Anon [ed.] - Weird Stories

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A. W. S.

Anon [ed.] - Weird Stories (Illustrated Newspapers Ltd., n.d. [1928])

Editor of The Tatler [Edward Huskinson] - Foreword

L. G. Eady. - The Phantom Actress
A. B. - The Unsolved Mystery of the Phantom Car
Anon - A Pre-enacted Tragedy
Colin H. Cattey - The Cedar of Lebanon
F. N. - The Phantom Paper
M. G. - A Bishop's Warning
Robert Darrell - The Call from Beyond
M. W. - The Return
F. J. D. - The Bell
P. W. - The Ghostly Cavalier
Arthur Dunsmore - A Ghostly "Thos. Cook"!
M. D. B. - A Photographic Manifestation
K. H. - A Photographers Experience
J. B. - When Idols are Disturbed
I. S. - The Wise Woman of Ranoch
E. M. - The Curse
K. M. U. - An Evening of 1915
Wanderer - The Devil of the Cave
C. M. G. A. - The Lady who sends the following vouches for the authenticity of the story
Brig. General C. T. B. - A Weird Dream Story
A. E. - A Weird Experience
W. G. E. - A Thought-Transference Experience
M. L. S. - A Message from the Dead
Anonymous - A Foxhunters Shade
R. M. - A Photographic Phenomenon
Maude M. C. Ffoulkes. - A Meeting with the Devil
J. G. S. - Untitled [appeared in 2 Nov 1927 issue as 'A Witness from Beyond']
G. B. W. - A Psychic Warning
Mabel Mellor - An Unsolved Mystery
J. D. W. - Phantom Footsteps
C. W. M. - A Galloway "Ghost"
Valerie Ponsford - Resurgam
Anon - What is the Explanation?
M. E. M. - The Unlighted Fire: A True Tale
Maureen - Two Strange Experiences
J. F. O'C. - Seven Years in a Haunted House
T. G. - A Television Story
A. L. - Three Photographs — and Another
The Hon. Mrs Gilbert Coleridge - The Evil Stone
E. M. S. - A Weird Experience of a Norwegian Girl
K. A. C. - Voices From The Void
A. C. G. Hastings - Footsteps
C. H. - The Grave
Anon - Fore-knowledge
C. M. B - The Barnekow's Ring
M. B. K. C. - A Super-Natural Experience
J.P. - A Queer Story of Cardiff
C. H. V. B. - Crucified
Anon - Physical or Metaphysical?
I. L. G. - Two Till Four A.M.
P. H. A. - Christmas 1897
Katherine Hortin - The Crucifix
M. D. - The Murderer's House
K. B. - The House of the Hand
M. H. R. - A Ghost that was heard and not seen
Clifford S. Deall - The Mystery still remains
T. M. M. G. - Untitled [appeared in 26 Sept. 1928 issue as 'A Story of the Mutiny']
V. L. - The Gates
M. de S. P. - The Wedding Ring
L. M. J. - A British Officers Experience in Malta
Anon - "The House of the Evil Deed"
C. - In the Tiller Flat
P. - The Devil Stone

The book of the marvellous series, compiles the bulk of the Queer and Weird stories through to September 1928.

L. G. Eady. - The Phantom Actress: The amateur players' "Nell Gwynne" overcomes a terminal case of stage fright to deliver the performance of her short life.

A. B. - The Unsolved Mystery of the Phantom Car: Mr Hunter's second hand car is consumed by a lust to kill!

Anon - A Pre-enacted Tragedy: A Highlands haunting. Two youths witness a woman in a ballgown drive her coach and four over a precipice. That same night Lady M — of K — meets with an identical fate returning from a party in the early hours.

Colin H. Cattey - The Cedar of Lebanon: From childhood Harry identifies with the ailing "pretty" tree in the garden, neither of them built to withstand the damp. As he dies, so the Cedar falls to the ground.

F. N. - The Phantom Paper: How came a copy of an English daily newspaper to appear on the table in a shack in remote Alaska? And where to did it vanish once he'd read of his fiancée's drowning?

M. G. - A Bishop's Warning: Saved from certain death in a landslide by the intervention of lugubrious phantom butler.

Robert Darrell - The Call from Beyond: Recently wed Frank Naylor is a man of his word, so when he promises to telephone his wife at nine that night she can be sure there's nothing will prevent his doing so.

M. W. - The Return: A Tommy keeps his promise to return from the front for his sister's church wedding.

F. J. D. - The Bell: A mother of three dies on Derby Day following a lengthy illness. Her spirit loudly protests the bereaved discussing a certain horse's prospects.

P. W. - The Ghostly Cavalier: Ghosts of a Royalist and his Roundhead brother still at one another's throats centuries on from the Civil War, until our narrator discovers their skeletons behind panelling while spending Christmas with Yorkshire relatives.

