirit into the bodies of the living. In this manner, he demonically possesses Myra's blind, crippled grandfather. As the soldier approaches the château, the old man comes hobbling relentlessly after him at phenomenal speed and soon has him bound and helpless! His only hope now is for Myra to save him before the Count can evict him from his own body.

E. F. Benson - The Flint Knife: (May 1930). Harry Pershore part-demolishes a walled section of his estate to create his very own secret garden. His friend, our narrator, warns against this, having identified a slab of black rock in the flowerbeds as an ancient sacrificial altar. Pershore persists regardless until sure enough, the new garden comes under siege from swarms of bloated flies, while a robed and hooded trespasser is forever lurking at the altar. When the plants inexplicably wither and die, Harry, suspecting vandalism, resolves to spend a night behind the enclosure and catch the culprit in the act.

Hugh B. Cave - The Affair Of The Clutching Hand: (May 1931). Surely as delightfully lunatic a story as HBC ever wrote - would even go so far as to say it's worthy of Morgan Bassett at her Island Of Doom best!

'The Turrets', West Sussex. Mad scientist Sir Gordon Null's obsession with the elixir of life is finally rewarded when he combines the secretions of a mad gorilla with a quantity of snake venom. Null invites Dr. Ronald Hale, his old friend from Cambridge days, to witness the results.

First he injects the docile family dog, who bolts from the lab with a terrible shriek.

Then he tries it on himself .....

In the dog's case, the serum kills the body but leaves the head horribly immortal and liable to tear to pieces anyone stupid enough to approach it. As to Sir Null, the title provides a clue as to the awful fate awaiting his housekeeper, beautiful daughter Margot and the inscrutable Oriental man-servant should he catch up with them!

Noble Forrest - The Ghost Of The Clergyman's Wife: (April 1929). A recently deceased mother returns to her son, telling him to keep up his studies and steer clear of disreputable companions. She also drops by on his father. Then she goes away again. Son wonders if the spectral presences who accompanied her were her two dead brothers. One of the 'true' stories, an incredibly dull one at that.

Ken Batten - The Ghost Car: (Oct. 1928). Spoilt Betsy B. leans on dad to buy her a Rolls Royce for her twenty-first birthday. Her delight turns to horror when the car does its best to collide with every on-coming vehicle, inexplicably stalls in the path of an oncoming train, and eventually swerves over an embankment, almost killing her. In her coma, Betsy witnesses the last moments of the previous owner. Once recovered, she and dad make a mercy dash to England to save an innocent man from serving a twenty year jail stretch for a murder he did not commit. Another of the 'true' ones (!), reprinted in 'William Patrick's Duel: Horror Stories of the Road .

Stephen Andrews- The Specter At The Feast: (Aug. 1928). Impoverished Italian student Novello is so grateful to his college chums that, when he's diagnosed with a terminal illness, he leaves his skeleton to them as a present (Prof. Kalin always wanted one for their studio). Novello was dating Pat Herron, the prettiest girl in the year, and, having no wish to sit with his bleached bones every day, she stays away from class. Harlan Ware, who was getting on swell with Pat until Novella enrolled, persuades her to accompany him to the end of term banquet. Pat's subsequent non-attendance so enrages Harlan that he throws a drink over his dead rival.

That night Harlan has a terrible dream of Pat, the skeleton sat beside her, losing control of her car on the way to the party, and crashing over a cliff .....

More to follow

[dem]

Not for nothing has Earle K. Bergey been hailed as "inventor of the brass brassière." (Fantastic Story Quarterly, Vol 1 No 3, Fall 1950)

Nell Kay - Our Haunted Taxi Ride (aka The Voice): (Ghost Stories, July, 1928). "On the banks of the Eiver, a Uttle east of the easterly line of Furman street, and between Pacific and Warren streets, as now laid out, was a knoll of land, where several hundred British soldiers and sailors were buried in regular rows. The heads of the westernmost row were exposed to the lashing of the waves of the river, by which means they were beaten off from the trunks ; and one of Mr. Cornell's negro men subsequently made a considerable amount of money by selling the teeth, taken from these heads, to the dentists of New-York city. This same burial-knoll, thus enriched, afterwards became Cornell's asparagus-bed, where he raised an excellent quality of that vegetable for the New York market. " - Gabriel Furman - Notes Geographical & Historical Relating To The Town Of Brooklyn And Long Island (1824)

