Not an Empty House

A tale for a winter fireside:

By Sue Marra Byham





“Margery” was an old-fashioned name she might have grown up to resent. But she had been a thoughtful, sensitive child who liked the way it felt when she said it, liked the way it sounded, the way it looked on a page. She was named for an ancestor, an Edwardian hell-raiser for peace and women’s rights, but Margery’s interest in that era was all in its houses and, though perhaps the ideal was seldom realized, in its vision of home.

Margery spent a good deal of time in her teen years writing letters to bosom friends of both sexes on fancy paper with colored ink, enclosing little homemade gifts like velvet pencil cases and folded paper stars, or tiny beribboned locks of her long hair.

She put off going to college because she wanted some modern approximation of a grand tour, and a brief illness gave her a plausible excuse. She bought a plane ticket with money accumulated from birthdays and holiday gifts, and spent almost six months living out of a knapsack in Britain and accumulating long skirts and jewelry in Europe, traveling with a succession of new acquaintances before being called abruptly home--but “home” had been sold by the time she got there.

For a year, she was a commuter student. It was not the university she would have chosen, but she tried to be optimistic. Margery told herself that learning was something you had to do on your own anyway. She took a self-conscious interest in everything around her, particularly as she traveled between school and the shoebox-style rancher she now shared with her mother. (Home is where the urn is, said this bitter woman, pointing to Margery’s father’s ashes.) Riding the bus was a new adventure.

The urban neighborhood through which she walked in the long skirts she had brought back with her was a new world.

At the center of that world, at the top of a hill, stood a crumbling Victorian row house, alone, surrounded by the rubbled remains of its former companions.

At first Margery wanted to close her eyes when she passed by the house. This pitiful shell of vintage grandeur tugged at her chest, at a place that already ached with unshed tears. It had once been the coveted corner house. She pictured it bigger and more stately than a row of similar, but lesser, three-story houses. It was scarred on one side by the sooty floor and ceiling lines of an old burned out, torn down neighbor, an architectural amputee. It was flanked by trash on vacant lots, the sole residence remaining in a wasteland of boarded-up offices and sadly-damaged commercial properties.

The first time she saw the house she tried to avoid the old ruin by crossing the street, but she only did that once. It felt wrong. Shading her eyes from the glare of the sun as she jaywalked away, the roofline’s silhouette imprinted itself reproachfully on her eyelids. She felt as if she had ignored an old friend with a terminal illness, one who knew that she was aware of his presence, but would rather remember him as he was in better days.

So in an oddly conciliatory mood, Margery began to give the house her full attention, to walk as closely to it as possible every day, to examine all of its visible features and try to guess its invisible ones.

The longer she looked at the house, the less she noticed the dirt clinging to the windows, the grit and tar paper blowing off the roof, the flaking paint, the rotting wood, the pitted stone; instead she saw a noble outline caressed by light and shadow, softened by remnants of lawn and shrub. Sometimes she thought she saw more, as though glimpsing a bright young face hiding inside a wrinkled one.

The house had had a name to conjure with once, though the name was now lost to time, the brass name plate now blackened and illegible. There was a wrought iron stair rail, all magical curlicues and twists, as if it had once been as pliable as licorice. If she stared at it, her peripheral vision went fuzzy. There might be fresh green paint on the front door, the blackened letter slot might be shiny reflective brass with a figural door knocker to match, a lion, or something less usual. A gnome.

There would be stained glass over the door, glowing peacock feathers, iridescent green and cobalt blue. A cat might sit on the marble steps, which would not be cracked, which would have been scrubbed clean and white every morning. A Persian cat. Marble planters on either side might hold boxwood, seasonal arrangements. There would be flowers or greenery in boxes under every window, boxes painted a slightly darker green than the door. Somewhere along the street would be a hitching post, something decorative in iron with a brass ring.

The tradesmen would have pulled up behind the house, there’d be a wood post in the alley; they might be bringing ice for the icebox or coal for the cellar. There was a peddler, who also took away rags. Lace curtains. They’d be open in the summer, lined with mosquito netting, which would also keep out much of the soot. Vendors would call their wares in mesmerizing rhythms as they walked or drove their routes, bringing treats like hot chestnuts, or cool strawberries.

A Hurdy-Gurdy pulled by a white horse. Bells ringing at noon. A sweep. A knife sharpener. A boy who sold newspapers at the corner. A man sweeping the litter in the sweet.

Margery passed the house twice daily as she walked between the disappointing university and the bus stop. It had long ago been divided into apartments. It might be a hundred years since it had belonged to a single household.

There were a couple of friendly tenants. She sometimes stopped to talk to them. One woman planted pansies out front in an old tire that had been painstakingly fringed and painted purple and white. Her elderly father wet down the stoop with a bucket of water every night and swept it clean. In spring there were couples who gathered around a hibachi sometimes, or a boom box, and in summer there were sweaty families asleep on beach towels or propped up against the door.

Margery exchanged smiles with these people at every opportunity. But they had reason to be wary of intrusive strangers. Only the people standing at the bus stop drinking out of paper bags always smiled back. No one seemed willing to go further than hello.

Sometimes she pretended she was headed to the front door that so often stood open. Maybe she had been invited to a birthday party or a barbecue. She would have been glad just to sit on the stoop and visit. But how she longed to go inside.

She would have made friends with the children if she could. (Margery’s father had encouraged her, when she was an eager toddler, to think of strangers as friends she hadn’t met yet. But what had that attitude done for him? Turned his own youthful enthusiasm to misery.) Margery laughed when the children were laughing. She waved. Often their people grabbed on to them and stared her down the street. She didn’t try to speak to them.