Arthur Dunsmore - A Ghostly "Thos. Cook"!: A spirit guide arranges travel accommodation for Mr. Dunsmore's golfing holiday in Nairn.

TBC

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M. D. B. - A Photographic Manifestation: Day of the phantom photobombers. Spectral priests and nuns mug for the camera inside an ancient West Country church.

K. H. - A Photographers Experience: A dead man calls at a Newcastle studio to collect his order in person.

J. B. - When Idols are Disturbed: The defacing of stone deities by a British Excise officer provokes violent poltergeist activity at a bungalow in the jungles of the Sahyadri mountains.

I. S. - The Wise Woman of Ranoch: Second sight in the West Highlands. A seer directs a mother to a Loch to retrieve the corpse of her missing son. The dead boy washes up at her feet.

E. M. - The Curse: An Englishwoman takes exception to a yogi squatting beside the gate to her bungalow and strikes him with her riding crop. That same night her doormat slides out of the house, across the garden and into a crocodile infested pond.

K. M. U. - An Evening of 1915: Narrator somehow tunes in psychically to the prayers of an entire desperate people. Russia on the brink of revolution.

Wanderer - The Devil of the Cave: A malevolent entity haunts a Burmese jungle path. An eerie mystery.

C. M. G. A. - The Lady who sends the following vouches for the authenticity of the story: A baby somehow escapes his cot to wander downstairs. When questioned, he explains 'Daddie' carried him. The cot is still locked. Daddy is in India. Early paragraphs hint at a Civil war haunting, but all a tease.

Brig. General C. T. B. - A Weird Dream Story: Aden 1876, Narrator dreams of a previous life as an officer in the Roman army fighting Barbarians in the Thuringian forest until mortally wounded by a spear driven clean through his breastplate. Back in the present day, the Brigadier General intuitively leads his men to safety along a path through rocky jungle. A Lieutenant marvels at his familiarity with a route as yet uncharted on the map.

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A. E. - A Weird Experience: A Parisian road-hog abruptly terminates our narrator's whirlwind romance with a divorcee whose first husband was a bit of a rotter. A week after the funeral, Stella's ghost materialises in a railway carriage — but is her smile for A. E. or the passenger in the corner seat?

W. G. E. - A Thought-Transference Experience: Examples of a young man's extraordinary powers of telepathy. "This is not invention. It is true."

M. L. S. - A Message from the Dead: To reassure her that all is well with him in the afterlife, the late Mr Carthew directs his widow to a passage in his favourite book.

Anonymous - A Foxhunters Shade: A phantom in the road prevents the crushing of a carload of young partygoers beneath a falling elm.

R. M. - A Photographic Phenomenon: When society bride-to-be Vera Brywood sits for a press picture, the studio withhold the results out of mercy. A premonition of murder.

Maude M. C. Ffoulkes - A Meeting with the Devil: 69 Curzon Road, Mayfair, October 1916. A "foreign-looking" young man materialises at the foot of Ms Ffoulkes bed over consecutive nights insisting; "I am the Devil, and I have come to bargain with you for the souls of two people who have greatly wronged you. Their hatred is of such quality that they are now delivered into your hands." To prove it's no dream, he leaves behind a souvenir. Jessie Adelaide Middleton is among the dining companions to whom Ms FFoulkes first confides her experience.

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J. G. S. - Untitled: [appeared in 2 Nov 1927 issue as 'A Witness from Beyond'] Russia, 1817. A holidaying medium and pals locate the corpse of her murdered father-in-law buried beneath a tree in dense forest.

G. B. W. - A Psychic Warning: A tramp hangs himself on Hampstead Heath. Two weeks earlier, a boy and his governess had attempted to cut down a swinging spectre from that same tree.

Mabel Mellor - An Unsolved Mystery: Poland. A haunted room whose unseen occupant proves fatal to two French governesses and sends a gay young officer stark raving mad.

J. D. W. - Phantom Footsteps: A sleepwalker wakes outside in the trees. Whose are the second, naked set of footprints trailing his own through the snow?

C. W. M. - A Galloway "Ghost": Narrator disputes that the shadowy presence witnessed by himself and a gypsy encampment during the summer of 1925 was, as they insist, a "Death Angel." Whatever it was whitened his hair overnight.

Valerie Ponsford - Resurgam: Susan the psychic waitress establishes communication with a Tommy killed in the trenches.

Anon - What is the Explanation?: A jostling ghost on the staircase, a furniture shifting poltergeist, and a phantom carriage in the courtyard of a Dieppe manor house.

M. E. M. - The Unlighted Fire: A True Tale: Overcrowding at the villa requires a guest to sleep in the haunted room. The narrator, a scoffer at "ghosts"and those credulous fools who believe in them, is happy to oblige.