"Come - water - help me - I can't find - water ..." Am wondering if this might qualify as borderline Jamesian pulp? It begins when Ella is disturbed by a series of nuisance phone calls which finally give way to a garbled plea for assistance. Across Manhattan, her husband Bob takes the same call in his office. The following day, while browsing a second-hand bookstall, the phantom voice insists that Ella procure a battered copy of Notes of a military reconnaissance, a book in which she has not the least interest. Hidden at back of this mouldering volume, a crumpled map of a Brooklyn long gone. Bob, intrigued, calls a taxi anyway. The driver, dark, muffled, and manacled at the wrists, doesn't wait for directions but sets off at breakneck speed, driving straight through oncoming vehicles, until they reach a street of festering slums. With no better ideas, they follow the driver inside one of the buildings to find the hall piled high with skeletons, each of them missing their skull. On to the next room and:

"Bob," I asked. "Do you think those skulls were the ones which had been severed from those bodies in the hall, and the dark figure we saw was the murderer?"

As they're studying the skulls, wondering what on earth happened to the teeth, a young Lascar walks in, takes one look at them and runs off screaming into the night! What on earth is going on?

Now, i'd be the first to admit, this does not sound much like it has anything in common with, say Arthur Gray, E. G. Swain or, come to that, Ramsey Campbell, but if Seabury Quinn is worthy his place in the James Gang for Bride Of Dewer, Tenants Of Broussac and The Chapel of Mystic Horror, then Nell Kay can sneak in with The Voice. The supernatural puzzle is only solved when the dogged pair consult copies of Furman's Notes Geographical & Historical Relating To The Town Of Brooklyn And Long Island and Stephen M Ostrander, M. A.,'s A History Of The City Of Brooklyn & King's County (1894).

Robert A. W. Lowndres reprinted this - as The Voice - in Magazine of Horror #20 (March 1968)

Urann Thayer - The White Domino: (July 1928): A macabre little ghost-cum-vampire gem which begins and ends with a man in the condemned cell awaiting his date with Madame Guillotine." ....The windows of the neighbouring buildings are crowded with drunken, laughing, singing men and women peering out and waiting for the morbid pleasure of my decapitation." Robert Merrill, Medical School graduate treats himself to that long promised visit to the Paris morgue a few days before carnival in July 1927. He is captivated by the corpse of "the most exquisite woman I have ever seen" laid out on a slab, with only two bruises on her throat to mar her beauty. Her eyelids flicker. Merrill screams to the keeper "Good grief man! The girl isn't dead!", but the man tells him he's imagining things. She was strangled in Pere Lachaise the previous night and has already been examined by a doctor. Have they caught the killer? "Not yet, but we will. French justice moves very slowly, but it gets its man every time."

At carnival that night, Merrill meets a strangely dressed girl who conceals her identity behind a white domino and, being the worse for drink, he declares his undying love and "I would die for one kiss from those beautiful lips!" She informs him that it is his decision, but if, once they've left the house, he then refuses to kiss her, he will die anyway. She leads him to a damp Pere Lachaise vault and, once inside, all that Gallic reserve goes right out the window. She presses her hard, cold breasts against him and offers her dead, frozen mouth. As he struggles to be free of the sex-crazed corpse, her mask slips aside to reveal ....

Louis Rice - Your Destiny In Your Scribble: (Ghost Stories, June 1931). If you were the kind of schoolkid who carved swastika's on his or her desk with a compass, fear not - you were simply expressing "the home desire, the friendship desire and the love of a peaceful life". More startling revelations from the "Famous American Handwriting Expert."

[andydecker]

Mar 20, 2012 8:39:24 GMT dem said:

Not for nothing hasEarle K. Bergey been hailed as "inventor of the brass brassière." (Fantastic Story Quarterly, Vol 1 No 3, Fall 1950)

But is the rest body-painting or spandex?

[cauldronbrewer]

John Locke (ed.) – Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers: Volume 1 (Off-Trail Publications, 2010)

