Ghost Appreciation Month – The End

[Written by Assistant Editor and Ghost Appreciation Month member, Sharon Ring.]

Ordinarily it would have been Mark Deniz, Beyond Fiction’s Editor-in-Chief, writing the round-up of this past month’s appreciation of all things ghostly. However, Mark has been at an undisclosed location enjoying some pre-birthday celebrations so it has fallen to me to pick up the mantle on this occasion and say a few words on Ghost Appreciation Month (GAM).

We’ve enjoyed thirty-one days of movies at Beyond Fiction. I’ve had the chance to watch some old favourites; The Haunting, Don’t Look Now, Jacob’s Ladder, and The Shining rating highly on that front. I’ve also had the opportunity to see four fantastic films which had previously managed to slip under the radar; The Frighteners, Session 9, Shutter, and Saint Ange (House Of Voices). It’s been great to see how trends in ghost movies have come and gone over the decades: from silent movies to the talkies, black & white to colour, from Hollywood through Europe and Asia. With the exception of a handful of films on the Ghost Appreciation Month’s list, such as Ghostbusters and The Frighteners, the driving force behind any decent ghost movie has always been the power of suggestion. The best films in the genre, from my point of view at least, are often those which play with image and sound in such a way as to render the actual seeing of a ghost almost unnecessary. Asymmetrical cinematography, discordant music and sound effects: these tools all lead the way to making a film’s audience feel uneasy, taking them out of their comfort zones and into the unknown.

GAM contributors reviewed around half the movies on Mark’s film list, with a few extra film reviews thrown in for good measure. It’s always interesting to read another person’s take on a movie you love, even more interesting to read a friend’s review of a movie on which you weren’t so keen. Point in case: The Blair Witch Project. I have seen this movie several times over the years, but never all at once. I’d watch the beginning and fall asleep: I’d get back from the pub and watch the last twenty minutes: never all in one go, however. Now, Mark Deniz loves this movie, positively raves about it. What the heck, I thought; now’s my chance to give it the full attention it apparently deserves. I watched it. It didn’t do for me what it seems to do for Mark and so many other people. Reading Mark’s review and listening to comments over on Facebook when I mentioned having finally seen the movie, I can appreciate that this was a groundbreaking film. I wish I could have seen it when it was released, at a time before spoofs and countless half-watches. I believe the impact it had on people back then is something I may have experienced myself. Never mind. Mark and I will have to agree to disagree on this one. Either that or fight it out at FantasyCon next year in comedy sumo suits (yes, Mark, that is a challenge!).

 

I will be the one in the red mawashi. Victory shall be mine.

 

Aside from my rather bizarre encounter with a ghostly Charles Dickens (man, that is one ghost with serious acceptance issues), GAM had two interviews in the line-up – Gary McMahon and Stephen Volk. Gary and I talked about his own ghost experience; the cultural and historical background of belief in ghosts; a little Mitchell-dissing (check out the Guardian article from David Mitchell to see how that came about); ghosts as metaphor; and finally onto a few words about his new book, which centres on a man who is able to see ghosts. Stephen and Mark discussed Stephen’s current hectic schedule; how and why Ghostwatch came to be; Stephen’s thoughts on the afterlife; some advice for budding screenwriters and a little industry talk; and wrapped things up with a quick question on Stephen’s favourite authors. This second interview along with a review of Ghostwatch the following day could not have been better timed. Halloween 2010 was the eighteenth anniversary of the original screening of the drama and, for reasons Natalie Kingston explains in her review, it has never been shown since.

Throughout the month, dotted between the reviews and interviews, were a series of articles and real-life experiences from our GAM contributors. I should say at this point that I have my own particular thoughts on the subject of ghosts. I’ve seen some – I definitely believe in the existence of them – but I maintain a healthy scepticism when it comes to other people’s stories, as I hope they would do with my own. Reading through this month’s posts I think the one which affected me most was probably Alison Littlewood’s short piece on the Isle of the Dead. No cheap thrills and ghostly apparitions here, just a poignant telling of the trip to a small cemetery island off the shores of Loch Leven.

So, there’s been plenty to read, watch and think about over this past month. There is a dedicated page for all the Ghost Appreciation Month posts for ease of reference.

On Mark’s behalf I would like to thank everyone who took part in the past month’s fun and to everyone who kindly tweeted and shared links on Twitter and Facebook. Now, for those of you who know Mark, you know this is a man who never rests. I think there’s a fairly good chance we’ll see another of these themed months sometime in the future. Perhaps we’ll see you there.

 

It's time for us to say farewell

 

In Portugal – A real life ghost story

[written by author, Mark West]

I am 41 years old, which is certainly old enough to know better. Also, in keeping with people my age, I’ve lost relatives who, given the option, I’m sure would have come back to check up on me from time to time (thereby, effectively, haunting me). I also have a five year old son who is starting to develop a perfectly rational fear of the dark and, as I keep reassuring him, “there’s nothing there.”

Really?

I love ghost stories and have done since I was a kid. To me, there wasn’t much better – apart from eating Space Dust whilst I watched a girl called Amanda play at lunchtime – when I was nine or ten than losing myself in a Three Investigator book, or a Peter Haining or Mary Danby collection. I formed ghost hunting groups with friends (one day, I might tell you about the ghost at Blue Bridge, who was said to be Old Nick himself), I read as much as I could and I scared myself silly with real-life ghost books from the library. Happy days.

I have had three brushes with what I think are perhaps most accurately described as unidentified phenomena. One was with my childhood friend Nick and he still talks about the incident, over thirty years later. Two were with my friend Craig – one was an unidentified flying object, one was about ghosts.

In 1989, he & I went on holiday to Portugal. He worked for a travel company, we got a reduced rate, we had a great time. Our hotel was a lovely place, run by a bear of an Englishman, with local staff. Beyond the restaurant/club house, there was a patio area, then two blocks of apartments – we were on the ground floor of the first, facing back towards the house. We got on well with fellow guests, there was a good atmosphere in general, it was a cracking holiday.

Towards the end of the week, after having sworn off drink for a few days (we were twenty and didn’t realise that the shots were doubles), we’d had a meal and enjoyed the evening in the club and gone back to our room. It wasn’t a big room – through the front door, the bathroom opened off the hall, then the main room had twin beds, patio doors (which faced out towards the main house) and built in wardrobes across from them (against the back of the bathroom wall). I slept in the bed nearest the wardrobes, Craig had the bed by the window.

