Collected Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  First published in GSA, reprinted in CGS. Manuscript (incomplete) in KCL MS MRJ:A/3. In the Preface to CGS, MRJ claimed ‘I only recollect that I wrote “Number 13” in 1899’, which was the date of his first visit to Denmark. It seems more likely that the story was written in 1900, after the second visit, when MRJ stayed in Viborg. May have been read for the first time at Christmas 1903 (Cox I, 133). The MS version contains the following rejected opening, in faint, pencilled handwriting which is often near-indecipherable:

  Too few Englishmen travel in Jutland. Too few that is if we are taking the unselfish view that the pleasantest part of the [earth] would right [sic] be visited by the largest possible number of people: not one too few, on the other hand if we are explaining what are most likely our genuine feeling [sic] that there ought to be certain parts of this earth kept sacred from the mass of tourists. Still I am not really apprehensive that Jutland will ever become a crowded tourist resort. Its beauties are of a tranquil, a tame, a melancholy kind. Its literature is luckily not popularized by translations, and its sights in the way of [smudged word], galleries and museums are few. I am therefore the less afraid that I shall do it the disservice of bringing the curse of trippers and hotel coupons [?] upon it by singing its praises. Perhaps the story that I am about to tell may even have the opposite effect.

  48 Viborg: ‘Sacred Hill’. Early capital of Jutland, Denmark, and originally a centre of pagan worship; largely rebuilt after a fire of 27 June 1726. MRJ first visited Denmark in 1899 on a cycling holiday with his friends James McBryde and Will Stone. The three did not stay in Viborg that year, but did when they returned to Denmark in 1900. ‘Perhaps’, MRJ wrote in E&K, ‘the expeditions I made in [McBryde’s] company to Denmark and Sweden … were the most blissful that I ever had’ (p. 144). The idea for ‘Number 13’ ‘was suggested by Will Stone’ (Lubbock, 32).

  Hald: south-west of Viborg; Bishop Jörgen Friis was imprisoned in Hald Castle (see note to p. 51).

  Finderup: King Erik Glipping (Erik V of Denmark) was mysteriously murdered in Finderup in 1286; Marsk Stig Andersen was amongst those convicted of the murder, though the details remain unclear.

  Preisler’s … the Phœnix … the Golden Lion: the first two are, or were, genuine Viborg hotels: MRJ stayed in Preisler’s in August 1900. The Golden Lion is fictitious.

  Sognekirke … Raadhuus: parish church and city hall.

  Mr. Anderson: the original name of Dennistoun, protagonist of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’. May be used as an allusion to Hans Christian Andersen, whom MRJ greatly admired, and translated in 1930: ‘Hans Andersen and the old ballads had already prepared me to find in Denmark what I daresay a great many people do not look for there—a land of romance’ (E&K, 144). May also carry a concealed echo of the ‘Marsk Stig [Andersen]’ mentioned above.

  Rigsarkiv: public archive or record office.

  48 last days of Roman Catholicism in the country: Denmark officially became Lutheran in 1536; Viborg played a central role in the Danish Reformation, under the leadership of Hans Tausen (1494–1561). ‘Number 13’ implies a connection between Catholicism and occultism, or even satanism—see the reference to ‘the gross corruption and superstition of the Babylonish Church’; and like ‘Lost Hearts’ it makes allusion to the Faust myth: ‘he practised secret and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy’.

  49‘I Bog Mose, Cap. 22’: 1st Book of Moses [that is, Genesis], chapter 22; the story of Abraham and Isaac. The great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) used this passage as the starting point for his existentialist masterwork Fear and Trembling (1843).

  bagmen: commercial travellers.

  51 Bishop Jörgen Friis: last Catholic bishop of Viborg, from 1521 to 1536. Expelled from the see by the Reformation leader Hans Tausen, and imprisoned in his own dungeon at Hald Castle (see note to p. 48), 1536–8. ‘Jörgen Friis’ is amended in MS, corrected from MRJ’s own spelling, ‘Friisen’.