As the weeks went by, and the house seemed to shrink down a little, to melt (like new tar) in the summer’s heat, she decided that the seemingly doomed building housed a tremendous spirit. Something that could not be destroyed was strong and intact there.

The house seemed to wear its graffiti proudly; the bright hieroglyphics were like medals for valor in a war against ugliness and despair. Yet day by day she grew sure that somewhere it also existed wholly as it had been in its prime. Perhaps preserved by the affection of its people, or by the loyalty of its sparrows and its squirrels and its mice. Maybe because it was really some unfathomable entity only inhabiting bricks, glass and wood. She didn’t pretend to know the why, but the imagined vision gradually became a certainty, a story she told herself as she passed the house four times every day—she had found a temporary clerical job to fill her afternoons and pay for books.

At first she thought about the house mostly to keep from thinking about other things. There was no sense in mulling over what she couldn’t do anything about. There was no sense in regretting a past or planning a future when she was powerless to do anything about either.

One day at the end of the summer a blue tarp appeared at one end of the house where a chimney had been; Margery signed up for the one class she could afford on her own and she did not go home, because again, there was no longer any home to go to. Instead she moved into a tiny, walk-in closet of a room. Its chief features were a hot plate, a fire escape, and surreptitious use of the bathroom in the laundromat downstairs.

On that day, she realized she felt the house. It was at the edge of her awareness, like going into a room and being able to tell whether she was alone or not. She was not alone. The house was there, was conscious, whether or not it was conscious of Margery. That was a marvelous enough secret, (all the better because there was no longer anyone in her life but the house to tell her secrets to,) but somehow that was only part of it. She also knew the desire of the house to shelter and protect, to be beautiful, to be loved. She knew this the way she knew her own hungers, perhaps because she was hungry with desire of the very same things. And she knew that it knew.

She wanted to tell the house about her little room, about the sleeping bag on the floor, and her diminished expectations of ever doing anything worth doing, of ever doing anything at all beyond meager repetitive tasks, as though it would be sympathetic, embrace her if it could, gather her in somehow. She wanted to tell it that she had two temporary jobs now, and no energy, and no money for another semester, and that she used the bar soap from the laundromat restroom where she bathed at night to wash her hair.

The house did not look ruined when the sun or the moon shone over its roof; at twilight and at dawn it exuded peace and confidence. There was a sense of its belonging right there, unhindered by time, forever. She wondered whether it felt alone in the universe.

She was unaware that the moonlight restored the youthful trustfulness and hope that had disappeared with the baby fat from her own face when she began paying her own lonely way in the world. The warm sun she loved was cracking her skin like cement, privation and fatigue were making empty metaphors of her soul’s windows, she clenched her teeth at night like deadbolts against intruders.

Somewhere in very different neighborhoods her old acquaintances would be finishing up their internships and semesters abroad. They’d be starting careers. She had only a vague idea how it must be. None of that seemed real, here. She lived in a place they would have driven through very quickly, and only if there were no avoiding it. She longed for a few words from people they would have found of no interest, invisible, if they passed them on the street. But her old friends were of no interest to her now. She wondered how she could ever have managed to overlook their complacent superiority, their insufferable arrogance and ignorance. They were just the sort of people who tore down wonderful old houses, no matter who cherished them, who destroyed beautiful old neighborhoods, oblivious to their history, who were reckless of everyone’s happiness but their own.

Two years and a succession of minimum-wage temporary jobs later, Margery was taking one evening class per semester and having to skip classes when her work schedule changed. There were only a few, furtive tenants left in the house, no children, no smiles.

There would have been no flowers either, but she snuck over one night and planted pansies in the faded purple and white tire, and when she rushed by at 2am from the sandwich shop where she was subbing for an alcoholic cashier whose brother owned the place, she would pause to see if the soil needed the gallon of water she toted.

She rushed because at that hour on that bus route she was apprehensive. She felt sick. She felt worn. But not when she nurtured the pansies. They responded to Margery’s touch like pets, eager to please and be pleased. They bloomed large and bright in that place as though in a sheltered garden tended by a woman who could spend time as freely as she liked.

One afternoon, having paused to admire her pansies, she finally slipped through the front door of the house. It was in order to avoid an exchange student she had known in her traveling days who was getting off the bus. (What could they have to say to one another now? Are you seeing anyone? Yes. No. I love a house. She couldn’t even offer him coffee.)

She forgot all about him when she closed the door behind her. It was as though she had been dreaming, and now the dream was finally taking a good turn. The hall was a wash of vertigo. Her heart was pounding with a back beat. Then she discovered the tile, a splendid mosaic of royal blue, yellow, green, and a white that was aging like real pearls. For a while she just stood and looked, waking as she found herself wiping the dust away with her fingers.

Someone had been prying the pieces loose. Everything else that could have been sold for scrap was already torn out.

She walked around. The oak floor was scarred with things dragged hastily through. It was layered over with grime. But grime was easy to look past. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to drink everything in. She smelled—dirt—but beneath that, there was something else.

She went back to the tiles, trying to trace the faint scent. She couldn’t think what it was. But it was pleasant. Beside the front door there was a row of mailboxes. In the wall opposite, papered rather than tiled, were two doors with numbers on them. She thought she saw a fragment of a red flocked design in the corner where a leak was peeling away layers brown with age.

Someone had heard Margery’s footsteps. The door on the left cracked open. He was holding a gun. He put it in his pocket. She looked away, at the names over the mailboxes. Sorry, wrong house, she said. She turned her back on him and left, wondering if she would she ever see past the hall.

