Fiona Snailham [ed.] - Holy Ghosts

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Fiona Snailham [ed.] - Holy Ghosts: Classic Tales of the Ecclesiastical Uncanny (British Library, Tales of the Weird, June 2023)

Sandra Gómez

Fiona Snailham - Introduction
A Note from the Publisher

Sheridan Le Fanu - The Sexton's Adventure
Mrs Henry Wood - The Parson's Oath
Elizabeth Gaskell - The Poor Clare
Ada Buisson - A Story Told in a Church
Amelia B. Edwards - In the Confessional
E. Nesbit - Man-Size in Marble
Robert Hichens - The Face of the Monk
Marguerite Merington - An Evicted Spirit
Edith Warton - The Duchess at Prayer
M. R. James - The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
John Wyndham - The Cathedral Crypt

Blurb:

"I confess I have a particular dislike to remain in a church after dusk; it recalls to my mind the most painful story I ever heard."

A festering evil lurks in the grotesque carvings of a cathedral's hallowed inner sanctum; sheltering in an Alpine chapel, a young libertine confronts his eerie monastic doppelgänger; locked in a Spanish cathedral, a honeymooning couple bears witness to a fatal procession. Churches and other sacred sites have inspired writers of the weird and uncanny for centuries as spaces in which death and the afterlife are within touching distance — where ghosts, demons and possessed effigies remain to haunt the living. Through eleven stories published between 1851 and 1935, this new anthology revives a throng of undying spirits from a host of unsung and classic authors including Elizabeth Gaskell, M. R. James, John Wyndham, and Edith Wharton.

FIONA SNAILHAM is a Lecturer in Gothic Literature at the University of Greenwich. Her research interests include Victorian popular fiction, nineteenth-century women writers and the ghost story. Her current project explores the intersection between Christian theology and Victorian mediumship and spiritualism.

The lure of Ada Buisson, Sandra Gómez, four or five stories unfamiliar to me, and a couple of quid off proved too great. 11 stories originally published between 1851-1935.

J. S. Le Fanu - The Sexton's Adventure: (Dublin University Magazine, Jan. 1851). Bob Martin, a notorious drunk, is shocked to sobriety by the gory self-murder of his publican, 'Black' Phil Slaney. One night, Bob rashly swears to his wife that the fiend can take him should he fall into his old ways. The Devil lies in ambush outside the suicide's pub.

Marguerite Merington - An Evicted Spirit: (Atlantic, March 1899). "Other visitors came to the house; also written attempts at consolation for the loss of me, most of them sincere, some few perfunctory, some simply idiotic." The ghost of Miss Gillian Stanleymain, struck down aged twenty-years after a short illness, eavesdrops on her own funeral arrangements. Blackly comic for most part, as the more competitive mourners jostle for the limelight. Ending is quite lovely.

Amelia B. Edwards - In the Confessional: (All the Year Round, Dec. 1871). Believing his wife unfaithful, farmer Caspar Rufenach murders the Rev. Pere Chessez so he might replace him behind the grid to hear her confession. Presumably Frau Margaret admitted to infidelity, as that night he took a hatchet and chopped her to pieces. Rufenach's ghost haunts the scene of his abominable sacrilege.

Robert Hichens - The Face of the Monk: (Byeways, 1897). Hubert Blair, talented young author and sensualist, is committed to an asylum following a suicide attempt triggered by an unlikely spasm of "religious mania." It began when Blair consulted a Bond Street clairvoyant over his worsening depression. Vane informs the writer of a double — a monk — "your spirit in a former state." Despite his protestations that, even had he lived a previous life, this could never have been the case, his very soul wouldn't allow it, Blair hunts down his saintly counterpart to an Alpine monastery. The two men have haunted one another throughout their lives, each believing the doppelgänger exists only to torment him. Huberts's every sin has perpetuated his double's self-loathing, and, as the monk suffers, so Blair is plunged into sympathetic despair. One resolution to this mutual torture might be for the sensualist to embrace the ascetic life — which, eventually, he does. Hence, his confinement.

Story ends with the doctor and Blair's closest friend agreeing that Hubert is so much happier in his "madness" than they in their miserable "sanity."

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Victorian melodrama!

Mrs. Henry Wood - The Parson's Oath: (Bentley's Miscellany, March 1855). Regina Winter, charity schoolmistress of Littleford village, is persistently hounded by George 'Brassy' Brown, poacher and sex pest, who has decided she is to be his wife. "I have sworn to marry you, and I'll keep my oath, by fair means or foul." Miss Winter half jokes that, should the hands-on Brassy one day shake her to death, the parson, Rev. John Lewis, must promise to give her Christian burial. The clergyman does more. He pledges his love, requests her hand, body and soul in marriage! Regina, overjoyed, agrees! All is joy and happiness until the night Regina goes missing in the vicinity of Brassy's farmhouse, never to be seen alive again. The poacher denies having seen her, insists he is long over his ridiculous infatuation with the woman and has no interest in her affairs.

Several years pass. An ailing Rev. Lewis, has long come to accept that his fiancée is dead. Unless her bones are recovered, he can't make good his promise.

Ada Buisson - A Story Told in a Church: (Belgravia Annual, Christmas 1867). A freezing cold Christmas Eve at a Private Girls School, near Chichester, and Milly Power, seventeen, is justifiably concerned that her almost-fiance, Arthur Power, has taken a shine to her gorgeous French cousin, Irena Duport. As night falls and the chatter turns to ghosts, Arthur, who has wangled entry to the Christmas party, fatally poses a dare.

"I would wager this," and he held up small gold locket, "that not one person here would venture now to cross the churchyard alone, enter the church and pass through and bring me piece of the cypress waving over the broken tomb on the other side."

Neither love rival can resist the challenge.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Snailham is not really ham, you know.

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Edith Wharton - The Duchess at Prayer: (Scribner’s, Aug. 1900). Loved this, a magnificently grim reworking of Balzac’s spiteful, claustrophobic horror, La Grande Bretèche. Neglected by a husband who spends much of his year away from home, the Duchess Violente falls in love young, dashing Cavaliere Ascanio. The Duchess impresses upon the servants that she is not to be disturbed while at worship in the family chapel, whose tiny crypt houses the thigh-bone of St. Blandina of Lyons. Shortly after a cloaked figure is seen fleeing the chapel, Duke Ercole II returns home unannounced with a wonderful gift for his wife. Moved by her devotion to the relic, the Duke has commissioned a life-size statue of his wife at prayer to stand above the crypt entrance, securing it shut. Two hundred years later, it remains in place and the beautiful stone face of the adulteress has twisted into an expression of loathing and horror.