On this particular night, nothing spectacular had happened. We had a chat for a while, then went to sleep and that was it.

I woke up and just knew it was the middle of the night, though it wasn’t particularly dark (we tended to keep the curtains open). As my eyes got accustomed to the light, I was very surprised to see someone crouching down beside the bed, staring at me. My over-riding memory of it now is that it looked like one of the guards out of the “Flash Gordon” film – a monks habit, with the hood drawn up and some kind of gas mask/breathing apparatus obscuring the face. I don’t remember reacting to this interloper, but watched as he stood up and walked carefully around my bed and along the back wall. As the thing reached the end of Craig’s bed (with me now up on one elbow, watching it go), Craig sat bolt upright in bed (and that startled me more than my ghost had).

“What time is it?”

I fumbled for my watch. “Ten past three.”

“Okay,” he said and laid back down. I couldn’t see my ghost any more, so I too laid down and went back to sleep.

The next morning, he was up bright and early and went to reception to make a call. When he got back, he explained that he’d wanted to ring his parents, as he was really worried. I asked why. He explained that he’d woken up that night to see two people sitting on the end of his bed, watching him. His first thought was that it must be his parents, checking that he was okay, but when he rang home, they were fine and healthy (and still are, thankfully, to this day).

As we sat there, on our beds in the early morning Portugese sunshine, I told him about the thing that I’d seen. As we talked, it came to me that maybe my ghost had been moving slowly because he was threading his way between things I couldn’t see, perhaps guests at a party. Guests that might, conceivably, be sitting at the end of Craig’s bed saying “look at that, a ghost person in bed.”

Completely stumped as to what was going on, but convinced the party angle was the one to go for, we trooped off to reception (I don’t know that we expected to find out that a party had been going on years before, until a fire broke out and killed everyone, but it would have been a start). The girl behind the counter was very nice, we’d spoken in the past and even tried to learn a few words of Portugese with her. Haltingly, we explained ourselves.

“We were just wondering if there’d been a party in our room.” We gave our room number and she went to check the pigeon hole and came back with our passports. “No, we’re in there, we just wondered if there’d been a party in there before.”

She looked at us and frowned. So we told her the story. About halfway through, she started to hyperventilate. Towards the end, she looked genuinely upset. When we got to the time part, she was very agitated. So much so that she went to get the manager’s wife (a fearsome, if friendly, lady – when I got sunstroke just after arriving, she made sure that I got grilled chicken for dinner to help me, even though it wasn’t on the menu). We re-told our story, conscious of the poor receptionist who was, by now, sitting in the backroom being comforted by her colleagues.

The manager’s wife listened to our story, looking at us to make sure we weren’t pulling her leg. She tried the obvious – were monks on my mind, there was a brand of drink that had as its logo a man in a cape, all manner of stuff – and realised that our story wasn’t going to change. She took us to one side and said, “If you promise not to mention this again, whilst you’re here, you can have free meals for the rest of your stay.”

Did my years of wanting to be a ghost-hunter kick in? Was my drive to discover the paranormal world enough that I would refuse? No, I’m now ashamed to admit that Craig & I thought with our bellies and went for the free meal option.

So, story ended right? We saw something we couldn’t explain, we freaked out a receptionist (who might have been prone to over-react, who knows?) and we were then offered hush money. I’d love to report that we experienced more phenomena but we didn’t – I was wary about being in the room on my own for the duration of our stay, but neither of us ever saw anything untoward in that room again.

It was all finished, except for something we overhead that night at dinner. Sharing our floor in the block were ex-employees of BOAC. Friendly, chatty and very funny, we got on well with them (bearing in mind they were perhaps fifty years older than us) and our little table was next to the large one they occupied.

Obviously, part of our deal was to tell no-one and we adhered to that. So imagine our surprise when the BOAC table started to talk about their previous night. Every one of them had woken up – either from hearing something or through a bad dream – and all of them were tired. We couldn’t resist and leaned back.

“What time was this then?” we asked.

There was general murmuring from the table, as people thought back about it.

So what time did five or six couples – a total of seven separate rooms – all wake up, on the same night, when nothing untoward was happening?

“Ten past three,” they said.

An Unusual Ghost Story: ‘The Fountain’

[written by author, Mana Hotton]

I am a very spiritual person by nature. I believe in the power of the human mind. Our every thought, our every feeling, from ‘what do I want for supper tonight?’ to ‘ouch, I just stubbed my toe’ is a series of electrical charges running up and down our nervous system like lightning in a bottle. There are people in life where just being in the same room with them winds you up or brings you down. We normally label it charisma. You can walk into a place and feel at peace or scared. It’s all about the energy. If you have energy that’s strong enough, it can leave an impression, like the negative of a photograph. We can wave it away with science now if you want, but it’s that afterimage that we call “ghosts”.

As a child, I was always seeing ghosts, or having prophetic dreams, or other such things that freaked out my superstitious Grandmother, among my other family members. That said, I don’t believe that spirituality really has anything to do with our human fascination with ghost stories. Ghost stories fascinate so many of us for so many different reasons, but most ghosts stories in media share a common theme, and I believe it’s that theme that inspires our interest. Spirits become for us not only the answer to the question “What comes after this life?,” but more importantly the question of “Will I be remembered?”.

The plotline of almost any ghost story has an aspect of it. Ghost is about a man dying, but staying to protect his lover and avenge his murder. Flatliners is about a group try to study the afterlife and bringing back their personal demons. Sixth Sense is about a boy learning why the ghosts come to him, ultimately to solve their problems so they can rest. The Ring, The Grudge, and so many other films like them, are about getting justice and revenge. The common thread, the common theme, is justice, redemption, setting things right. They aren’t about the dead as much as they are about wish-fulfillment. In that way, that wish fulfillment, highlights the fact that people can be haunted by memories the way their character avatars get haunted by spirits. No movie, I think, plays that as poignantly as The Fountain, with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.

The Fountain is a movie with three plots set in three different time periods. The oldest plot is about Tomas, a Conquistador searching for the Tree of Life for his Queen Isabel, who is under siege. The “present day” plot is about Dr. Tommy, an oncologist researching desperately searching for a cure to the same type of cancer his wife, Izzy, has. The third shows a biosphere space ship travelling to a nebula with Tom and a tree, whom he talks to, with the ‘ghost’ of Izzy haunting him. Haunting or hunting, one way or another, each version of Tom, is ever searching for the secret of life over death, while Izzy or Isabel seeks simply life.