One day a sign on the front door said the house had been condemned by the department of licenses and inspections. Margery had been laid off from a decent clerical job, and was passing by on the way to the unemployment office, on the way back to temping. She heard a stereo in a downstairs apartment. Several days later the sign was gone, but people were moving out.

Margery wondered whether the house dreamed of the days before wrecking balls and looters, transients and squatters, leaks and roaches and feral kids, if it was able to escape to its past or dream its future. She was sure it had a life beyond the quiet street where the store fronts that weren’t boarded up were for check cashing emporiums, loan sharks or food banks.

She wondered whether the house minded harboring the homeless at night, and thought perhaps it didn’t. She wondered if they wandered somehow into its mysterious heart, if they felt its awareness. She wished she had the nerve to crawl through a cellar window where the bars were broken, and stay til morning.

She sought the house in every change of weather at every time of day, to see the changes in its façade, in its face. She was skipping classes anyway, while she looked for a third temping job, or a better, permanent position.

Her own face went on changing; it was growing stoic and wary but still openly compassionate, a troubled face, and her eyes were duller. She always seemed to have a cold or a sore throat or both.

It was December when she saw the police cars double-parked out front.

She was passing the house numerous times a day, working a grueling schedule to pay for tuition and a room rent increase. (Who didn’t prey on the desperate? The guy who owned the laundromat had sure seen her coming.)

She was distressed, rushing forward for a moment, as though it were any of her business what the police were doing there. She smelled roses briefly as she walked away. Bourbon roses, she thought.

Sometimes people sat out front drinking out of paper bags. But there was something hidden in these faces. Missing. She didn’t make eye contact. Sometimes there were people upstairs lowering small packages out of windows. The police came again and someone boarded up the windows and put padlocks on the doors. There was no longer any evidence of regular tenants, no shortage of derelicts.

Margery began to take away the worst of the trash that touched the house itself. She carried a grocery bag, and used a rag she found to pick broken bottles and chunks of glass from the stoop. With a strange joy she realized she was free to put crumbs there now, to feed the sparrows. That she might sit on the stoop herself.

She walked all around the building, then, starting from behind where the chain link fence had been split, and going right through the hip high weeds and into the side alleys. She was not afraid. Death didn’t frighten her. And something told her the house was just resting with its memories. It was not dead.

Suddenly it occurred to her that these days couldn’t last forever; she wanted something from the house that she could keep with her, always. She was frightened that one day the lot would be empty, there would be bulldozers and cranes and nothing visible of the house at all.

She wanted to give the house something more than her attention, to give it something of herself, for always, too. If this was strange, so what. She had no one to answer to, no one to argue that the love she felt for the house might be irrational, or unrequited. She had none but her own heart to trust.

She found a coin. She didn’t really have to look for it, she just scraped her toe in the ground near a cellar window, carefully, since there were so many fragments of glass embedded in the mud in that spot where the soil was foul with oil, and the grass wouldn’t grow anymore. From there she walked a straight line to where bits of old lawn started up in little patches again. She bent forward looking for four leaves among the clovers and found it, an 1898 Morgan silver dollar, an eagle on the back and a woman she supposed was Lady Liberty on the front.

Lady Liberty. That had a nice ring to it. It would make a nice alias. Or it might be the lady was a goddess lending her inspiring likeness to the coin. She had a sweetly indomitable face.

Margery pulled the ornate silver stick from her coiled hair and half buried it where the coin had been.

She searched the rubbish in front of the house until she found a length of telephone wire. She took this home and picked apart the rubber insulation to get at the fine copper wire inside. It took her all evening to make a net bag out of the wire that would hold the goddess coin safely on a knotted cord around her neck.

She was wearing this the next day when she saw the boards pulled away from one of the doors at the back of the house. The room behind it had been the old kitchen.

It was partly below ground, because of the hill. She walked through the three rooms on that floor, one behind the other, empty but for trash, mostly vagrants’ carpet remnants, newspapers, and the detritus from fast food meals.

The cellar door and another door at the top of the stairs were locked. The walls had been white. Most of the doors had been replaced or torn off their hinges, but one door in the kitchen, presumably the door to a pantry, was old wood. Under the steel padlock an iron latch was half off as though someone had thought to scavenge it and got tired of prying. The ceiling was high. A wire dangled from the center. There were lots of windows.

There must have been an array of pipes missing, sharply-angled corridors to help contain any unpopular odors such as the corned beef and cabbage they would have had on St. Patrick’s Day. Were those the remains of a Rockingham teapot? No, of course not, it was dirty brown glass that had caught the light, from some poor wanderer’s cheap bottle of beer.

She wanted to sit on the floor and close her eyes and imagine the house becoming itself around her, a cast iron nutcracker in the shape of a bulldog attaching itself to a sturdy plank table, hooks reaching down to catch the copper pans flying toward them, but felt that it wasn’t safe, she ought to go.

She kicked up a fragment of very old cardboard from a box which had once held a top hat. There was an advertisement for the hat pasted on it. She held this, breathing in its fragrance of lingering time, as the afternoon darkened. The days were getting very short again. She put the cardboard in the pocket of her skirt.

After she came through the window to the alley someone as dark and thin as a shadow slipped in.

When she went home that night she sat up in bed and closed her eyes and imagined herself back in the house. She willed her hands to feel the rough oak on the kitchen floor, pretended to breathe, not the odors of urine, spilled beer, mildew and mold and wet wood, but a wood stove, bread dough rising on a shelf at the back, little bundles of lavender in a pile of tablecloths.

