High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

by Robertson Davies

  High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

  Robertson Davies

  Robertson Davies first hit upon the notion of writing ghost stories when he joined the University of Toronto’s Massey College as a Master. Wishing to provide entertainment at the College’s Gaudy Night, the annual Christmas party, Professor Davies created a “spooky story,” which he read aloud to the gathering. That story, “Revelation from a Smoky Fire,” is the first in this wonderful, haunting collection. A tradition quickly became established and, for eighteen years, Davies delighted and amused the Gaudy Night guests with his tales of the supernatural. Here, gathered together in one volume, are those eighteen stories, just as Davies first read them.

  The ghosts of Ibsen and Dickens and sixteen horrid apparitions manifest themselves in this witty collection of tales.

  Robertson Davies

  High Spirits:

  A Collection of Ghost Stories

  How the High Spirits Came about—

  A Chapter of Autobiography

  Ghost stories came into my life before I could read. How well I remember the first one; it was at a party given by my parents, and it was not yet time for me to go to bed, because I remember that the sun was sinking outside the windows, and as the guests ate tulip jellies—they were streaked red and yellow and topped with whipped cream of a deliciousness that seems to have departed from the earth—Mrs. Currie told the strange tale of the Disappearance of Oliver Lurch. He was a farm youth in Kentucky who had gone out one night from a gathering just like ours, to fetch some wood for the fire, had not returned and when the others went to seek him he could be heard calling from the sky, “Here I am! Here I am! Help me! I am Oliver Lurch!” The cries became fainter and fainter, and Oliver was heard and seen no more. There were those who said he had been carried off by a great eagle but—a grown man? What sort of eagle was that? It must have been Something Else.

  I fell asleep that night fearing the Mighty Clutch. And since then I have always felt that any party would be the better for a ghost story.

  The first uncanny tale I read, when I was ten, was Frankenstein, which terrified me unforgettably and gloriously. None of the film versions, in my opinion, comes near the effect Mary Shelley produces by her special quality of prose. A story in this collection, The Cat That Went To Trinity, obviously owes much to this favourite of mine, and although it is far from serious, it is not meant to be derisive of the great original. No disrespect toward serious spectres is intended herein.

  Although I have read tales of ghosts and the supernatural eagerly all my life I never thought of writing one until I went to Massey College in the University of Toronto, in 1963. The college had a Christmas party for its members and their friends, and some sort of entertainment was needed. There were lots.of gifted people to call on—poets and musicians—but I was expected to make a contribution, and I decided on a ghost story, the one which appears first in this book. For the eighteen years I was at the college a story was called for every Christmas, and here they are, gathered together, in the hope that other enthusiasts for this sort of tale will enjoy them.

  It was never my intention to frighten anyone. Indeed I do not think that would have been possible; the audience was too big and to me, at least, terror is best when the group of listeners is small. No, these stories were to amuse, and perhaps to add a dimension to a building and a community that was brand-new. University College has a ghost, of which it is justifiably proud, and doubtless there are others around the University which have not yet found their chroniclers. Massey College is a building of great architectural beauty, and few things become architecture so well as a whiff of the past, and a hint of the uncanny. Canada needs ghosts, as a dietary supplement, a vitamin taken to stave off that most dreadful of modern ailments, the Rational Rickets.

  Let no one suppose that I was the first to think that a few hauntings might be acceptable in the new college. Very early in its first autumn I was told that a figure had taken to appearing on the stairs, and in dark corners, who frightened some people, and disappeared when bolder people pursued it. I have never thought of myself as a ghost-catcher, but my work at the college demanded some unusual tasks, and I accepted this one as part of the job. I captured the ghost at last—sneaked up on him from behind—and he proved to be one of the students who, with a sheet and an ugly rubber mask, was trying to cheer the place up. That was his explanation, but there was a gleam in his eye that suggested to me that the ghost game fulfilled some need in his own character. That was not hard to understand, for he was engaged in a particularly rational and hard-headed form of study, and too much rationality, as I have suggested, calls for a balancing element.

  Writing ghost stories, and in particular, cheerful ghost stories, set me to the task of examining the literature of the ghost story, and its technique. There are some very famous ghost stories, and perhaps the acknowledged masterpiece is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. James casts it in the form of a tale read at Christmas time to a party of friends in an English country house; what could be better? It is without doubt the best of James’ substantial and distinguished contribution to this branch of literature. There are also the fine stories written by Montague Rhodes James, which he composed and at first read aloud to groups of friends at King’s, Cambridge, and later at Eton, where he was Provost. My father-in-law heard him on a few of these occasions and many years later described to me the special pleasure they gave. Parties of friends, college occasions: yes, we could provide these elements at the Massey College Gaudy Nights; the word comes from the Latin gaude, and has long been applied to college parties. But what about style?