It’s the search for redemption, to make the wrong things right, be they in war, or against disease, or personal failure, that drives the main male character in each of the plots. The female protagonist in each of the plots doesn’t seek to run from but toward the inevitability of the end. A few arc words in the movie, spoken over and over, “Death is the road to awe,”. It becomes the ultimate message. Death as creation. However, it’s also that the past can haunt us so much that no matter how long we live or how far we go to avoid it, it will make itself known until we put everything right within ourselves.

In the strictest sense, the The Fountain isn’t a traditional ghost story. However, since it shares with traditional ghost stories that theme of the near-eternal search for redemption until all the wrong things are made right, it makes you forget that it’s not. It may not, in essence, but about a haunting, but the effect is that it haunts you far beyond. You may need to watch it twice or three times to catch all the subtly of it, but each time you are brought closer to closure and, perhaps, closer to awe.

Reflections on the Ghost as a Representative 21st Century “Monster”

[written by author, editor and reviewer, Robert Hood]

If the Monster in fiction (and hence film) takes a form that becomes symbolically resonant of particular periods of social history, then broadly (and simplistically) it might be said that witches (and demons) are Mediaeval (the conflict of Church, the old religions and to some extent the State), werewolves are late feudal (the tension between the New World and the Old — the Beast that still lurks within), vampires are Victorian (reflecting the dominance of the middle classes and their struggle for power against the old aristocratic social structures), giant monsters are post-World War (and meditate on the rise of Science and Technology) and apocalyptic flesh-eating zombies channel late 20th century consumerist angst. What then is the iconic monster of the 21^st Century, the creature that has, during this century’s first decade, been most successfully molded by the creators of popular entertainment into a symbol of the time?

The zombie remains a definite contender, going on the sheer volume of popular works — books and films — that feature the post-Romero cannibalistic living dead. As such it has been somewhat re-defined beyond the 20^th Century consumerist view of the zombie made popular by George Romero’s 1970s-80s films, particularly Dawn of the Dead (1978). The consumerism aspect has been extended in the sense that it increasingly depicts the rise of a non-spiritual materialism — an abandonment of spirit in favour of the flesh. Clive Barker once described the modern zombie as immortality without religious belief.

The zombie subgenre also resonates with a concern that is prevalent in modern horror generally: a fear of viral contagion. Vampires have a viral aspect, but it tends to be played down in favour of other themes (especially since the rise of Twilight’s “new-age” blood-suckers). In zombies the fear of an unstoppable plague has achieved some sort of apotheosis. Films such as 28 Days Later…, and even such inventive re-inventions as Pontypool, are all about uncontrollable infection.

However, despite the contemporary upsurge in zombie films, I would argue that there are two other iconic monsters vying for the rule of monsterdom in the post-millennial period. One is the serial killer, a real-life phenomenon that has been thoroughly mythologised on film and in literature over the years. As a monster, the serial killer/slasher goes back many decades, to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and beyond — in its modern form, probably to the later films of Bava and then to Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), which fuelled the proliferation of slasher films, even if the tropes appeared earlier. The 1990s were full of them. Now we’re seeing their resurgence in the form of both remakes and originals. Silence of the Lambs and Thomas Harris’ subsequent Hannibal Lecter novels and the films they spawned introduced a level of malevolent intelligence into an image of “the serial killer” that had previously been merely physical and rather mindless. Now we have a whole slew of high profile “killers” that range from Hannibal Lecter through to the mutant cannibals of the The Hills Have Eyes remake, the red-neck maniacs of Rob Zombie’s films and the sadistic torture pornographers of Saw and Hostel. They’ve even become the “subject” of TV shows (such as Dexter). Apparently they’re everywhere. I would, rather contentiously perhaps, say that politically motivated fearmongering in regards to terrorism has played a huge role in molding this “monster in our midst”. At the moment, however, despite its box-office ubiquity I don’t feel that the serial killer/slasher is capturing our time with any great originality. Most of the films feel like earlier exploitation films with high-tech upgrades.

No, for me the most iconic “monster”, the one that is capturing a huge part of the spirit of the 21^st Century as we have seen it so far, is the ghost. Ghosts of all persuasions have undergone a massive renaissance, producing not only significant books, but more films than all the others combined — not to mention TV series such as Medium, Supernatural and — the best of the lot, in my opinion — the UK series Afterlife.

Central to the upsurge in major ghost films has been the influence of Asian, and specifically Japanese, horror. When Ringu (1998) hit the scene it re-energised horror films generally, and dragged them into the mainstream box-office in a way we hadn’t seen for a long while, bringing with it a malicious haunting that utilized the technology of our time. Ju-on: the Grudge and its many progeny followed, and brought with them successful ghost films from Hong Kong, Thailand and Korea — the Hollywood remakes inevitably followed. Somewhere in the early inspirational mix, though, there was The Sixth Sense (1999) with its “I see dead people” plotline. The enormous and unexpected success of that film worldwide was as influential as the Ring cycle. These films arguably created an aesthetic than is still functioning, despite signs of stagnation, and has led to the rule of the ghost. And that aesthetic is quite different from that of ghost films of previous eras.

The 21^st Century ghost has, in fact, subsumed its rivals. In its Asian form it brought zombiesque viral fears into the ghost story, without that subgenre’s visceral contempt for the flesh. Traditionally ghosts were very limited in their influence, usually seeking revenge on specific guilty individuals or the progeny of those who had brought about their deaths or otherwise wronged them. Either that, or their spheres of influence were localised, restricted to the environment in which they had lived or died (the classic haunted house scenario). There were instances of a wider vengeance, however, especially over time, as well as hints of the possibility of a viral “spread”, as in the conclusion of Stephen Volk’s TV drama Ghostwatch (1992), which had the sort of effect on its audience last seen in Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds (1938). This, as well as Ringu, showed that the ghost could represent fear of our dependence on and obsession with technology as well, as the modern ghost seems quite comfortable with using television, photography (Shutter), the internet (Kairo, Watch Me, FeardotCom), mobile phones (One Missed Call, Phone) and even cinema (as in the Thai film Coming Soon) to destroy us. The underlying fear is obvious: what if we can’t contain the negative aspects of the technology that we’ve so thoroughly woven into our lives?