There was no heat in her closet room, and not enough food. She was out of work, with no unemployment check and no prospect of a job until she stopped having the flu, which didn’t seem likely when she couldn’t afford a doctor to prescribe any medications to set her on her feet.

She continued to take a walk to see the house every morning. She went to a consignment shop once a week until she’d sold everything she had worth selling except the hot plate and her sleeping bag and the few treasured bits of jewelry she kept in her purse. She began to feel badly enough, upon waking, to wonder whether she would manage to see the house that day. But though her steps slowed, she always went, and she always felt better.

One January morning she came downstairs to the laundromat to use the bathroom to get ready to look for an interview. She surprised a man, who had braved the cold in threadbare denim, using a crowbar to pry open the coin box on one of the washing machines. He turned, scattering coins to the floor.

Jackpot, Margery said, smiling. She was happy for him. She walked back upstairs.

Later she thought she saw violets growing at the house, by the front stoop. She rubbed her eyes to bring them into focus, and they disappeared. She glimpsed a glittering white damask tablecloth hanging from a wash line, but only for a second. She began to think, as she turned the corner, that someone somewhere played a piano, though it was just an impression, and no particular tune.

The walk became increasingly painful as the weather turned stormy and cold. She put a baked potato in each pocket to keep her hands warm until the day she found the electricity in the room had been turned off, and she had to defrost her toes over a steam vent down the street.

Late one February afternoon a weakness took hold of her. She needed to sit down, somewhere no one would see her.

She looked longingly at the house. The kitchen door was off its hinges, though it had been padlocked as always when she last walked by. She headed for it numbly, floatingly, not seeming to make contact with the ground, and it occurred to her as she sat again on the kitchen floor that it was so cold she might die of hypothermia if she didn’t collect herself quickly and go back to her sleeping bag over the laundromat. At least the dryers vented on either side of her. Still, she stayed, and thought.

The laundromat wouldn’t be home much longer. Her savings were gone. She was several months behind in the rent, (pittance though it was, or would have seemed, in the days when she and her companions explored Europe like protégées of Henry James.) Maybe she should bring her sleeping bag here. Maybe there was a nook she could hide in. Perhaps she could enter the pantry. Perhaps bar it, for protection, from the inside. There might not be any really frigid winter days after this one.

If there were, she would gamble with Fate for her happiness. Let it save her, or not, just as it would save or abandon the house.

Death was a safe place. Maybe it was the only safe place. That was why people sometimes killed the ones they loved—so nothing bad would ever happen to them. That’s why her father should have taken her with him. Instead he had abandoned her. He should have guessed her mother would flee the daughter’s face that so resembled his, once he’d saved himself. That she and her mother would blame each other for his pain, and the way he’d ended it. Maybe he’d gone to a place of healing on the other side, if there was an other one. She wished them both well, without wishing to see them again.

Time passed quickly as she daydreamed, nodding, thinking sometimes that she heard a fire kindling, and when it was hot enough, she heard coffee beans rattling in a pan, smelled them roasting. The smell was real for a moment, edging out her numbness, and the blood beating in her ears was like a familiar voice telling her to wake. A house, she thought, was home because it was part of you. It was a permanent refuge. It was forever.

She heard the door open, footsteps, but she was stone cold now, past getting up quickly, past caring, too sleepy to open her eyes. There was a crash, but she didn’t hear it. She was having a feverish conversation with the house. She was beseeching it to let her in.


When the authorities found the body, it was tucked under a faded quilt that fell to pieces when they lifted it onto the stretcher. A few down feathers, blindingly white in their dingy surroundings, drifted overhead as though they had also disturbed a pillow.

As they closed the body bag and carried out the remains of a short life, a plain needle made of wood, the sort she might have used to knit socks, fell from her coiled hair, and there was a sound that sent chills racing up and down the spine of the only one who heard it, a policewoman who was the first on the scene long before dawn, when the dark recesses of the house might have hidden (the veteran thought) anything but this—it was the loud cheerful whistle of a good teapot heated to a boil, ending in a whisper as it was taken from the flame.

And the words came to her, from nowhere that made any sense: our Margery is home.

© 2007 Sue Marra Byham

Ghosts in an Empty House

Anyone interested in an exploration of human consciousness must confront the touchy subject of ghosts. Unfortunately, purely scientific methods of investigation haven’t yielded inarguable results, except in the opinion of those willing to trust their own instincts, or the instincts of those they deem trustworthy. Ghost Hunters: William James And The Search For Scientific Proof Of Life After Death by Deborah Blum (The Penguin Press, NY, 2006), for example, details some experiments that strike me as conclusive, yet reviews of the book generally state the work of both the American and British Societies For Psychical Research (SPR) as having proved nothing--which suggests a disconnect in the definition of "proof."

Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House (1906) is a fictionalized account of one of his own inquiries under the auspices of the British SPR; it rings true if you’re inclined to trust the author, as I am, and illustrates the concept of ghostly images re-enacting a scene involving an extraordinary degree of emotional power:

“…it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the goose flesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent cause.”

Blackwood's haunted house is dangerous in its ability to invoke a perhaps deadly fear in the beholder; that this involves an entity able to take advantage of that fear is ambiguously implied—if fear kills, can anyone know precisely how?

“He at once suppressed the memory of stories he had heard of ‘physical mediums’ and their dangerous phenomena; for if these were true, and either his aunt or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were simply aiding to focus the forces of a haunted house already charged to the brim. It was like walking with unprotected lamps among uncovered stores of gunpowder…the wholesale depletion of his vital forces…was for himself, the chief horror of the whole experience.”