  Ghost stories tend to be very serious affairs. Who has ever heard of a ghost cracking a joke? I wanted my ghosts to be light-hearted, if not in themselves, at least as they appeared to my hearers. No new style would suit a ghost story, so it would be necessary to parody the usual style. And the parody would have to be affectionate, for cruel parody is distasteful in itself, and utterly outside the spirit of a party.

  I think I know the traditional ghost story style pretty thoroughly. It is solemn, and it frequently makes use of unusual words, designed to strike awe into the minds of the reader or the hearer. It is a style that can very easily become ridiculous, and even such a great master of the ghost story as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu does not always escape this peril. Poor LeFanu not only wrote uncanny tales, he lived one. The story has been told many times that he suffered from a recurrent nightmare, in which he stood at the foot of a macabre and menacing house which towered high in the air, and which he knew was about to collapse on him. When he died in 1873, of a heart seizure, his physician remarked dryly that the house had fallen at last.

  It is one of the regrets of my life that I missed seeing, and perhaps even having some conversation with, a man who was a great scholar in the realm of magic, uncanny happenings, and of course ghost stories. He was, to give him his full resounding title and name, the Reverend Father Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, chiefly known for his work in the realm of Restoration drama, but also the author of The History of Witchcraft and many other books about werewolves, Satanism and the supernatural. He was a rum customer. He had left his home in Oxford shortly before I went there in 1936 and was remembered with affection, some mirth, and now and then with unexpected venom. He appeared in the streets dressed like a European priest, in cassock and shovel-hat, with a cloak and a bulky umbrella; some stories insisted that he always walked in the gutter, for no determinable reason. But—and it was this that raised eyebrows—he was invariably accompanied on his afternoon walk either by a pallid youth dressed in black, who was supposed to be his
secretary, or by a large black dog, but never by both! Tongues wagged.

  Although I never met Father Summers, I have all my life collected his books, among which are several collections of ghost stories, some of which he wrote himself, and to all of which he appends learned discussions of the kind of literature he knew and loved so well. His prose style, which sets the teeth of more austere readers on edge, fills me with delight. He had read so many tales of the supernatural, pored over so many old manuscripts and grimoires, that his writing had been infected by them, and displays a fruit cakyness and port-winyness that makes for very rich literary feeding. He delights in words like ‘sepulture’ and ‘charnel’ which it would be a pity to allow to fall out of the language. So when I set to work to write some ghost stories, with a glint of parody in my eye, I determined also to lay a few laurels on the tomb of that not always wholly admired scholar, Montague Summers. I shall be pleased if those who know his work feel that I have not altogether failed.

  My ghosts are sufficiently traditional, in that they all appear in search of something. This is the usual reason for ghostly appearances; something has been lost, or some revenge or justice is sought, and the spirit cannot rest until this unfinished business is concluded. If that is established, it is obvious that the proper greeting to a ghost is not a shriek of terror but a courteous “What can I do for you?” It was Shelley who wrote—and I echo him—

  While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

  Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

  And starlit wood, with fearful steps pursuing

  Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

  In my ghost stories I have tried to explore where such high talk might lead.

  Anybody who writes ghost stories is sure to be asked: Do you believe in ghosts? And the answer to that must be, I believe in them precisely as Shakespeare believed in them. People who want further discussion may be referred to that model of good sense, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said:

  It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.

  All belief? The Doctor speaks with his accustomed certainty. Much belief, undoubtedly, for in 1954-55 the popular Swiss fortnightly Schweizerischer Beobachter published a series of articles on prophetic dreams, coincidences, premonitions and ghosts, and then asked readers who had any experience of such things to write to the Editor. The response was overwhelming; more than 1200 readers wrote in, giving more than 1500 cases of personal experience; and these writers were people of education and discretion. It is interesting that most of the letter-writers confided their names to the Editor but asked that they be not made public; few people will admit to all the world that they believe in the supernatural. These letters were confided by the paper to the late Dr. C. G. Jung, whose secretary, Mrs. Aniela Jaffe, published them with psychological comment, and extremely interesting reading they make. So it may be said that if not everybody believes in ghosts, there are a great many people who certainly do not disbelieve in them.

  One word remains to be said: I have not edited these stories specifically for the reader; they remain in the form in which they were first spoken aloud, and I beg you—you readers—to grant them the attention of the ear, as well as of the eye. Perhaps, as in my case, your first ghost story was heard.

  The names of several living people, associated in one way or another with Massey College, appear in these stories. Never, let me say, are they mentioned in anything except an affectionate and genial spirit, as befits a Gaudy Night, and I hope that the bearers of these names will not feel that I have beenimpudently free with them, or suggested an acceptance of the supernatural which they may disclaim. These are, after all, party-ghosts, emanating from high spirits.

  Revelation from a Smoky Fire

  At the outset of a personal ghost story, it is accepted practice to say that one is the least fanciful person in the world, that one has not a nerve in one’s body, doesn’t believe in ghosts, and can’t understand how it happened. I am therefore at a disadvantage, for I am a more than ordinarily fanciful person, I am extremely nervous, I don’t find anything intrinsically improbable in the notion of a ghost, and I have a pretty shrewd idea how it happened. Therefore I am more likely to distress myself than to alarm you by what I am going to recount; I know that in the ghost controversy you are all overwhelmingly of the anti-ghost party. But I can assure you that I found it a disquieting experience.