There’s more. The ghost story is classically about the persistence of the influence of the past. Metaphorically the subgenre explores guilt and the knowledge that the past lingers as an influence we have to deal with – one we may not be able to deal with. The current ghost film has taken this one step further in that in stories such as that of Sadako and The Grudge and many more since those the vengeance unleashed by past sins is frighteningly indiscriminate. Not only the guilty suffer, but the dire consequences extend to society in general. More widely the prevalence of vengeful spectral women and children in Asian films reflects a feeling that socially we are at a crossroads. In these films, the traditional social (specifically family) structure has broken down and yet lingers on in an inability to find a new way to heal the psychic trauma of the breakdown. Likewise films such as the apocalyptic Kairo (the original and infinitely superior Japanese version of Pulse) reflect the alienation caused by urban life and technological advancement. It is here that the most iconic of the ghost films have found a strong voice for our post-millennium anxieties.

Moreover, recent ghosts in cinema have become more than diaphanous spectres that prey on guilt and attack victims through the sort of classic numinous dread that is characteristic of ghosts. The new breed are often brutal and visceral in their attack, slaughtering their victims (who are often chosen randomly or, as in One Missed Call, via aspects of the technology they are using to haunt us) and dispensing the sort of extreme violence that we associate with serial killers and political/religious extremists. In this way ghosts become the serial killers we talked about earlier. They are spiritual terrorists, as elusive and as incomprehensible as al Queda, and as such express all those fears that were activated post 9-11.

Lastly, of course, the current popularity of ghost films also reflects conflicted attitudes to traditional matters of life, death and the “Eternal Truths” — as rational and spiritual views of reality vie for dominance within our materialist society. It’s a two-edged sword. TV shows such as The Ghost Whisperer perpetually assure the viewer than death is not the end, that we can take comfort in the knowledge that life continues after death. Ghost stories generally offer this re-assurance, of course, but more commonly it is hard to find solace in the knowledge, as the afterlife as often as not proves to be as conflicted as life and frequently offers hellish vengeance and demonic confrontation as an eternal truth. In Medium the conduit of ghostly communications might have found a legalistic niche as well as a structure of support via the family and the DA’s Office, but in shows such as Stephen Volk’s Afterlife seeing the dead only leads to pain, alienation and emotional dysfunction. Not very comforting.

[Note: this article is based on one that first appeared on The Talking Squid website on 4th October 2007.]

The Crow: The Sound of Violence

[written by author, Kim Lakin-Smith]

Few movie soundtracks are as enmeshed with the visuals and emotions of its source material as 1994’s cinematic goth-fest, The Crow. A nocturne in the truest sense of the word, the soundtrack is less ear-filler than a social commentary on love, loss and revenge. Black as a congealed river slit from the wrist of Poe, Wilde, or Curtis, the fourteen track album features early grunge and industrial rock, with the odd wistful ballad smeared in-between. Of any album spawned by a graphic novel, The Crow is by far the most visceral, and not because of the violence of its lyrics, but because it is a terrifyingly frank tribute to the inherent pain of the human condition.

Why this should be so is rooted in the real story that lies behind the movie. A sense of tragedy permeates both movie and album, and this can be traced back to the original graphic novel, and writer and artist, James O’Barr.

In 1981, O’Barr started work on The Crow while he was stationed in Berlin. He explains,

I joined the marines after someone very close to me was killed by a drunk driver. I just wanted to stop thinking about it and have some structure in my life. But I was still filled with such rage and frustration that I had to get it out before it destroyed me. One day I just began drawing The Crow; it came pouring out.

That ‘someone’ was the one. Racked with grief, O’Barr achieved an early discharge and returned to the states with the full intention of killing the drunk behind the wheel. His personal quest for revenge was thwarted, the driver having already passed away. Instead, O’Barr channelled his homicidal rage into his art. It is no accident that the comic’s inferred setting is O’Barr’s hometown of Detroit, or that the murders of antihero, Eric Draven, and his true love occur when they are out for a romantic drive. The Crow was a product of anguish then, even before the now infamous events that took place on its movie set.

The series of misfortunes which occurred during the filming of The Crow have led many to believe that O’Barr’s story was a victim of its own macabrism. A car accident, a screwdriver embedded in a hand, a stuntman falling through a window and breaking several ribs, a hurricane, and a fire were among the darker acts of god to affect those on set. But the ultimate tragedy was the death of the movie’s star, Brandon Lee, who was shot by a fellow actor on set under still-debated circumstances. With Lee due to be married three weeks later, the story of Eric and his lost love was all too acute for O’Barr; he spiralled into depression and drug addiction, only to emerge years later, relieved for the most part of the guilt – and the majority of the financial assets – that came from his creation.

Given these bleak circumstances, the choice of soundtrack was always going to be intrinsic to the movie’s authenticity. O’Barr even admitted, “I was much more inspired by the music of the time than the comics of the time.” The first graphic novel in the series was dedicated to the lead singer of Joy Division, Ian Curtis, who hanged himself at age 23 and on the night before the band’s first US tour, seemingly because of his worsening epilepsy. This fusion of art and music was evident in the use of Joy Division songs as chapter titles, and quotes from rock poet Jim Carroll and lyrics by Robert Smith of The Cure. Even Eric’s appearance was based on Peter Murphy from the group Bauhaus, his body movements on punkster Iggy Pop.

The resultant album was seminal; it revelled in O’Barr’s musical inspirations, layering these with artists not only relevant at the time but whose work reflected the film’s core themes of alienation, heartache and decay. From the haunting cries of The Cure’s opening track, ‘Burn’, through to the metal bombast of Pantera, Trent Reznor’s rusted, tyrannical meshwork of ‘Dead Souls’, hit track, ‘Big Empty’ from Stone Temple Pilots, and the closing fragility of Jane Silberry’s ‘It Can’t Rain All The Time’, The Crow – The Soundtrack encapsulated a moment in cinematic history, when Goth became gut-wrenchingly glorious and the whole world wept.

SOUND BITES

• ‘…The sonic personification of anxiety. Blues cubists. Spokesmen for misfits’ – how the Violent Femmes describe themselves on their website. Perfect then for a movie about a heart-torn vigilante expelled from the grave.

