The Best Ghost Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  There the story of Plattner’s experiences ends. I have resisted, I believe successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction to dress up incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far as possible in the order in which Plattner told it to me. I have carefully avoided any attempt at style, effect, or construction. It would have been easy, for instance, to have worked the scene of the death-bed into a kind of plot in which Plattner might have been involved. But quite apart from the objection-ableness of falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such trite devices would spoil, to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world, with its livid green illumination and its drifting Watchers of the Living, which, unseen and unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.

  It remains to add, that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace, just beyond the school garden, and, so far as can be proved, at the moment of Plattner’s return. Deceased was a rate-collector and insurance agent. His widow, who was much younger than himself, married last month a Mr. Whymper, a veterinary surgeon of Allbeeding. As the portion of this story given here has in various forms circulated orally in Sussexville, she has consented to my use of her name, on condition that I make it distinctly known that she emphatically contradicts every detail of Plattner’s account of her husband’s last moments. She burnt no will, she says, although Plattner never accused her of doing so: her husband made but one will, and that just after their marriage. Certainly, from a man who had never seen it, Plattner’s account of the furniture of the room was curiously accurate.

  One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must insist upon lest I seem to favour the credulous superstitious view. Plattner’s absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved. But that does not prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even outside space hallucinations may be possible. That, at least, the reader must bear distinctly in mind.

  ON THE BRIGHTON ROAD

  RICHARD MIDDLETON

  Slowly the sun had climbed up the hard white downs, till it broke with little of the mysterious ritual of dawn upon a sparkling world of snow. There had been a hard frost during the night, and the birds, who hopped about here and there with scant tolerance of life, left no trace of their passage on the silver pavements. In places the sheltered caverns of the hedges broke the monotony of the whiteness that had fallen upon the coloured earth, and overhead the sky melted from orange to deep blue, from deep blue to a blue so pale that it suggested a thin paper screen rather than illimitable space. Across the level fields there came a cold, silent wind which blew fine dust of snow from the trees, but hardly stirred the crested hedges. Once above the sky-line, the sun seemed to climb more quickly, and as it rose higher it began to give out a heat that blended with the keenness of the wind.

  It may have been this strange alternation of heat and cold that disturbed the tramp in his dreams, for he struggled for a moment with the snow that covered him, like a man who finds himself twisted uncomfortably in the bed-clothes, and then sat up with staring, questioning eyes. “Lord! I thought I was in bed,” he said to himself as he took in the vacant landscape, “and all the while I was out here.” He stretched his limbs, and, rising carefully to his feet, shook the snow off his body. As he did so the wind set him shivering, and he knew that his bed had been warm.

  “Come, I feel pretty fit,” he thought. “I suppose I am lucky to wake at all in this. Or unlucky—it isn’t much of a business to come back to.” He looked up and saw the downs shining against the blue like the Alps on a picture-postcard. “That means another forty miles or so, I suppose,” he continued grimly. “Lord knows what I did yesterday. Walked till I was done, and now I’m only about twelve miles from Brighton. Damn the snow, damn Brighton, damn everything!” The sun crept up higher and higher, and he started walking patiently along the road with his back turned to the hills.

  “Am I glad or sorry that it was only sleep that took me, glad or sorry, glad or sorry?” His thoughts seemed to arrange themselves in a metrical accompaniment to the steady thud of his footsteps, and he hardly sought an answer to his question. It was good enough to walk to.

  Presently, when three milestones had loitered past, he overtook a boy who was stooping to light a cigarette. He wore no overcoat, and looked unspeakably fragile against the snow. “Are you on the road, guv’nor?” asked the boy huskily as he passed.

  “I think I am,” the tramp said.

  “Oh! then I’ll come a bit of the way with you if you don’t walk too fast. It’s a bit lonesome walking this time of day.” The tramp nodded his head, and the boy started limping along by his side.

  “I’m eighteen,” he said casually. “I bet you thought I was younger.”

  “Fifteen, I’d have said.”