  Troldmand: ‘troll man’; a sorcerer. McBryde wrote and illustrated his The Story of a Troll-hunt as ‘a monument of this journey’ to Denmark (E&K, 144).

  terrier: ‘A register of landed property … an inventory of property or goods’ (SOED).

  52 stuepige: chambermaid.

  54 There was no Number 13 at all: MS follows this with a deleted sentence: ‘Well, I can only say that I must have been drunk [;] there is no other explanation. Drunk or dreaming: and I never do either.’

  Scarlet Woman: the Whore of Babylon. See Revelation 17: 4–5:

  And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hands full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

  And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

  Reformation exegesis often identified the Whore of Babylon with the Roman Catholic Church.

  casus belli: cause of war.

  Baekkelund: the reference is unclear, though may refer to a café or restaurant. Baekke is some 40 miles south of Hald. Baekkelund is a Norwegian surname.

  55 Aarhuus: city in eastern Jutland, some 25 miles south-west of Viborg.

  Silkeborg: 20 miles south of Viborg.

  57 Emily in the Mysteries of Udolpho: Emily St Aubert, the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s classic Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), is, like all Radcliffe’s heroines, much given to the composition of impromptu verses. MRJ makes particular reference here to the beginning of chapter 7: ‘and while she leaned out of her window … her ideas arranged themselves in the following lines …’.

  59 ‘omnis spiritus laudet Dominum’: from the closing verse of the last of the Psalms (Psalm 150: 6): ‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.’

  61 palæographer: a scholar of ancient writing.

  Hans Sebald Beham: 1500–50; German engraver and illustrator.

  62 Upsala: Uppsala; Swedish city, which MRJ visited in 1901.

  Daniel Salthenius: 1701–51. MRJ wrote that he had seen in Uppsala ‘two contracts with the devil written (and signed in blood) in 1718 by Daniel Salthenius, who was condemned to death for writing them. He escaped and died Professor of Divinity at Königsberg’ (Cox I, 110).

  COUNT MAGNUS

  Written 1901 or 1902; first published in GSA; reprinted in CGS. KCL MS MRJ:A/4 contains only one page of a draft version of the story.

  63 Horace Marryat’s … Danish Isles: Horace Marryat, Journal of a Residence in Jutland, the Danish Isles, and Copenhagen (2 vols., 1860). Marryat also wrote One Year in Sweden: Including a Visit to the Isle of Gotland (2 vols., 1862).

  Pantechnicon fire: the Pantechnicon was an enormous (2 acres of space) warehouse for storing furniture in Motcombe Street, Belgravia, London; destroyed by fire, 14 February 1874. ‘Pantechnicon’ (Greek for ‘all the crafts’) is now used to refer to any large furniture-removal van.

  64 Råbäck: MRJ visited Råbäck on his trip to Sweden with McBryde, August 1901.

  Dahlenberg’s Suecia antiqua et moderna: Erik Jönsson, Count Dahlbergh, Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna (Sweden Ancient and Modern), 3 vols. (1660–1716). A celebrated collection of engravings of Swedish architecture and landscape, compiled by Dahlbergh; in part aimed to display Sweden as a modern world power.

  De la Gardie: a prominent Swedish noble family. Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (1622–86) was variously Lord High Treasurer, Lord High Chancellor, and Lord High Steward of Sweden.

  65 mausoleum: MRJ visited the De la Gardie mausoleum at the Cistercian abbey of Varnhem in August 1901 (Cox II, 310).

  67 Black Pilgrimage: the ‘Black Pilgrimage’ to Chorazin may have been MRJ’s invention, but it has subsequently been taken up by a number of writers and occultists. For a study of this, see Rosemary Pardoe and Jane Nicholls, ‘The Black Pilgrimage’ (PT, 601–8).