• Pantera’s ‘The Badge’ is a Metaller’s anthem which questions the morality of police, asking ‘What’s behind the badge?’ This theme is highlighted in the third film in The Crow franchise. The Crow: Salvation sees a new dark angel, a character called Alex Corvis, framed for the murder of his girlfriend by corrupt police.
• James O’Barr began work on his graphic novel in 1981. This was also the year The Cure recorded the maudlin album Faith, solidifying an obsession with all things decayed and dissipating with their 1982 release, Pornography. O’Barr’s adoption of The Cure as muse was well-timed; a year later, Robert Smith and crew reinvented themselves as more of a pop outfit.
• The soundtrack concludes with Jane Silberry’s ethereal ‘It Can’t Rain All The Time.’ In 2006, Silberry changed her name to Issa (pronounced eeee-sah), a feminine variant of Isaiah. Another case of reincarnation?
• Fear And Bullets was an album created through a collaboration between James O’Barr and longtime friend John Bergin as a soundtrack to O’Barr’s graphic novel. It was originally released in 1994 along with a limited edition hardcover copy of the graphic novel, the release coinciding with the publicity received from the film.

Ghosts and Subjectivity: Is There Anyone Out There?

[written by author, editor and reviewer, Robert Hood]

Ghosts thrive on the ambiguity that exists between objective experience and subjective response. If, as many philosophers have argued, the world is a whirlpool of quantum energies that gain form and meaning from our perception of reality and the forms we impose on it, then the distinction between subject and object must blur at times, perhaps often. Maybe it’s in that borderland that ghosts exist.

Ghost stories, both written word and film, reflect this objective/subjective divide. For example, though its credentials as a bona fide genre horror film will inevitably be a matter for debate, the South Korean film Sorum [aka Goosebumps] (2001), directed by Jong-Chan Yun, has definite claim to being a ghost story, albeit one that lacks “objective” ghosts. In fact, its arthouse manner and psychological horrors offer up one of the most haunted environments to be found on film, rivaling The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel and The Haunting‘s Hill House and other famous bad places — as dark, unhappy and soaked in evil memory as any generic celluloid spookhouse. Even if, more so than Hill House, the tenement’s haunting originates in the minds and souls of its inhabitants, the dilapidated tenement that is the focus of the narrative nevertheless contains a presence that does what ghosts of a more objective kind generally do: express a lack of spiritual and emotional resolution by imposing the past upon the present. The unraveling of a dire mystery resonating from the past, fear of ill-understood shadowy memories, final revelation of a crucial if unexpected relationship, inner violence erupting in physical attack as the act of remembering activates a terrible “curse”: these are all the stuff of ghost stories — and though no dead wet girls or demonic apparitions are in evidence (except in a passing dream as memories begin to surface), a ghost story is what Sorum most definitely is.

Slow-paced and pessimistic, set against a background of almost continual storm and building toward violence made more potent for the earlier stillness from which it grows, Sorum is inhabited by characters who are the living dead, moving through life without connection or joy, yet desiring a connection they may never be able to find. In a way it is a romantic tragedy told using the underlying dynamics of a ghost story. Not a commercial film (though successful at the box office), it is nevertheless darkly riveting and deeply moving, especially if approached without the sort of genre expectations that demand the sort of standard narrative attitude in which director Jong-Chan Yun shows only a somewhat subverted interest.

Sorum represents one particularly extreme approach to the issue of subjectivity in ghost stories. It’s a question that applies to some of the best of them and has obvious reference to anecdotal evidence for real-world hauntings: to what extent is it all in the mind of the beholder?

In my article “Vengeance From Beyond the Grave?”, I argue the case for seeing the film Weight of Water as a bona fide ghost story, even though it is arguably a cross-temporal drama, and ghostly events in it can be seen as either a product of the characters’ emotional connection with the past or as artistic and structural synchronicities imposed by the director. More typically, Henry James’ 1898 novella, “Turn of the Screw” — regarded as one of the great ghost stories — refuses throughout to untangle the spectral events from the subjective imaginings of the unnamed governess, and has therefore given rise to decades of debate as to whether or not the ghosts are “real” or merely figments of her over-wrought imagination. This ambiguity has carried over into cinematic versions of the story, particularly Jack Clayton’s excellent 1961 The Innocents.

Relying less on ambiguity, the 1963 Robert Wise masterpiece The Haunting — though it tends to validate the objectivity of events as well — gives the titular haunting a decidedly subjective feel, placing the emotionally vulnerable Eleanor at the centre of the ghostly manifestations. The same applies to the novel on which it was based — Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. When the events of the haunting are made blatantly objective, as in Jan De Bont’s 1999 visually splendid but rather unsubtle remake, the actual story completely unravels and all valid emotional content departs. This version is all surface and no depth, the metaphorical power of the original having been dissipated in the process of giving it a full CGI makeover.

The metaphor lying behind Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kaïro [aka Pulse] (2001) is a particularly potent and unusual one. Kurosawa’s apocalyptic ghost story — one of the creepiest films I’ve ever seen — isn’t ambiguous in its approach to the ghosts, but rather it visualizes the central metaphor in terms of ghostly imagery, as Tokyo — and by implication the world — turns into a ghost town, its inhabitants lost to the isolationism of modern society and its technologies. Here the ghosts are totally subjective in the sense that they are what remains of individuals lost to loneliness — the dusty residue of shadows on walls and desperate, barely coordinated spectres reaching out to the living and drawing them into their own non-life.

The influence of subjectivity, then — often appearing in its most extreme form as ambiguity — is common to the best ghost stories, and arguably it is what makes them both creepy and emotionally potent.

What this tussle between subjectivity and objectivity means for ghosts as such, however, is a question that is difficult to rationalise, and your own response will rather depend on how you view the world. Though as a fiction writer I have produced many ghost stories, as evidenced by the collection Immaterial: Ghost Stories (2000), it’s not because I accept the objective existence of ghosts but because I find them to have great metaphorical (or subjective) power. Indeed I can’t say I’ve had any real-world experience that I would conclusively acknowledge as a ghostly encounter. Back when Immaterial first appeared, an interviewer (Kyla Ward) asked me whether I had ever seen a ghost. This was my answer:

The closest I would say I’ve come was at points when I was particularly emotional, when various traumatic events had happened in my life. I’ll mention two. One was the break-up of my first marriage, which went through a fairly bad, uncertain stage. I remember early one morning I woke up, or thought I woke up, and there was this hideous face right next to the bed, centimetres from me. I screamed and jerked awake. I was fully awake then and there was nothing there, of course. Now, was that a ghost? It felt like it at the time. Yet the psychological ‘cause’ also seems obvious.