P. 104 of 192.

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"In spite of the recent exposures of "mediums," whose talents might have won them an honest competence as jugglers, there can be no doubt about the sincerity of the movement they exploited. All over England thousands of people are vividly interested in what may be called psychic research, and if they record their experiments in the language of the telephone exchange, it does not detract from the honesty with which they pursue them. A belief in that honesty emboldens me to offer the following personal experience." - J. F. O'C., Seven Years in a Haunted House, The Tatler, 27 July 1927.

'Maureen' - Two Strange Experiences : Her holiday in the Highlands is disrupted by the antics of 'Joey the clown', a spirit guide with a tiresome sense of mischief. A curio, given narrator by a man who loved her before he left to fight in South Africa, inexplicably vanishes from a glass case for a year, reappearing on the day she reads his name on the casualty list.

J. F. O'C. - Seven Years in a Haunted House: On the 30th day of each month, the tall lady in brown brings terror to the residents of 22 — Street, knocking throughout the night, tearing away bedclothes and even nailing shut a door. An elderly priest's attempt at exorcism only provokes the spirit to murderous assault. The family move out, but, as with the previous occupants, bereavement and ruin swiftly follow. Later victims include T., "the great cyclist and captain of the K Cycle Club." Quite the epic, surely worth considering for a Haunted House or Poltergeist selection.

T. G. - A Television Story: December 15 1912. A member of Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition [the geologist Griffith Taylor, presumably] has a 'dream vision' of Amundsen's party arriving at the South Pole, which he records. It proves accurate.

A. L. - Three Photographs — and Another: As each of their pictures is destroyed or lost in bizarre circumstances, so that member of the family dies. Lurid horror! "It really happened!," etc.

The Hon. Mrs Gilbert Coleridge - The Evil Stone: Blood red, finger length, engraved in script unknown, probably stolen from gypsies. Lethal to those who possess it.

E. M. S. - A Weird Experience of a Norwegian Girl: A 21-year-old's premonition of disaster on the eve of a parachute exhibition above the fjord.

K. A. C. - Voices From The Void: A disembodied warning voice prevents narrator's death beneath a falling potted geranium while visiting Corfu. Her daughters own narrow escape that same afternoon is more remarkable still.

A. C. G. Hastings - Footsteps: An unseen presence nightly treads the corridors, turns the door handle, opens it, and — nothing. Until tonight ...

C. H. - The Grave: Delhi, summer 1915. Unfathomable disappearance of a hissing, coiled Cobra from an earthenware pot suspended from a branch above a supposedly haunted grave.

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Anon - Fore-knowledge: His brother confides his recurring dream of meeting death on a marsh while retrieving ambulance supplies for the Tommies. Three years later ....

C. M. B - The Barnekow's Ring: November 1700. A Swedish countess spend a night in the haunted room of a friend's house. She is visited by the spirit of a murdered man whose corpse has been left to rot beneath the floorboards this past fifteen years. An enchanting Gothic ghost story.

M. B. K. C. - A Super-Natural Experience: Sweet music heralds the death and ascension to Heaven of one dear to the narrator. A discordant, anti-melody signifies imminent violent demise.

J.P. - A Queer Story of Cardiff: A merchant marine suffers dire consequences for defying a psychic landlady's plea not to set sail aboard the first ship to offer him a post.

C. H. V. B. - Crucified: While The Barnekow's Ring is among Weird stories' sweeter offerings Crucified details a grisly first world war crime. A room that drips blood, and the ghost of a young French soldier, bayoneted to a door through both hands at feet in a village near the battleground at Verdun, calls upon an English emigré to inform his parents that he died a martyr.

Anon - Physical or Metaphysical?: Three Hindu seers levitate a two ton bundle of weights, crowbars and chains before European witnesses.

I. L. G. - Two Till Four A.M. : The phantom nightly walks a corridor of a five-story Parisian mansion, opening and closing five doors before returning whence it came. Nobody knows why.

P. H. A. - Christmas 1897: Narrator is twice pushed out of bed by a phantom presence while staying overnight in a guest bedroom at a Northern Fever Hospital. So many have suffered the same indignity that staff keep a log.

Katherine Hortin - The Crucifix: A broken cross bought for a few pesetas from a Seville junk shop. Back home in England, Ms Hortin repairs it, after which she dreams vividly of a procession of cowled monks and a massacre at a fortress.

M. D. - The Murderer's House: Mystery at the Kingshouse Inn. A previous tenant murdered his wife, only for her corpse to vanish beneath through a hole in the floor before he could bury her. The hole has resisted every attempt to refill it.

Home straights. Strong contender for personal favourite read of 2024 before we reach mid-January.

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K. B. - The House of the Hand: Their stay at a luxury holiday mansion is interrupted by a Gallic beast with five fingers, "long, white and tapering — waving and clutching in the darkness." Premonition of a vile murder.