Blackwood says in a 1938 introduction that "The Empty House" tells of “a commonplace mind that became clairvoyant and clairaudient from a flash of terror” and that “in most of these stories there is usually an average man who, either through a flash of terror or of beauty, becomes stimulated into extra-sensory experience." He mentions “that unfurnished haunted house in a Brighton square where I sat up to see a ghost with a woman beside me whose rather wrinkled face suddenly blanched smooth as the face of a child, frightening me far more than the ghost I never actually saw…” (Best Ghost Stories Of Algernon Blackwood, ed. E.F. Bleiler, Dover Publications, 1973)

E.F. Benson’s A Tale Of An Empty House (1925) (the title a tribute to Blackwood) illustrates the same concept, but depicts a greater degree of malevolence surviving or embedded in the ghostly scene, so potent as to physically attack a living witness. Again the violence is contained within the scene which remains somehow impressed upon the house, but there is something more, a consciousness capable of perceiving an interloper.

“At that moment not fright, but fear, which is a very different matter, closed in on me. Fright, as I understand it, is an emotion, startling, but not unnerving; you may under the finger of fright spring aside, you may scream, you may shout, you have the command of your muscles. But as that limping step moved down the passage I felt fear, the hand of the nightmare that, as it clutches, paralyses and inhibits not action only, but thought. I waited frozen and speechless for what should happen next.” (The Collected Ghost Stories Of E. F. Benson, ed. Richard Dalby, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., NY 1996)

Many who are uncomfortable with the idea of sentient spirits are o.k. with the re-enactment concept (termed veridical phantasms by the SPR). This is reassuringly sane thinking linked to the magic of television: ghosts are merely reflections of those whose time is past, they can’t hurt us any more than we can be hurt through watching villains on a tv screen, and anything more complicated than that must be fiction.

But admitting the possibility of ghosts isn't the same as confirming their existence. Although everyone seems to know at least one true ghost story, publicly, many people would sooner admit to binge drinking than to a ghost sighting. Imagine the likely reaction if a candidate for president announced he planned to spend his first night in the White House in Lincoln’s bedroom with a ouija board. Apparently it is still not generally acceptable to speak of seeing, much less communing with, anything noncorporeal.

Does soul=spirit=ghost=mind=brain? If we could somehow thresh out our definitions to most people’s satisfaction, could we then agree to let the dying go in peace and stop fighting over whether removing life support machinery constitutes murder where a victim of modern medicine is, by his own definition, already dead?

Volume 1 Number 2 of H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror http://www.wildsidepress.com includes a different kind of ghost story, "A Ghost Can Be Born" by Ray Russell, a case of astral traveling apparently suggested to the author by the premature senility or pre-senile dementia of a close friend (author Charles Beaumont):

“Must every molecule of flesh be cold before a ghost can be born? Who says so… If spirit is mind, and mind is brain, and a brain be all but snuffed out…then why may not a ghost be formed, a ghost composed of that which is already dead, those faculties forever dark, the part of Chet that mattered…”

The category of ghosts consisting of some evidence of a visit made by the dead to their survivors, particularly at the moment of death, has been well-documented throughout history in letter and literature, as well as in reports compiled by students of the occult. FATE Magazine’s department My Proof of Survival: Factual accounts by our readers of survival after death is a collection of readers’ reports, half a dozen or so vivid narratives monthly. http://www.fatemag.com It is inconceivable that any family is entirely bereft of these visitation experiences—unless they refuse to acknowledge them.

Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney (founders, with Henry Sidgwick, of the British SPR) were thre Society's chief ghost investigators. Frederic (F.W.H.) Myers eventually wrote what is still the definitive scholarly volume on the subject, originally published in 1903, Human Personality And Its Survival Of Bodily Death. (My copy is the 1961 volume from University Books, Inc., ed. Susy Smith.)


Myers’ description of a ghost as a “manifestation of persistent energy” would seem to cover all the bases. William James, in a peevish 1903 review of the book quoted by Smith, wrote: “Anyone with a healthy sense of evidence, a sense not methodically blunted by the sectarianism of ‘science,’ ought now to feel that exalted sensibilities and memories, veridical phantasms, haunted houses, trances with supernormal faculty, and even experimental thought-transference, are natural kinds of phenomena which ought, just like other natural events, to be followed up with scientific curiosity.” Yet these are still radical constructs in 2006.

If you buy the idea that the world has been progressing over the centuries from ignorance to enlightenment, superstition to science, you are willing to take intuition for guesswork, synchronicity for coincidence, vision for hallucination caused by fatigue or a trick of the light.

Consider instead the idea that when we assume our forebears suffered from a lack of sophisticated technology we overlook the possibility that they lived in an extraordinary state of awareness. It’s not much of a stretch—we already take it for granted that someone who loses one of the five senses compensates by further developing the remaining four.

How might man have experienced his world, absent the option of imposing his will upon it? Is man evolving away from greater perceptive skills? Or are these skills becoming necessary again as we reach the limit of our power to alter the world or modify nature?

How much of “ancestor worship” may have arisen from an awareness of the continued presence of ancestors? Were ghost stories told in winter because cold and starvation brought these spirits into clearer focus?

Is there a thinner “veil between the worlds” on October 31? Is there some sort of veil we may lift at will whenever we truly desire a peek into the unknown, or when changing seasons remind us of the mysteries of birth and death? Is there a sixth sense that reveals we are like fish in a bowl, only dimly aware of a world beyond the glass?