The other one, not horrific, was when Luke my stepson died. One night just after his death I was dreaming, I guess, but in the dream I went into the lounge room and Luke was there. I talked to him for a long time, I don’t remember what we talked about but I had a strong sense of talking and a strong sense of his presence. At one point in the dream I thought to myself, ‘Hang on, I can’t be talking to him, because he’s dead.’ Then I woke up. But I was left with an extremely strong sense of his presence. I wasn’t scared, on the contrary I was grateful because the sense of his presence was so strong it was like having him back again for a moment. Now, it would be very easy, if I was a different sort of person, to interpret the whole thing as a spectral visitation. And in some sense, maybe it was. Whether it was a visitation from Luke’s literal ghost or whether it was my memories of him being manifested, at a subconscious level I obviously wanted to talk to him about things. I came out of the dream feeling better, feeling happier. Not about the situation, but about the moment and about my own acceptance of what had happened. So that seemed like a haunting, too.

This sort of emotional experience of death and loss is what I explore in my novel Backstreets (Hodder Headline, 2000), which was dedicated to Luke. The central premise — that main character Kel, unable to accept the death of his best friend Bryce, comes to believe that his friend is simply lost somewhere in the backstreets of the city, along with the spirits of other lost youths — is a literary objectification of the experience of grief. The book has a supernatural air, though no literal justification is given to Kel’s belief.

Perhaps such ambiguity is inevitable when it comes to ghostly phenomenon. If there is such a ‘thing’ as a ghost, can it ever be clear-cut that it exists in what we consider the real world? Ghosts, even if they are to be considered objective in some way, exist in and are products of a subjective reality as well. There is a material world that we all take part in and then there’s an immaterial world — the other side, the emotional world, the world of memory and loss, the world of desire and hope — that is largely our own. Ghosts are inhabitants of both. So it’s never absolutely certain whether they’re internal or external. Psychic researchers can try all they like to find scientific proof of ghosts, and maybe they will one day — but I suspect we will live with the ambiguity forever, because that seems to me to be intrinsic to this phenomenon.

To my mind, subjectivity is the essence of ghost stories. Ghosts are creations of memory. They are memories made manifest. And as such they haunt the world of our emotions.

The Spirit in the Lens

[written by writer and photographer, Lucy Huntzinger]

Most children believe wholeheartedly in ghosts. We have a hard time letting go of that belief as adults. We want to believe, though we have numerous sensible reasons for claiming we don’t.

For those who grew up with a Santa Claus who arrives Christmas Eve and climbs down the chimney to deliver presents there’s not much difference between a ghost and an unseen fat man fitting where no human can go, rearranging things to leave his presents and maybe even laughing in the night or jingling bells. In some cultures ghosts are celebrated and sometimes invited to join us on special nights: Feast of All Souls’ Day, Ancestor Day, Dia de los Muertos. In other cultures ghosts are feared and special care is taken not to attract their interest. We fear them or love them, but we believe in them.

You may scoff and say you don’t, but you probably enjoy a well-made film with supernatural elements or a terrifyingly realistic ghost story. Even non-believers like a little scare now and then, especially if they can be sure everything will turn out well in the end. Ghosts appeal to something very basic to human nature: a desire for life beyond death.

We can’t help but speculate about it. If death isn’t the end, as so many people believe, what remains after the body dies? Do we linger to help our loved ones or attempt to take revenge on those who caused us pain? Would we know ourselves or would we be terrifyingly unaware? Aware or not, can our incorporeal selves be seen, touched, heard? Humans have always longed to make direct contact with the supernatural, whether it be gods or spirits. Maybe especially spirits.

Artists express our longings for self-aware continuation with spectacularly creative “proof” that we are not alone, from paintings of supernatural creatures to films about little boys who see dead people to photographs that have seemingly captured the spirits that surround us. Cameras, that marvelous nineteenth century invention, lend themselves particularly well to the hobby of ghost hunting.

Spirit photography, also known as ghost photography, goes back to the early days of glass plate negatives, or wet plates, first introduced in 1842. Inventive photographers quickly worked out several ways to manipulate images so that “ghosts” appeared to be standing behind or next to (sometimes superimposed over) a subject. It was done primarily through double exposures, taking a second shot after the customer or friend had gone, or through long exposure trickery. When the shutter is open for more than a couple of seconds anything moving will appear faint, blurry or simply disappear altogether. An enterprising portraitist could have an assistant dressed as a ghost slip behind the unsuspecting subject who was holding still for the necessary long exposure (up to sixty seconds was common) and pose for ten seconds, then slip away. Only the seconds in which the assistant was standing completely still would show up on the negative.

You can try this at home with your own digital camera. Make sure you are in fairly low light conditions indoors and don’t try it outdoors unless it’s night. Mount the camera on a tripod or prop it up so it won’t move accidentally, set the exposure to ten or fifteen seconds and push the shutter button. Run around and into the camera’s field of view and try holding still, then moving rapidly out of frame, then running back in and holding still again somewhere different than you were before. The resulting image will have one or more “you”s in varying degrees of clarity. The longer the shutter is open and the longer you hold a position, the likelier you are to get that classic image of you posing with yourself. Voila! You’re a ghost!

'Revenge of the Tablecloth II' (photo by Lucy Huntzinger)

 

Virtually all spirit photography is a deliberate fraud; if we look at the old studio portraits we wonder how anyone could have believed such obvious fakes. But what about those spooky photographs with ghostly faces in castle windows or appearing in group shots where they ought not to be, photographs taken by ordinary people who just wanted a snap of their family or friends standing in front of a famous tourist destination? Well, they’re usually not fakes as such, meaning the photographer didn’t set up a dummy in the window or arrange for some steam to billow up just as he or she took the shot. However, there is nearly always some kind of obvious natural explanation for that kind of photo. Humans try to make sense of patterns and where there are two dark areas above one smaller dark area and a semblance of a horizontal streak it’s very easy to see a face on a mossy wall or in the chiaroscuro of light glancing off window glass. Sometimes another visitor to the castle or cathedral wanders into the photo without the photographer realizing it at the time. Sometimes it’s just areas of light and dark in a place we wouldn’t expect it and we thrill at the thought that it might be, this time, a real ghost.