M. H. R. - A Ghost that was heard and not seen: John, his wife, and the servants all hear the front door slam and brother Walter charge upstairs, when they know him to be in South Africa. We've read enough of these things to know what that means. At least he died horribly.

Clifford S. Deall - The Mystery still remains: A concealed cupboard hides the skeleton of a young doctor who became a recluse on the death of his bride-to-be. How did he get there?

T. M. M. G. - Untitled: [appeared in 26 Sept. 1928 issue as 'A Story of the Mutiny']. Lucklow, 1857. A Frenchman sensitive to ghosts assures a roomful of Europeans that all will survive the siege, though some will be wounded. He knows this because the Angel of Death — an old man — and his recorder walk among them without striking out a single name. Events prove him correct.

V. L. - The Gates: A château haunted by the spectre of an avaricious youth who strangled his uncle, the Comte, taking advantage of the weird phenomena affecting the gates to the courtyard to arrange a fatal accident for the heir at the same time. A "true" ghost story that probably isn't.

M. de S. P. - The Wedding Ring: Recently wed, she loses her engraved wedding ring in the ocean. Attempts to replace it prove futile; the replica falls from her finger. A gypsy woman interprets this as a warning that the girl has married badly and great tragedy, ruin, fire and blood will be her lot until the sea surrenders what it has taken, whereupon she will find happiness.

L. M. J. - A British Officers Experience in Malta: Valetta. Two sisters presumed murdered by the Mafia revisit their old home. An unsuspecting official provides escort from the cemetery.

Anon - "The House of the Evil Deed": A skeleton in the closet of a grand old house in the South of Ireland. When The ghost reveals who put it there, the murderer breaks down and confesses.

C. - In the Tiller Flat: Narrator watches appalled as a man with ghastly pale face removes his boots, throws himself out through a porthole and into the sea — without making a splash. On examination, the porthole remains bolted shut. Meanwhile, two miles away aboard a second ship, a suicidal stoker removes his boots ....

P. - The Devil Stone: Know-all white overseer of South Indian tea plantation lands a kick on a 'cursed' granite stone as a show of contempt to idle native superstition. He promptly sickens with a mystery ailment, horrible, lingering and fatal.

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WEIRD STORIES

SUCCESSFUL stories of the supernatural usually fall into two classes — those that are written as fiction by a professional writer who is a real artist at his work, and those that are related as bald facts without any embroidery or strain of imagination. Weird Stories (Illustrated Newspapers, Ltd.: 2s. 6d. net) is a book that comes in the latter class of merit, since it is a collection of stories that have appeared in the Tatler, and which have been submitted by responsible people in good faith. In this book occur stories of almost every kind of supernatural experience, from mental telepathy to manifestation, but there are some of them that stand out particularly from the rest.

THERE is always an atmosphere about the East, and a story in this book, entitled "The Curse," is most dramatic. It tells of an Englishwoman who invoked the wrath of a Yogi, or holy man, who demanded the Englishwoman's Ayah to procure him a hair from her mistress's head. The terrible tragedy that was averted by the faithful servant giving the Yogi a mat hair instead of the human one will enthral everyone. Another amazing tale from the East concerns the experience of three Englishmen and two women who witnessed the spectacle of weights, amounting to two tons, lifted of their own accord to a height of nearly two feet from the floor by, apparently, mental suggestion.

To readers interested in spiritualism two stories of photographic manifestation will prove interesting. One about a certain rector, who, on taking photographs of an historic church, found on every negative the figures of priests and nuns kneeling or officiating at the altar. The other is of an engaged girl, who had her photograph taken at a studio. Finding that the photographers were very loath to let her see proofs, she sent a friend, who finally persuaded them to reveal the proofs. The friend was horrified to see in the proofs the figure of the engaged girl's future husband standing behind his fiancée with an upraised dagger, a manifestation that was dreadfully fulfilled. Another story dealing with photographs, and a most poignant one, is that of a man who relates how on three occasions a photograph of someone dear to him has been destroyed prior to the subject's death. In this way he has received a warning of the death of his wife and his two sons, and he most tragically ends: "I have one photograph left, and I shall feel so happy when I lose that; it is a photograph of myself!"'

AN interesting example of television is the story told by a member of the Scott's South Pole Expedition in 1912, who had a vision of the Norwegians reaching the South Pole on the exact day that nearly a year later he learnt that they did actually arrive.

THERE are countless other intriguing stories and recollections in this book, and Weird Stories makes a most successful "thriller." Particularly so because the majority of the stories concern twentieth-century experiences, which seem all the more eerie in a world that is no longer ruled by a general superstition of, to quote the Ingoldsby Legends, "Witches and Warlocks, Ghosts, Goblins and Ghouls." — WILFRED GAVIN.

— The Bystander, 19 December 1928