  67 Skara: small cathedral city in southern Sweden, which MRJ visited in 1901.

  The book of the Phœnix … and
so forth: The Book of the Phoenix is a fictitious work of alchemical writing; The Book of the Thirty Words is also fictitious. Cox II (311) identifies the Book of the Toad with Trinity MS 1399, Bufo Gradiens (‘Toad Passant’). According to Jewish tradition, Miriam, the sister of Moses, was an alchemist: see Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chs. 5 and 6. The Turba Philosophorum (‘Assembly of the Philosophers’) is a Latin alchemical text reputedly dating to the twelfth century, but first published in 1572; translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite in 1896 as The Turba Philosophorum, or Assembly of the Sages.

  ‘Liber nigræ peregrinationis’: ‘Book of the Black Pilgrimage’.

  68 Chorazin: a city in Galilee rebuked by Christ for its faithlessness: see Matthew 11: 20–2. Because of this condemnation, Chorazin became identified as the birthplace of the Antichrist, a tradition which seems to have its origin in the seventh-century Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, a significant text for medieval eschatology—as MRJ, author of numerous studies of Latin apocalypses, certainly knew: he had written the entry on ‘Man of Sin and Antichrist’ for Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible (1898–1902), iii. 226–8, which makes reference to Pseudo-Methodius (PT, 604).

  ‘of the air’: the ‘Prince of the Air’ is Satan; see Ephesians 2: 2: ‘Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’ For an analysis of Satan as ruler of the air (hence his iconographic wings), see Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 246.

  71 devil-fish: generic term for ‘various large and formidable fishes’; usually refers to angler fish, but in this context most likely ‘the octopus, cuttlefish or other cephalopod’ (SOED).

  73 Skåne … Trollhättan: Skåne is the southernmost province of Sweden. Trollhättan is a city in southern Sweden, near Skara; its name, which means ‘Trolls’ hoods’, is clearly significant in the context of the story’s hooded demon. See also note to p. 51: Troldmand.

  On referring to No. 13, I find that he is a Roman priest in a cassock: see the connections between Roman Catholicism and devil-worship in ‘Number 13’, James’s other Scandinavian story.

  74 Harwich: major port in Essex, very near to Felixstowe (see note to p. 76: Burnstow).

  Belchamp St. Paul: a village in north Essex, very near the Suffolk border.

  ‘OH, WHISTLE, AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD’

  Probably written 1903; first read Christmas 1903. First published in GSA; reprinted in CGS. MS in the King’s School, Canterbury. The title is from a 1793 song by Robert Burns:

  O whistle, an’ I’ll come to you, my lad;

  O whistle, an’ I’ll come to you, my lad:

  Tho’ father and mither should baith gae mad,

  O whistle, an’ I’ll come to you, my lad.

  76 Professor of Ontography … St. James’s College: the Professor of Ontography is James’s coinage, though it means something like ‘Professor of Reality’ (fittingly, given Parkins’s avowed materialism). St James’s is a fictional Oxbridge college.

  Burnstow: a fictional version of Felixstowe, Suffolk, as MRJ notes in the Preface to CGS. See also ‘The Tractate Middoth’, p. 134, where William Garrett travels to Burnstow-on-Sea.

  Templars’ preceptory: ‘A subordinate community of the Knights Templars; the estate or manor supporting this, or its buildings’ (SOED). There is no such preceptory at Felixstowe.

  the Long: the long summer university vacation.

  78 Dr. Blimber: Dr Blimber is the principal of the Brighton school to which young Paul Dombey is sent in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. The quotation here is misremembered, or imagined—as the story’s note attests, ‘Mr Rogers was wrong’.

  79 Disney: an allusion to the Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University, endowed in 1851. MRJ applied unsuccessfully for this chair when it became vacant in 1892.

  80 round churches: the Templars did build round churches, such as Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge, or Temple church in the Inns of Court, London.

  feræ naturæ: of a wild nature.