With the advent of digital cameras in the 1990′s, ghost hunters and spirit photographers lost their fascination with ghosts that appeared in human form and focused on a new phenomenon popularly known as orbs. The notion of spirit energy appearing as balls of light caught on quickly. Why? Because digital cameras more easily capture tiny imperfections on the lens than the old plate and film cameras. Orbs show up particularly well when flash is used because of light reflections off particles, which are translated by the camera’s computer into pixelated balls. Moisture and dust are the most common culprits. Millions of people discover the hard way what happens when you take photographs without cleaning your lens properly or when there is fog, rain, snow or simply your own breath on a cold night creating minute water droplets on the lens. Some of those millions think there’s a supernatural cause for the orbs, which can’t be seen with the naked eye.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, there’s no scientific basis for believing any form of supernatural creature can be captured through the lens of a camera. Spirit photography is fun and sure, you might capture a ghost if you try it, but just as we laugh at those double exposures from the 1870s some day people will laugh at our collection of orbs. If the spirits are truly with us, it has yet to be proven with a camera.

The Isle of the Dead

[written by author, Alison J. Littlewood]

 

Eilean Munde

 

The dead have highways, said Clive Barker in The Books of Blood. And those highways have junctions, and crossroads, and sometimes, the lands of the living and the dead intersect.

Of course, we have places set aside for the dead in this world too: the graveyards so beloved of supernatural fiction, complete with ground mist, leaning gravestones and a sickly yellow moon.

I only know of one burial island, though. It lies in Loch Leven near the villages of Glencoe and Ballachulish, and the ruins of its tiny church can be seen from the mainland. Its name is Eilean Munde. Being an island, it doesn’t receive many visitors. But one day my partner Fergus and I hired a canoe and headed out.

The loch was perfectly still, not a breath of wind stirring the water. It reflected back the mountainous backdrop and the rocky walls of the island. We could only see one place to land, a tiny inlet just the right size to draw in with a small boat and step out onto the gently sloping sides.

I didn’t find out until later that this inlet is called the ‘Gate of the Dead’.

I remember walking towards the island’s church, listening to the sounds from the mainland. I heard distant traffic, the shouting of children. The island wasn’t cut off from those things. And yet, it was. It was as though the sounds came from a different world.

I had an overwhelming sense that I didn’t belong there; that I was intruding. I think Fergus felt it too, because we glanced at each other and headed off in different directions. It wasn’t what we’d normally do, and we didn’t discuss it. For me, the thought of chatting with someone would have seemed wrong. It didn’t matter if we could hear the mainland: Eilean Munde belonged to silence. It belonged to the dead.

I had an intense feeling of being watched as I explored the graves. I saw the final resting place of MacIain of the Macdonalds, the clan that was betrayed and butchered in the massacre of Glencoe in 1692. And I stepped over the ruined walls of the tiny church to find more graves inside, topped by stone slabs. The earth beneath them, though, had been hollowed out. Through a gap I saw the gleam of white bone.

Later I found out that those graves had been carved into solid rock. And over the years the wind tearing up the loch had carried away the infill, grain by grain. I hear that the graves have since been filled in again – at least for the time being. I have a feeling they will have begun the slow process once more, of emptying themselves little by little, until the bones emerge.

I listened for stories about the island after that. The graves emptied by the wind. The Gate of the Dead. The way the loch would fall deathly still on the day of a burial. I could picture it well: just as it had been on the day we visited.

One story has it that when someone is buried on the island, their soul is doomed to watch over it until the next arrives. But there hasn’t been a burial on the island for many a year. If there is a ghost on Eilean Munde it has had many years of watching, and will no doubt have a great many more.

Eilean Munde belongs to the dead. It is one of those places where the walls grow thin. I could feel it in the oppressive sense of being watched; of being watched tirelessly and constantly, ever since I first stepped onto its ground.

Strange, with such an abundance of stories about the isle, that Fergus and I didn’t talk about it at all. We rowed away without speaking. Even in the comfortable surroundings of the hotel, we didn’t speak of it further than to decide that, yes, the island had been weird.

And then we each took a sip of a warming single malt and sat, for a time, in silence…

[Tomorrow, it's time for Lucy Huntzinger's discussion about ghost photography]

Ghosts: Treat them Gently

[Taken from Robert Hood's site. First published Evening News, 17 April 1931 reprinted in Ghosts and Scholars, edited by Rosemary Pardoe and Richard Dalby (Crucible 1987)]

Their Most Famous Creator Explains How to Get the Best Out of Them

What first interested me in ghosts? This I can tell you quite definitely. In my childhood I chanced to see a toy Punch and Judy set, with figures cut out in cardboard. One of these was The Ghost. I was a tall figure habited in white with an unnaturally long and narrow head, also surrounded with white, and a dismal visage.

Upon this my conceptions of a ghost were based, and for years it permeated my dreams.

Other questions — why I like ghost stories, or what are the best, or why they are the best, or a recipe for writing such things — I have never found it easy to be so positive about. Clearly, however, the public likes them. The recrudescence of ghost stories in recent years is notable: it corresponds, of course, with the vogue of the detective tale.

The ghost story can be supremely excellent in its kind, or it may be deplorable. Like other things, it may err by excess or defect, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a book with very good ideas in it, but — to be vulgar — the butter is spread far too thick, Excess is the fault here: to give an example of erring by defect is difficult, because the stories that err in that way leave no impression on the memory.

I am speaking of the literary ghost story here. The story that claims to be ‘veridical’ (in the language of the Society of Psychical Research) is a very different affair. It will probably be quite brief and will conform to some one of several familiar types. This is but reasonable, for, if there be ghosts — as I am quite prepared to believe — the true ghost story need do no more than illustrate their normal habits (if normal is the right word), and may be as mild as milk.

The literary ghost, on the other hand, has to justify his existence by some startling demonstration, or, short of that, must be furnished with a background that will throw him into full relief and make him the central feature.

Since the things which the ghost can effectively do are very limited in number, ranging about death and madness and the discovery of secrets, the setting seems to me a1l-important, since in it there is the greatest opportunity for variety.

It is upon this and upon the first glimmer of the appearance of the o supernatural that pains must be lavished. But we need not, we should not, use all the colours in the box. In the infancy of the art we needed the haunted castle on a beetling rock to put us in the right frame: the tendency is not yet extinct, for I have but just read a story with a
mysterious mansion on a desolate height in Cornwall and a gentleman practising the worst sort of magic. How often, too, have ruinous old houses been described or shown to me as fit scenes for stories.