The History of GHOST STORIES
The Editors
Editor and Word-Rate Data
Statistics
The Authors (Volume 1)
GHOST STORIES ad – June 1926
George William Wilder – In Touch with the Unknown (July 1926)
$10,000 for a Ghost – July 1926
Arnold Fountain (Fulton Oursler) – He Fell in Love with a Ghost (July 1926)
Walter W. Liggett – The White Seal of Avalak (July 1926)
T. Howard Kelly – The Ha’nts of Amelia Island (Aug. 1926)
Muriel E. Eddy – True Ghost Experiences: The Beheaded Bride (Sept. 1926)
W. Adolphe Roberts (as told by Hugh Docre Purcell) – Marked with the Curse of Obi (Dec. 1926)
GHOST STORIES ad – Jan. 1927
Edmund Snell – The Black Spider (Jan. 1927)
John Miller Gregory – Talking Glass (Apr. 1927)
Nictzin Dyalhis (as told by Eric Marston) – He Refused to Stay Dead (May 1927)
Ethel Watts Mumford – The Specter in Red (June 1927)
Lilith Shell (as told by Owen Bennett) – Who Am I? (June 1927)
C. B. Bigelow – The Ghost Light (Sept. 1927)
Harvey S. Cottrell (Harold Standish Corbin; as told by Will Winship Arnold) – Sardonic Laughter (Nov. 1927)
Guy Fowler – A Ghost from the Flying Circus (Jan. 1928)
George Malherbe (Gordon Malherbe Hillman) – Dead Man’s Vengeance (March 1928)
Constance Bross Eckley – A Ferryman of Souls (May 1928)
Mont Hurst – The Wolf Man (July 1928)
Alan Forsyth (Leonard Cline) – Sweetheart of the Snows (Aug. 1928)
Robert W. Sneddon – Painted Upside Down (Sept. 1928)
Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni – The Green Monkey (Oct. 1928)

I was inspired by this thread and a post by Douglas A. Anderson on Wormwoodiana to buy both volumes of Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers (I just started reading the second volume; details to follow). Editor Locke has done an excellent job on the set, including extensive research on the magazine's history. The authors are a fascinating bunch: the ones from the first volume include a man convicted of manslaughter (Cline), a friend of H. P. Lovecraft (Eddy), a muckraker apparently murdered by mobsters (Liggett), the Italian-born poet laureate of Arkansas (Marinoni), and the bizarre (and bizarrely named) Nictzin Dyalhis of Weird Tales fame. Locke has also made the laudable decision to avoid selecting any stories included in Phantom Perfumes, Mike Ashley's previous anthology drawn from the magazine.

As for the stories themselves, they range from mediocre to solid. The highlights for me were Collins's Talking Glass, which makes good use of its vaudeville setting, and Cline's Sweetheart of the Snows, which features a snow elemental and is reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood's "The Glamour of the Snow." My next two favorites would probably be the ones by Sneddon (which is still no match for his original version of "On the Isle of Blue Men") and Marinoni. I wasn't impressed by Snell's The Black Spider, mentioned above, but maybe I was put off by the strong period racism as well as the seeming poor fit with the magazine's theme (it's more in the giant spider genre than the ghost genre). The Dyalhis tale is relatively subdued--and readable--compared to his flamboyantly awful WT stories.

Judging by Locke's notes, the editors had a bad habit of taking vivid titles and making them duller. For example, Cline's "Lady of Frozen Death" became "Sweetheart of the Snows." I also prefer the original title of Dyalhis's "He Refused to Stay Dead," which was "My Encounter with Osric, the Troll"; maybe that's just me, though.

[dem]

"Mediocre to solid" is spot on from those few ghost stories I've sampled to date. In case you're not aware, you can download a free pdf of the Jan. 1927 issue from The pulp Magazine Project. Does Mr. Locke reproduce the posed photographs? They were a big hit with me when I eventually got to see a copy.

[cauldronbrewer]

Aug 19, 2013 13:41:43 GMT dem said:

Does Mr. Locke reproduce the posed photographs? They were a big hit with me when i eventually got to see a copy.

Yes, the posed photographs are included in all of their strange, goofy glory. The one of Osric the Troll is a beauty.

The second volume also includes reproductions of the covers. Sadly, most of them are uninspired compared to the ones of, say, Weird Tales. The final two covers, done in Art Deco style, are the best.

[Craig Herbertson]

It would be worth it for the photos alone

[cauldronbrewer]

John Locke (ed.) – Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers: Volume 2 (Off-Trail Publications, 2010)