Is there an altered state of consciousness involved in the perception of ghosts? The closing words of Blackwood and Benson’s tales are suggestive.

Benson’s: “…next moment we were out in the pelting rain, running for the ford. The deluge was sweet to my soul, it seemed to wash away that horror of great darkness and that odour of corruption in which we had been plunged.”

Blackwood’s: “With trembling hands Shorthouse opened the front door, and they walked out into the moonlight and drew a deep breath of the cool night air blowing in from the sea.”

What do you think of the altered state theory? It would explain the disparity of experience—or the lack of any experience at all—among those who encounter a ghost. For example, an informal narrative of my own, collected in Michelle Moore's Haunted Nights paranormal magazine, Volume 3, available via print or download at http://www.lulu.com/content/357807

Many such occurrences, such as the appearance of ghosts on the Gettysburg battlefield, are very well documented; there are a number of places online for serious or casual psychic investigators to share or augment such ghostly experiences, including:

http://www.ghost-stalker.com/

http://www.ghostsofgettysburg.com

http://www.atouchofdeath.com/

There's also an excellent Guide to Supernatural Fiction at http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/users/tartarus/database.htm

Til next time—thanks for stopping by!

The Centaur

Mike Ashley wrote in Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life that Blackwood regarded The Centaur as “the favourite among his novels, because it best represented all he was trying to achieve” and was “closest to his own personal outlook.”

Here is a passage from The Centaur describing a character with a lot of Blackwood in him, named Terence O’Malley; does it remind you of anyone else?

“Occasionally, and at the time of this particular ‘memorable adventure,’ aged thirty, he acted as foreign correspondent; but even as such he was the kind of newspaper man that not merely collects news, but discovers, reveals, creates it. Wise in their generation, the editors who commissioned him remembered when his copy came in that they were editors. A roving commission among the tribes of the Caucasus was his assignment at the moment, and a better man for the purpose would have been hard to find, since he knew beauty, had a keen eye for human nature, divined what was vital and picturesque, and had, further, the power to set it down in brief terms born directly of his vivid emotions.”

To me these words, written in 1911, scream the name of arguably the greatest writer of our own time. As do these:

“Ten men will describe in as many different ways a snake crossing their path; but, besides these, there exists an eleventh man who sees more than the snake, the path, the movement. O’Malley was some such eleventh man…
“The others reasoned where the snake was going, its length in inches and its speed per second, while he, ignoring such superficial details, plunged as it were into the very nature of the creature’s being… For him mere intellectuality, by which the modern world sets such store, was a valley of dry bones… It missed the essential inner truth…”

The writer I have in mind wasn’t one in eleven—he was unique. But he said that as a young man he was greatly influenced by Henry Miller, who has said that HE was greatly influenced by Algernon Blackwood. So there is a tangible connection between Blackwood and—Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

The farther I got in reading The Centaur, the more the allusions to O’Malley’s life and work intrigued me as they might also apply to the young Hunter Thompson of The Proud Highway (volume one of Thompson’s letters, edited by Douglas Brinkley), which I’m now re-reading. O’Malley is not a dead ringer for Thompson, by any means. But there is, I think, an evident kinship.

It’s fascinating to imagine what, if Hunter Thompson had found a mescaline pathway to the central vision of Blackwood’s Centaur, he would have made of the occasion—or better yet, what would have happened had he met, in real life, the gentleman O’Malley meets on the boat. Maybe O’Malley couldn’t hang; throughout much of The Centaur he definitely has The Fear. But I think they’d have enjoyed knowing each other. Blackwood himself would have had far more stamina than his alter ego, I think.

Blackwood’s introduction to mind-altering drugs included at least one bout with hashish pills (an experience he turned into an article) and a month’s worth of morphine injections, though it may be supposed that he dropped these experiments in favor of a mysticism fueled largely by theosophy. All of Blackwood’s works, like Thompson’s, would be based on personal experience.

Algernon Blackwood arrived in New York in September 1892; he and the friend he stayed with had $60 between them. Hunter Thompson arrived in New York with $119 in December 1957, and moved into a friend’s place. Both Blackwood and Thompson were outdoorsmen in excellent physical condition who supplemented their incomes early on with modeling work. In establishing themselves in the city as journalists, they dealt with several of the same publications. They found New York to be a terrific spectacle full of stimulating people but largely horrifying, particularly in contrast to the wild places they loved. In a l958 letter, Thompson described New York as a “huge tomb full of writhing, hungry death.” That pithy summation dovetails nicely with Blackwood’s opinion; Ashley titled the first New York chapter of his Blackwood biography “The Depths of Hell.”

O’Malley’s (and Blackwood’s) need to go to nature for succor and refreshment after the enervating experiences which drove them to write are expressed in terms with which Thompson would have identified in The Centaur:

“He (O’Malley) often would compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from ordinary social intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a successful gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit to the woods or mountains. The former, as a rule, evaporated in a single day; the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and months.”

They had similar feelings about grey flannel suits and the whole concept of civilization: “Civilization, he (O’Malley) loved to say, had blinded the eyes of men, filling them with dust instead of vision.”