‘Can’t you imagine some old monk or friar wandering about this long gallery?’ No, I can’t.

I know Harrison Ainsworth could: The Lancashire Witches teems with Cistercians and what he calls votaresses in mouldering vestments, who glide about passages to very little purpose. But these fail to impress. Not that I have not a soft corner in my heart for The Lancashire Witches, which –ridiculous as much of it is — has distinct merits as a story.

It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective, always supposing him to be the ghost of a dead person. Elementals and such-like do not come under this rule.

Roughly speaking, the ghost should be a contemporary of the seer. Such was the elder Hamlet and such Jacob Marley. The latter I cite with confidence and in despite of critics, for, whatever may be urged against some parts of The Christmas Carol, it is, I hold, undeniable that the introduction, the advent, of Jacob Marley is tremendously effective.

And be it observed that the setting in both these classic examples is contemporary and even ordinary. The ramparts of the Kronborg and the chambers of Ebenezer Scrooge were, to those who frequented them, features of every-day life.

But there are exceptions to every rule. An ancient haunting can be made terrible and can be invested with actuality, but it will tax your best endeavours to forgo the links between past and present in a satisfying way. And in any case there must be ordinary level—headed modern persons — Horatios — on the scene, such as the detective needs his Watson or his Hastings to play the part of the lay observer.

Setting or environment, then, is to me a principal point, and the more readily appreciable the setting is to the ordinary reader the better. The other essential is that our ghost should make himself felt by gradual stirrings diffusing an atmosphere of uneasiness before the final flash or stab of horror.

Must there be horror? you ask. I think so. There are but two really good ghost stories I know in the language wherein the elements of beauty and pity dominate terror. They are Lanoe Falconer’s ‘Cecilia de Noel’ and Mrs Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’. In both there are moments of horror; but in both we end by saying with Hamlet: ‘Alas, poor ghost!’ Perhaps my limit of two stories is overstrict; but that these two are by very much the best of their kind I do not doubt.

On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence. There is a series of books I have read, I think American in origin, called Not at Night (and with other like titles), which sin glaringly against this law. They have no other aim than that of Mr Wardle’s Fat Boy.

Of course, all writers of ghost stories do desire to make their readers’ flesh creep; but these are shameless in their attempts. They are unbelievably crude and sudden, and they wallow in corruption. And if there is a theme that ought to be kept out of the ghost story, it is that of the charnel house. That and sex, wherein I do not say that these Not at Night books deal, but certainly other recent writers do, and in so doing spoil the whole business.

To return from the faults of ghost stories to their excellence. Who, do I think, has best realized their possibilities? I have no hesitation in saying that it is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. In the volume called In a Glass Darkly are four stories of paramount excellence, ‘Green Tea’, ‘The Familiar’, ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’, and ‘Carmilla’. All of these conform to my requirements: the settings are quite different, but all seen by the writer; the approaches of the supernatural nicely graduated; the climax adequate. Le Fanu was a scholar and a poet, and these tales show him as such. It is true that he died as long ago as 1873, but there is wonderfully little that is obsolete in his manner.

Of living writers I have some hesitation in speaking, but on any list that I was forced to compile the names of E. F. Benson, Blackwood, Burrage, De la Mare and Wakefield would find a place.

But, although the subject has its fascinations, I see no use in being pontifical about it. These stories are meant to please and amuse us. If they do so, well; but, if not, let us relegate them to the top shelf and say no more about it.

Ghosts and M. R. James

[written by writer, T. A. Moore]

 

The man in question

 

The thing about ghosts is that they are scary. 

Obviously, you say. They are ghosts. 

Ghosts, however, are scarier than any monster in the traditional folklore rulebook. This might be a bit of a bold claim but I stand by it, because there is no recourse with a ghost. Terrifying as the idea of vampires and werewolves are, there are remedies: a stake to the heart, a silver bullet, a big serving of garlic bread before bed.What options do you have with a ghost, something that might have no form but be just an accusing whisper in the dark? 

Nothing, is the answer, and that is what M. R. James understood. The most terrifying element of any ghost story was the helplessness of the POV character in the face of an unexplainable intrusion into his mundane reality. 

I was 14 when I read M. R. James for the first time. It scared the blue bejeezus out of me and I spent a week scared to close the curtains. I was scared to leave them open too, mind you, but I didn’t like the idea of something skittering around out there that I couldn’t see. Before writing this article I hunted out one of the copies I’ve not pressed onto friends and reread a few of my favourites. 

Luckily I can get by on very little sleep. 

M. R. James’ speciality was the inexplicable. His ghosts were intrinsically alien, horrible shadows driven by lost memories and the echo of spite. What they want is not just beyond the haunted’s ability to provide, but beyond their ability to comprehend. Some, like the horror in Mezzotint might have an understandable reason for rising from the grave but why do they linger? Why does some poor, unassuming scholar see them creeping, thin-legged and repellent as an insect, across an etching years after their revenge was accomplished? 

The canon of M. R. James work is too extensive to review in detail here. So I will instead talk about the one that lingers, inexplicable as James’ ghosts, in my brain. It is possibly the most horrifying story I have ever read. The one that wakes me in the night with a shiver and the details of which I recall even though years passed between my first reading and the second. 

Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad is a story that imbues the flap of a clothes line with terror. James once said that a story must “…put the reader into the position of saying to himself: ‘If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’” He, at least for this reader, succeeded in this story. The protagonist is a mild-mannered, inoffensive academic guilty of nothing more than curiosity. Yet the idle blast on an old bronze whistle brought an insensate, unappeasable *thing* into his life. 

It is a thing of sheets and folds and linen that gropes blindly after the man who unwittingly summoned it. There is no sense of purpose in the thing, no reason for its dogged pursuit, and when it is tackled by a convenient army man it crumbles away into nothing. And somehow that moment is more horrible than anything else in the story. The idea of this shell of cloth that was full of….what? What had filled that horrible shape that near drove an innocent man to madness from simply beholding its ‘hideously crumpled face’? His own breath, stolen from the whistle, some revenant or old god called up to reclaim the whistle it had once owned? What had the whistle’s original purpose been? 

There’s no answer. In M. R. James’ world a monster can build itself from the sheets on your bed and stalk you for no reason that a sane, living mind can comprehend. 

That is why ghosts are terrifying.