  “You’d have backed a loser. Eighteen last August, and I’ve been on the road six years. I ran away from home five times when I was a little ’un, and the police took me back each time. Very good to me, the police was. Now I haven’t got a home to run away from.”

  “Nor have I,” the tramp said calmly.

  “Oh, I can see what you are,” the boy panted; “you’re a gentleman come down. It’s harder for you than for me.” The tramp glanced at the limping, feeble figure and lessened his pace.

  “I haven’t been at it as long as you have,” he admitted.

  “No, I could tell that by the way you walk. You haven’t got tired yet. Perhaps you expect something the other end?”

  The tramp reflected for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said bitterly, “I’m always expecting things.”

  “You’ll grow out of that,” the boy commented. “It’s warmer in London, but it’s harder to come by grub. There isn’t much in it really.”

  “Still, there’s the chance of meeting somebody there who will understand—”

  “Country people are better,” the boy interrupted. “Last night I took a lease of a barn for nothing and slept with the cows, and this morning the farmer routed me out and gave me tea and toke because I was little. Of course, I score there; but in London, soup on the Embankment at night, and all the rest of the time coppers moving you on.”

  “I dropped by the roadside last night and slept where I fell. It’s a wonder I didn’t die,” the tramp said. The boy looked at him sharply.

  “How do you know you didn’t?” he said.

  “I don’t see it,” the tramp said, after a pause.

  “I tell you,” the boy said hoarsely, “people like us can’t get away from this sort of thing if we want to. Always hungry and thirsty and dog-tired and walking all the time. And yet if anyone offers me a nice home and work my stomach feels sick. Do I look strong? I know I’m little for my age, but I’ve been knocking about like this for six years, and do you think I’m not dead? I was drowned bathing at Margate, and I was killed by a gipsy with a spike; he knocked my head right in, and twice I was froze like you last night, and a motor cut me down on this very road, and yet I’m walking along here now, walking to London to walk away from it again, because I can’t help it. Dead! I tell you we can’t get away if we want to.”

  The boy broke off in a fit of coughing, and the tramp paused while he recovered.

  “You’d better borrow my coat for a bit, Tommy,” he said, “your cough’s pretty bad.”

  “You go to hell!” the boy said fiercely, puffing at his cigarette; “I’m all right. I was telling you about the road. You haven’t got down to it yet, but you’ll find out presently. We’re all dead, all of us who’re on it, and we’re all tired, yet somehow we can’t leave it. There’s nice smells in the summer, dust and hay and the wind smack in your face on a hot day; and it’s nice waking up in the wet grass on a fine morning. I don’t know, I don’t know—” he lurched forward suddenly, and the tramp caught him in his arms.

  “I’m sick,” the boy whispered—“sick.”

  The tramp looked up and down the road, but he could see no houses or any sign of help. Yet even as he supported the boy doubtfully in the middle of the road a moto
r-car suddenly flashed in the middle distance, and came smoothly through the snow.

  “What’s the trouble?” said the driver quietly as he pulled up. “I’m a doctor.” He looked at the boy keenly and listened to his strained breathing.

  “Pneumonia,” he commented. “I’ll give him a lift to the infirmary, and you, too, if you like.”

  The tramp thought of the workhouse and shook his head. “I’d rather walk,” he said.

  The boy winked faintly as they lifted him into the car.

  “I’ll meet you beyond Reigate,” he murmured to the tramp. “You’ll see.” And the car vanished along the white road.

  All the morning the tramp splashed through the thawing snow, but at midday he begged some bread at a cottage door and crept into a lonely barn to eat it. It was warm in there, and after his meal he fell asleep among the hay. It was dark when he woke, and started trudging once more through the slushy roads.

  Two miles beyond Reigate a figure, a fragile figure, slipped out of the darkness to meet him.

  “On the road, guv’nor?” said a husky voice. “Then I’ll come a bit of the way with you if you don’t walk too fast. It’s a bit lonesome walking this time of day.”

  “But the pneumonia!” cried the tramp aghast.