Introduction
The Authors (Volume 2)
Margaret Jackson (as told by Jane Hardin) – The Thing on the Roof (Dec. 1928)
Paul Ernst - A Crystal Gazer's Crime (June 1929)
Edwin A. Goewey (as told by James Halliday) - The Phantom of the Sawdust Ring (Oct. 1929)
Ghost Hour on the Radio (letter, Nov. 1929)
Perry Paul - The Thing in the Laboratory (June 1930)
Jack D'Arcy (D.L. Champion, as told by Robert Patten) - The Gospel of a Gangster's Ghost (Nov. 1930)
Douglas M. Dold - Prisoners of Fear (Feb. 1931)
Wilbert Wadleigh - The Prehistoric Phantom (Feb. 1931)
W.H.D. Bence - Midnight Sorcery (Apr. 1931)
Gordon Malherbe Hillman - The Thing That Limped (July 1931)
Stuart Palmer - White Witch of Stoningham (July 1931)
E.W. Hutter - Salt is Not for Slaves (Aug./Sept. 1931)
Edith Ross - Out of the Shadows of Madness (Aug./Sept. 1931)
Theodore Kuntz - Long Fingers (Oct./Nov. 1931)
George Tibbitts - Green Death (Dec. 1931/Jan. 1932)
Conrad Richter - Monster of the Dark Places (Dec. 1931/Jan. 1932)
The Artists
Cover Gallery

As with Volume 1, the author biographies provide some of the most interesting reading in Volume 2. This time around, they include pulp workhorses Champion and Ernst, novelist-turned-murderer Hillman, and the amazing Dold (a former doctor who went into fiction writing after losing his sight helping WWI refugees in a combat area). The revelation of the anthology, however, is the mysterious Tibbits, whose Green Death (which could have been called "The Green Lodge," as it reminds me of a certain H. R. Wakefield story) offers the sort of gung-ho pulp horrors that are missing from most of the other stories. Runner-up honors go to Palmer's tale. Somewhat to my amazement, Conrad Richter--who later wrote The Light in the Forest, which I found quite devastating as a kid--contributes a solid supernatural sleuth story set in a coal mine.

[cauldronbrewer]

Mike Ashley (ed.) – Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades: Memories of Ghost Stories Magazine (Ash-Tree Press, 2000)

Hugh B. Cave - Foreword: Looking Back
Mike Ashley - Introduction: Spectral Memories

Hugh B. Cave - The Affair of the Clutching Hand
Frank Belknap Long, Jr. - The Man Who Died Twice
J. Paul Suter - The Woman with Two Souls
Hughes Neupert - The Dead Who Know No Peace
Ethel Watts Mumford - Phantom Perfumes
Urann Thayer - A Soul with Two Bodies
Stuart Palmer - Seven Grey Wolves
Muriel Hunt - The Creature that Rose from the Sea
Victor Rousseau - The Angel of the Marne
H. Thompson Rich - The Thing that Came Home from the War
Bassett Morgan - The Punishment of Barney Muldoon
Sophie Wenzel Ellis - The Spirit in the Garden
W. R. Davis - The Room Behind Walls
Arthur T. Jolliffe - The Living Dead Man
Gordon Malherbe Hillman - Forgotten Harbor
Jack Bechdolt - Chained to a Bed of Roses
Conrad Richter - The Toad-Man Spectre

Appendix I: Checklist of Issues of Ghost Stories
Appendix II: Index of Contributors to Ghost Stories


This anthology is an excellent complement to John Locke's two-volume selection from Ghost Stories magazine. The stories in Phantom Perfumes are generally stronger than the ones Locke chose, but that's no slight to him as he deliberately avoided duplicating Ashley's selections. The highlight for me was:

Mar 15, 2012 5:51:18 GMT dem said:

Urann Thayer - A Soul With Two Bodies: (Feb. 1928). Rousseau's story is wonderful, but this, the second story from the GSS booklet, taken on it's own bizarre terms, is .... incident packed. Great if slightly improbable ending, too. An American soldier fighting on the Italian front during WWI takes refuge for the night in what he takes to be a deserted château. He's not as alone as he thought. The owner, a sadistic Austrian Count, is in the process of molesting Myra the peasant girl and is not best pleased at being shot in the head. One day, he warns the soldier, you will return here to meet your doom.

After the war, a chain-smoking spectre torments the soldier via a series of mediums until, on a psychic plea for help from Myra, he returns to the château for a final confrontation. But the Count is a being of exceptional powers, including the ability to transfer his spirit into the bodies of the living. In this manner, he demonically possesses Myra's blind, crippled grandfather. As the soldier approaches the château, the old man comes hobbling relentlessly after him at phenomenal speed and soon has him bound and helpless! His only hope now is for Myra to save him before the Count can evict him from his own body.

Much less restrained than the typical entry in the magazine, Thayer's tale has a bleak, doom-laden atmosphere that reminds me of Cornell Woolrich, "Donald Dale," and Hugh B. Cave. Speaking of Cave, he's on hand with both a story (described by Dem upthread) and a brief recollection of the magazine.