  81 martello tower … Aldsey: Martello towers are small defensive forts and watchtowers built along the British and Irish coastline (and across the British Empire) during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Aldsey is fictional, though there are a number of Martello towers in and around Felixstowe.

  ‘Now I saw in my dream … meet him’: another misremembered quotation. This is from the account of Christian meeting the fiend Apollyon (‘the Destroyer’) in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress:

  Then I saw in my Dream, that these good Companions (when Christian was gone down to the bottom of the Hill) gave him a loaf of Bread, a bottle of Wine, and a cluster of Raisins; and then he went on his way.

  But now in this Valley of Humiliation poor Christian was hard put to it, for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul Fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. (Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford and New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1984), 46)

  82 boots: a servant responsible for cleaning shoes.

  Belshazzar: see Daniel 5 for the story of Belshazzar’s Feast. The Babylonian (Chaldean) king Belshazzar, son of Nebuchadnezzar, hosts an opulent feast, during which an invisible hand writes on the wall the words ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN’, which no one can understand except the prophet Daniel, who interprets the words to mean ‘God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it…. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting…. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.’ That night, Belshazzar is killed; his kingdom is conquered by Darius the Median.

  ‘I ought to be able to make it out’: understandably, there is some dispute as to what ‘FUR FLA FLE BIS’ means. ‘Fur Flabis Flebis’ can be translated as ‘Thief, you will blow, you will weep’; ‘Furbis Flabis Flebis’ as ‘You will blow, you will weep, you will go mad’. MRJ’s Eton tutor H. E. Luxmoore recalled hearing the story as ‘Fur flebis’ when it was read at Christmas 1903 along with ‘Number 13’ (Cox II, 312). It is probably safest to leave this as an ambiguous reference rather than commit to any one interpretation. The swastikas surrounding ‘QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT [VENIT]’ (‘Who is this who is coming?’) are in this context an ancient symbol prevalent in Eastern religions, though also adopted by Christianity.

  84 Experto crede: ‘Believe one who has experienced it’ (or ‘one who knows’).

  86 ‘like some great bourdon in a minster tower’: a long-unidentified quotation, though given the story’s recurring interest in misquotation and ambiguous interpretation, it may well be invented (in which case, mischievously, MRJ himself would be the ‘minor poet’ here). A bourdon is the bass-stop of an organ.

  87 cleek: iron golf club.

  88 Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle: 21 December. St Thomas is famously, like Parkins, ‘doubting’, a rational materialist forced to confront the evidence of the supernatural when he sees the risen Christ.

  THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS

  Written in the summer of 1904, when MRJ was researching the stained glass at Ashridge Park. First published in GSA, and written specifically in response to publisher Edward Arnold’s request for more ghost stories to expand the collection to 60,000 words (KCL MS MRJ:D/Arnold). Reprinted in CGS. Eton College Library MS 365.

  94 ‘Sertum Steinfeldense Norbertinum’: this is a fictional work by a fictional author, though the Premonstratensian abbey at Steinfeld (in the Eiffel mountains, in the district of North Rhine-Westphalia in the far west of Germany) is real. In 1802, after its dissolution, the abbey’s sixteenth-century stained glass was removed and sold: some of it went to East Anglia, as the story suggests, while much of it was bought by Lord Brownlow for Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire, and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In 1906, MRJ wrote a study of this, Notes of Glass in Ashridge Chapel, which he researched in July 1904: this is the ‘private chapel—no matter where’ mentioned later, and the story is obviously the product of the same research.

  95 Job, John, and Zechariah: initially ‘Solomon, John and Paul’ in MS.

  Vulgate: the Bible in Latin.

  There is a place … hidden: Job 28: 1: ‘there is … a place for gold where it is fined [refined]’, though here recast as ‘There is a place for gold where it is hidden’ [‘absconditur’].