Afain and again Blackwood and Thompson stood at the intersecting edges of untamed nature and untrammeled mind, rocking on their heels, and looked over, seeking truth— then struggled to convey in words what can’t be described in words, and succeeded--by imbuing their writing with the palpable passion of a unique voice. It’s impossible to dissect the strange genius of either man--you can only speak dumbly about words you don’t so much read, as feel…

“…perception came to them in general, massive sensations rather than divided up neatly into five channels—that they felt all over so to speak, and that all the senses, as in an overdose of haschish, become one single sense.” (The Centaur)

Blackwood wasn’t widely hailed for The Centaur, which is difficult in that it doesn’t read well as a novel. That Blackwood has filled it with his own spirit and must have greatly enjoyed being immersed in the writing of it, is evidenced by the many other writers quoted in its pages; these were the writers most important to him. The gist of their perspective is that mankind has come too far from its primitive roots to perceive the layers of consciousness which include Gaia and the entire universe beyond—that every new civilization has diminished rather than improved the human condition.

To some of those who foretell the end of the world as we know it and the descent into utter chaos, this might conceivably be a comforting thought—that a return to nature would open the doors of perception, and man would no longer be limited to the use of a tiny sliver of his brain.

But ultimately O’Malley sought “the blending of his being with the Cosmic Consciousness,” submerging rather than developing his personality; Thompson embodied what he wrote in a 1958 letter, (The Proud Highway) “We strive to be ourselves.”

In the beginning pages of The Centaur, though, where O’Malley is introduced as an intense young man at odds with all current concepts of society and civilization, a provocateur with no fixed residence but a tiny room full of his books and papers, and a satchel ready for traveling, I saw a kind of preliminary ghost of the young man who would become Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Later, in the world glimpsed by O’Malley that was populated by gods of man’s own making, I saw a likely limbo for the legendary Lono:

“He felt them now, these stately Powers men once called the gods, but felt them from a distance; and from a distance, too, they saw and watched him come. He knew their gorgeous forms half dimmed by a remote and veiled enchantment; knew that they reared aloft like ancient towers, ruined by neglect and ignorance, starved and lonely, but still hauntingly splendid and engaging, still terrifically alive.” (The Centaur)

It would be Thompson who woke that god:

“Because I AM Lono…and every night around sundown I crawl out and collect all the joints, coins, and other strange offerings thrown over the stake fence by natives and others of my own kind. So don’t worry about me…” (from a letter to Ralph Steadman also reprinted in Songs of the Doomed.)

Here is another powerful bit of imagery from Thompson’s The Curse of Lono which brings to mind a certain passage in The Centaur (which I won’t quote because it’s integral to the unfolding of that story):

“Over the side. Into the deep, blowing air like a porpoise as he slid away from the rocks and out to the open sea, disappearing into the ocean with the atavistic grace of some mammal finally remembering where it really wanted to be.” (For the full story, see pgs. 202 & 203 of the 2005 Taschen edition.)

Neither The Curse of Lono nor The Centaur has received the attention they deserve; neither the critics nor the authors’ fans wholly embraced either book, preferring other, greater works. But in my opinion, the closest we readers can come to meeting Blackwood and Thompson is to look for them in the books that come the nearest to self-portrait. And curiously, it is in these same works that they most nearly approach one another.

Thanks for stopping by!

A Prisoner in Fairyland

Algernon Blackwood's A Prisoner in Fairyland is an extraordinary accomplishment that works on several levels. The story is firmly grounded in Blackwood's own reality; "Uncle Paul" and his characters are Blackwood and the people and places he loved best. (Places are spiritual entities in Blackwood's work and must be counted as characters in their own right.) It's grounded in occult science, with Blackwood nudging the reader to certain conclusions which might be termed spiritualist, pantheist, theosophist, etc.; the germs of the ideas discussed--there's a great deal of explanation and discussion for a novel, but this is something more than a novel--are arguably universal truths. You'll find references to concepts such as thought transference, astral travel, Akashic record, nature of reality, illusion of death, visualization, significance of light, dreams, daydreams, Gaia, desire as a force., etc. There's even a homemade planchette.

You don't stop reading this book--you wake from its pages. Some readers may wish it had been revised to curtail Blackwood's tendency to ramble, but others will delight in the rambling, because those are the parts that lure the reader likewise into a reverie, and they do much to establish the powerfully contemplative mood of the whole.

The author intends that the reader sense him eagerly looking on, nodding encouragement. Such a construction can be fatal to any book, particularly when it's accompanied by a serious intent to persuade the reader to a certain outlook or view, but Blackwood manages beautifully here. At one point he actually states his premise: "'That's the mind wandering," explained the eldest child of the three. 'Always follow a wandering mind. It's quite safe. Mine's going presently too. We'll all go off together.'" The eldest child, judging by appearances, is the adult, "Uncle Paul," and the author, Blackwood.

The women in the book are very much trussed to horrid pedestals; I'm inclined to forgive Blackwood this because he was in love and this book is in part an expression of his yearning, though this doesn't excuse him. Regardless, the women are bohemians according to the middle class British values of that era.

The latter part of the book betrays a strangely Christian slant which may reflect the author's hope of reaching a broader audience, or (given the fact that the magic here is rooted in childhood memories brilliantly interpreted) he has simply reverted to the language of his youth. The moralizing is briefly drearly and largely inoffensive; it will add spice to any in-depth discussion of the work.

In fact, if you enjoy a good debate, this is a good book to lend your friends in anticipation of many hours' animated conversation, with or without stimulating refreshments. Or, get the book online at
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=6021

Thanks for stopping by!

John Silence

A late March post. This month was one of those jarring times in which you’re suddenly forced to view your place in the world from an entirely new angle. So it was good to delve into Algernon Blackwood, and if I’d been able to dwell entirely in the zone I might have managed to read everything extant and post about it by April Fool’s Day.

But pranks will have to wait for next year, and I’ve read or re-read only 5 Blackwood volumes so far. Here’s the first.