  “I died at Crawley this morning,” said the boy.

  THE LAST HOUSE IN C? STREET

  DINAH M. MULOCK

  I am not a believer in ghosts in general; I see no good in them. They come–that is, are reported to come–so irrelevantly, purposelessly–so ridiculously, in short–that one’s common sense as regards this world, one’s supernatural sense of the other, are alike revolted. Then nine out of ten ‘capital ghost stories’ are so easily accounted for; and in the tenth, when all natural explanation fails, one who has discovered the extraordinary difficulty there is in all society in getting hold of that very slippery article called a fact, is strongly inclined to shake a dubious head, ejaculating, ‘Evidence! it is all a question of evidence!’

  But my unbelief springs from no dogged or contemptuous scepticism as to the possibility–however great the improbability–of that strange impression upon, or communication to, spirit in matter, from spirit wholly immaterialised, which is vulgarly called ‘a ghost.’ There is no credulity more blind, no ignorance more childish, that that of the sage who tries to measure ‘heaven and earth and the things under the earth,’ with the small two-foot rule of his own brains. The presumption of mere folly alone would argue concerning any mystery of the universe, ‘It is inexplicable, and therefore impossible.’

  Premising these opinions, though simply as opinions, I am about to relate what I must confess seems to me a thorough ghost story; its external and circumstantial evidence being indisputable, while its psychological causes and results, though not easy of explanation, are still more difficult to be explained away. The ghost, like Hamlet’s, was an honest ghost. From her daughter–an old lady, who, bless her good and gentle memory! has since learned the secrets of all things - I heard this veritable tale.

  ‘My dear,’ said Mrs MacArthur to me–it was in the early days of tablemoving, when young folk ridiculed and elder folk were shocked at the notion of calling up one’s departed ancestors into one’s dinner-table, and learning the wonders of the angelic world by the bobbings of a hat or the twirlings of a plate;–‘My dear,’ continued the old lady, ‘I do not like trifling with spirits.’

  ‘ Why not? Do you believe in them?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Did you ever see one?’ ‘Never. But once, I heard one.’

  She looked serious, as if she hardly liked to speak about it, either from a sense of awe or from fear of ridicule. But it was impossible to laugh at any illusions of the gentle old lady, who never uttered a harsh or satirical word to a living soul. Likewise the evident awe with which she mentioned the circumstance was rather remarkable in one who had a large stock of common sense, little wonder, and no ideality.

  I was very curious to hear Mrs MacArthur’s ghost story.

  ‘My dear, it was a long time ago, so long that you may fancy I forget and confuse the circumstances. But I do not. Sometimes I think one recollects more clearly things that happened in one’s teens–I was eighteen that year–than a great many nearer events. And besides, I had other reasons for remembering vividly everything belonging to this time,–for I was in love, you must know.’

  She looked at me with a mild deprecating smile, as if hoping my youthfulness would not consider the thing so very impossible or ridiculous. No; I was all interest at once.

  ‘In love with Mr MacArthur,’ I said, scarcely as a question, being at that Arcadian time of life when one takes as a natural necessity, and believes in as an undoubted truth, that all people, that is, good people, marry their first love.

  ‘No, my dear; not with Mr MacArthur.’

  I was so astonished, so completely dumbfounded–for I had woven a sort of ideal round my good old friend–that I suffered Mrs MacArthur to knit in silence for full five minutes. My surprise was not lessened when she said, with a gratified little smile -

  ‘He was a young gentleman of good parts; and he was very fond of me. Proud, too, rather. For though you might not think it, my dear, I was actually a beauty in those days.’

  I had very little doubt of it. The slight lithe figure, the tiny hands and feet,–if you had walked behind Mrs MacArthur down the street you might have taken her for a young woman still. Certainly, people lived slower and easier in the last generation than in ours.

  ‘Yes, I was the beauty of Bath. Mr Everest fell in love with me there. I was much gratified; for I had just been reading Miss Burney’s Cecilia, and I thought him exactly like Mortimer Delvil. A very pretty story, Cecilia; did you ever read it?’