Ashley's introduction is characteristically engaging and informative. I suspect him of having a private joke by including "The Man Who Died Twice," "The Woman with Two Souls," and "A Soul with Two Bodies" all in one book. I also suspect him of being a dog lover given his choice of Palmer's "Seven Grey Wolves," a sentimental but well told tale of a loyal hound who returns from the grave to protect his people, as his favorite from the magazine.

As for rest of the contents, special mention is due to Morgan's wildly uncharacteristic story, which includes lots of Irish-American color and not a human/animal brain transplant in sight, and Richter's chronicle of supernatural sleuth Matson Bell (also featured in "Monster in the Dark Places," included in Locke's second volume), which suggests that he could have been a solid pulp writer if he hadn't wasted his talents on Pulitzer Prize-winning novels.

[dem]

The Ashley and the two volumes of Locke selections look brilliant. Seeing all those familiar weird pulp veterans among the Phantom Perfumes line-up gives the impression that Ghost Stories was some kind of Strange Tales/ Weird Tales hybrid, when, from my, admittedly very limited experience of the magazine, nothing could be further from the truth.

I've a morbid fascination with another 'true story' magazine from roughly the same period, Harold Hersey's Strange Suicides which, amazingly, survived two issues (January and February, 1933) before the editor realised the error of his ways. Galactic Central - which is where I learned of it's existence - reproduce both covers, one of which I've sampled and enlarged below.

[cauldronbrewer]

Sept 28, 2013 18:13:39 GMT dem said:

The Ashley and the two volumes of Locke selections look brilliant. Seeing all those familiar weird pulp veterans among the Phantom Perfumes line-up gives the impression that Ghost Stories was some kind of Strange Tales/ Weird Tales hybrid, when, from my, admittedly very limited experience of the magazine, nothing could be further from the truth.

Right, I suspect the pickings get mighty slim once you get past the stories that Ashley and Locke selected.

Sept 28, 2013 18:13:39 GMT dem said:

I've a morbid fascination with another 'true story' magazine from roughly the same period, Harold Hersey's Strange Suicides which, amazingly, survived two issues (January and February, 1933) before the editor realised the error of his ways. Galactic Central - which is where I learned of it's existence - reproduce both covers, one of which i've sampled and enlarged below.

There's bad taste, and then there's sublimely bad taste. I'd call this the latter.

[cauldronbrewer]

Aug 18, 2013 15:16:23 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

The authors are a fascinating bunch: the ones from the first volume include a man convicted of manslaughter (Cline), a friend of H. P. Lovecraft (Eddy), a muckraker apparently murdered by mobsters (Liggett), the Italian-born poet laureate of Arkansas (Marinoni), and the bizarre (and bizarrely named) Nictzin Dyalhis of Weird Tales fame. Locke has also made the laudable decision to avoid selecting any stories included in Phantom Perfumes, Mike Ashley's previous anthology drawn from the magazine.

As for the stories themselves, they range from mediocre to solid. The highlights for me were Collins's Talking Glass, which makes good use of its vaudeville setting, and Cline's Sweetheart of the Snows, which features a snow elemental and is reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood's "The Glamour of the Snow." My next two favorites would probably be the ones by Sneddon (which is still no match for his original version of "On the Isle of Blue Men") and Marinoni. I wasn't impressed by Snell's The Black Spider, mentioned above, but maybe I was put off by the strong period racism as well as the seeming poor fit with the magazine's theme (it's more in the giant spider genre than the ghost genre). The Dyalhis tale is relatively subdued--and readable--compared to his flamboyantly awful WT stories.

Judging by Locke's notes, the editors had a bad habit of taking vivid titles and making them duller. For example, Cline's "Lady of Frozen Death" became "Sweetheart of the Snows." I also prefer the original title of Dyalhis's "He Refused to Stay Dead," which was "My Encounter with Osric, the Troll"; maybe that's just me, though.

In addition to killing a man and writing "Sweetheart of the Snows," a.k.a. "Lady of Frozen Death," Leonard Cline wrote a 1927 novel, Dark Chamber (originally published by Viking Press). Here's the Popular Library edition (no publication date listed):

The book seems to be a polarizing one; H.P. Lovecraft says positive things about it, but others don't like it as much. I hope it's half as good as the (uncredited) cover.

[dem]

Mr. Cline sounds "a bit of a character" and am looking forward to your thoughts on Dark Chamber. And yes, the cover painting for the PL edition is indeed a beauty. The blurb is none too shabby either!