Blackwood, Algernon, The Complete John Silence Stories, (Dover Horror Classics), edited & with an introduction by S. T. Joshi, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1997, originally John Silence, Physician Extraordinary, 1908 and Day and Night Stories, 1917.

The John Silence stories feature an investigator of psychic phenomena who is a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes, almost an alter ego. His maxim: If you pay attention to impressions, and do not allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.

By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich by accident, and by choice—a doctor. That a man of independent means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them, and greatly to his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices.

Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner…He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large class of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the arts, could not afford the price of a week’s comforts merely to be told to travel. And it was these he desired to help…

…the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions…

The tales are less polished than Doyle’s, rougher in some places, but in others they soar into poetry which compels in part because you feel the author’s own keen yearning astonishment at the wonders of consciousness or the glories of an untamed land.

…presently…a sound of horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognized nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant.

There was a queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music seemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in the rigging of invisible ships; or—and the simile leaped up in his thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion—a chorus of animals, of wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and singing as animals will, to the moon…

Blackwood was a Theosophist and a member of the Golden Dawn; under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research he investigated reports of paranormal activity. Silence is based on someone he knew, and full of Blackwood’s own earnest ideals.

Of one of Silence’s clients he writes: He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all of the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn’t want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth.

So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were over…

The tales open with the authenticity of his insider’s view, yet depart into a glowing weirdness that is dark fantasy at its best.

One concept stressed throughout is the power of positive—or negative--thinking:

Thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.

Learn how to think… and you have learned to tap power at its source.

All perception… is the result of vibrations…

…time and space are merely forms of thought.

This was the first of Blackwood’s works to be published in the U.S., where nasty rumors that he was involved in black magic only added a cachet to his reputation. Like Conan Doyle, he was contacted by people in strange circumstances who were desperately seeking help, and like Doyle, he apparently took up those cases which seemed to merit his intervention. Taking into consideration the nature of the requests it isn’t surprising that he kept no record. Mike Ashley has done a superb job of ferreting out what details remain.

What are your thoughts about "thought"?

More from me later this month. Thanks for stopping by!

Algernon Blackwood

I read something recently about the medical definitions of illusion and hallucination. An illusion is a misconception: the humming of the refrigerator perceived as someone chanting something in a foreign language, or a crumpled autumn leaf taken for a sparrow. There’s always some basis for an illusion, whereas a hallucination arises unaided from the mind of the beholder.

Does it? So said the article, written by a man taking drugs to combat Parkinson’s. There was no mention of the possibility of external sources, or of factoring these mind-altering drugs into a discussion of metaphysics.

I’m still pondering the nature of reality and the ways in which people deal with it, avoid it, or somehow alter it to suit themselves. I’m wondering why some people literally live to find an answer to the eternal questions, agreeing with Hermann Hesse that “Every man’s life is a road toward himself,” while others relate to these concepts--life or afterlife, dreaming or awake, conscious or subconscious--only during rare moments of crisis.

Who are the mystics and visionaries and who are the lunatics and the mentally ill, assuming there’s a difference? Are they arbitrary definitions, depending only on a judgment of competence? Is one person’s vision another’s hallucination because the first person handles it calmly and the second flies off the handle? Or are the experiences realms apart?

I’m also cleaning out my personal library, taking stock of the books I think of as “keepers,” which I plan to reread or use as reference, and those worth reading that I’d urge on my friends. Meanwhile I’m always hungry for new books and looking for recommendations. There are many places online to find booklists, but I have yet to find one ambitious enough to embrace every variety of book that touches on the nature of reality: fiction of all sorts, myths and legends, poetry, non-fiction from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, journals, letters, biography, art…. So I’m going to take a stab at posting one here, not by harvesting all the titles I can find, but in the course of a leisurely, once a month discussion of ideas old and new which I hope others will add to as they stumble into my virtual woods.

I’m eager to read Mike Ashley’s biography of Algernon Blackwood, and to re-read my collection of Blackwood's supernatural fiction. I consider it a crime that his A Prisoner in Fairyland is out of print! It is online, thanks to Project Gutenberg: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=6021

More on Algernon Blackwood next month. In the meantime, here’s a link to information about him, and an interview with Ashley: http://hem.fyristorg.com/bd/ab/index.html

Thanks for stopping by!

Happy New Year

Welcome to my web nook, the link between my own wild woods and their imagined, virtual and prototypical counterparts, those being the best terms I can think of for all the possible dimensions in which they exist.

Wood Castle, for instance, looks a lot different to me than it would to a visitor. A visitor might miss the butterfly garden and see only the stockaded remains of an old aboveground pool. A visitor expecting something in stone and turrets might not experience their incarnation in vinyl and wood. But any home is still, twenty-first century or not, a refuge and a fortress and a piece of earth to nurture and protect along with its wildlife, a haven for family and friends, a headquarters for their activities. State of mind has a lot to do with it. Some people inhabit temporary shelters all their lives, never developing any connection with their surroundings. Others, if they have only a windowless room with a spider in it, will abide there wholeheartedly, if perhaps half in a land of dreams.

Isn't life mostly what happens in our thoughts plus what we choose to notice in our surroundings and what we care to remember of our actions or lack of action, or what happens to us despite our other plans? Two people experience the same cataclysm, and one reacts with sometimes disturbing optimism, and another with sometimes hilarious pessimism. They grow or they self-destruct, but never for the same reason. However much they shared in the bare facts connected with the event, they experienced it differently.

Imagination is power. That's what I'm thinking about today.

Thanks for stopping by!