  The fire in my study smokes. It is not merely that the Bursar buys green wood; something is amiss with the chimney. Sometimes it smokes so much that I feel like those Jesuit missionaries who used to fling themselves on the floor in the longhouses of the Canadian Indians, because only within six inches of the floor could one breathe the air without tearing the lungs.

  My fire was smoking yesterday afternoon at dusk, as I sat reading the précis of an M.A. thesis. My nerves would have been quieter had I been reading a ghost story; thesis abstracts are, with a very few exceptions, the least credible and most horrifying productions of imaginative literature. Nevertheless you will understand that I was not in the least disposed to see a ghost, though I was rather far advanced in asphyxiation.

  At last, reluctantly, like a man approaching a task he knows to be outside human power, I went to the fire and knelt to poke it, thinking perhaps I might alter the quality of the smoke, and thus secure change, if not relief. Of course I simply made it worse. I grew impatient, and, holding my breath, put my head into the worst of the smother, to see if anything—a bird’s nest, or a dead squirrel, or anything of that sort, might have stuck in the chimney.

  Nothing. Defeated, and with the disgruntled resignation of one used to such defeats, I crawled backward into the room, and stood up.

  There was a man sitting at my desk.

  Nothing in the least alarming about that. People quite often come into my study without being heard; when I am busy I often do not notice what is happening around me. I assumed he was a visitor. He looked like a senior faculty member—a tall, rather lean, bald man, with professorial eyebrows. He was wearing his gown, but so was I, for that matter for, though smoky, my study was cold.

  “Good afternoon,” I said; “Can I help you?”

  “You can help me by doing something about that smoking chimney,” he replied.

  He smiled as he spoke, and I assumed that this was some form of donnish humour. Nevertheless, I thought it rather cool of him to complain about what was, after all, my chimney. I decided to take the line of extreme and disarming courtesy, which sometimes works well with impudent people.

  “I assure you I am doing the best I can,” said I.

  “Not a very good best,” said he; “take another look up the flue.”

  I obeyed. Not, you understand, because I was awed by him, but because I wanted time to think. Slowly I knelt, and poked my head into the fireplace again, and thought.

  Who the devil is he? There is something familiar about his face, but what is his name? I wish I could either forget both faces and names, or remember both. It is this perpetual dealing with nameless faces that makes my life a muddle of uncertainty. Is he one of those architectural critics who still push their way into the college, and take on airs? How dare he give me orders? I must have met him somewhere. Is he one of those dons who suffers from the delusion that he is Dr. Johnson, and is rude on principle?

  By this time I had thought all I could, without drawing in huge breaths of smoke, so I crawled back into the room and stood up again.

  “If I were you I’d go up on the roof and put a rod down that chimney,” said the stranger. “Or why don’t you come down it again?”

  “Down the chimney?” said I. Aha, this was the clue. Here was a madman.

  “Yes,” said he; “you didn’t knock at the door, so I assume you must have come down the chimney. You weren’t
here a minute ago.”

  One of my cardinal rules in life is always to humour madmen. It is second nature to me. I do it several times every day. “Quite so,” said I. “I came down the chimney.”

  He looked at me closely, and I thought somewhat insultingly.

  “Tight squeeze, wasn’t it?” said he.

  “Not in the least,” I replied. “A chimney with a good clear draught might be a little swift for a man of my age and quiet habit of life, but this is a superbly smoky chimney—and the smoke, as you readily understand, gives just that density to the atmosphere in the flue which permits me to float down as gently as a feather. Science, you observe.” I said this airily, for I was beginning to enjoy myself.

  “Look here,” said he; “I don’t believe you’re a chimney sweep at all.”

  “Your perception is in perfect order,” said I. “I am not a chimney sweep; I am the Master of this College. Now may I ask who you are?”

  “Aha,” he cried, “just as I thought. You’re a madman. I don’t believe in humouring madmen. Out you go!”

  “As you please,” said I. He looked as though he might become violent, and I wanted time to edge myself toward the bell which calls the Porter. “But before I go, would you have the goodness to tell me who you are?”

  “I?” he shouted, working the tremendous eyebrows in a way which I could tell had been effective in quelling undergraduates. “Certainly I’ll tell you. I am Master of this College.”

  “Of course,” said I, in my silkiest tones, “but which Master are you?”

  “Damn your impudence,” he roared, “I’m the ninth Master.”

  I confess this made me feel very unwell. I can’t tell why, but it did, and although I cannot fully describe the sensation, I thought I was going to faint; for a time my consciousness seemed to come and go in rhythmic waves; it was like vertigo, only more intense; I was horribly distressed. But my visitor seemed even more so.