  ‘No.’ And, to arrive quicker at her tale, I leaped to the only conclusion which could reconcile the two facts of my good old friend having had a lover named Everest, and being now Mrs MacArthur. ‘ Was it his ghost you saw?’

  ‘No, my dear, no; thank goodness, he is alive still. He calls here sometimes; he has been a faithful friend to our family. Ah!’ with a slow shake of the head, half pleased, half pensive, ‘you would hardly believe, my dear, what a very pretty fellow he was.’

  One could scarcely smile at the odd phrase, pertaining to last-century novels and to the loves of our great-grandmothers. I listened patiently to the wandering reminiscences which still further delayed the ghost story.

  ‘But, Mrs MacArthur, was it in Bath that you saw or heard what I think you were going to tell me? The ghost, you know?’

  ‘Don’t call it that; it sounds as if you were laughing at it. And you must not, for it is really true; as true as that I sit here, an old lady of seventy-five, and that then I was a young gentlewoman of eighteen. Nay, my dear, I will tell you all about it.

  ‘ We had been staying in London, my father and mother, Mr Everest, and I. He had persuaded them to take me; he wanted to show me a little of the world, though even his world was but a narrow one, my dear, - for he was a law student, living poorly and working hard.

  ?He took lodgings for us near the Temple; in C? street, the last house there, looking on to the river. He was very fond of the river; and often of evenings, when his work was too heavy to let him take us to Ranelagh or to the

  play, he used to walk with my father and mother and me up and down the

  Temple Gardens. Were you ever in the Temple Gardens? It is a pretty place now - a quiet, grey nook in the midst of noise and bustle; the stars look wonderful through those great trees; but still it is not like what it was then, when I was a girl.’

  Ah! no; impossible.

  ‘It was in the Temple Gardens, my dear, that I remember we took our last walk - my mother, Mr Everest, and I - before she went home to Bath. She was very anxious and restless to go, being too delicate for London gaieties. Besides, she had a large family at home, of which I was the eldest; and we were anxiously expecting another baby in a month or two. Nevertheless, my dea
r mother had gone about with me, taken me to all the shows and sights that I, a hearty and happy girl, longed to see, and entered into them with almost as great enjoyment as my own.

  ‘But tonight she was pale, rather grave, and steadfastly bent on returning home.

  ‘ We did all we could to persuade her to the contrary, for on the next night but one was to have been the crowning treat of all our London pleasures: we were to see Hamlet at Drury-lane, with John Kemble and Sarah Siddons! Think of that, my dear. Ah! you have no such sights now. Even my grave father longed to go, and urged in his mild way that we should put off our departure. But my mother was determined.

  ‘At last Mr Everest said - I could show you the very spot where he stood, with the river–it was high water–lapping against the wall, and the evening sun shining on the Southwark houses opposite. He said–it was very wrong, of course, my dear; but then he was in love, and might be excused -

  ‘“Madam,” said he, “it is the first time I ever knew you think of yourself alone.”

  ‘“Myself, Edmond?”

  ‘“Pardon me, but would it not be possible for you to return home, leaving behind, for two days only, Dr. Thwaite and Mistress Dorothy?”

  ‘“Leave them behind–leave them behind!” She mused over the words. “ What say you, Dorothy?”

  ‘I was silent. In very truth, I had never been parted from her in all my life. It had never crossed my mind to wish to part from her, or to enjoy any pleasure without her, till–till within the last three months. “Mother, don’t suppose I—”

  ‘But here I caught sight of Mr Everest and stopped.

  ‘“Pray continue, Mistress Dorothy.”

  ‘No, I could not. He looked so vexed, so hurt; and we had been so happy

  together. Also, we might not meet again for years, for the journey between London and Bath was then a serious one, even to lovers; and he worked very hard–had few pleasures in his life. It did indeed seem almost selfish of my mother.

  Though my lips said nothing, perhaps my sad eyes said only too much, and my mother felt it.