The Short Story: Ghosts and Spectres

Abstract

So begins J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost story “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853). Its opening is in some ways genre-defining in that it provides us with a typical situation for the ghost story’s dissemination: it is a tale told on a winter’s night (preferably at Christmas), when the weather is suitably stormy and the room pleasantly cosy in both senses of the word (both warm and safe), in stark contrast to the dangers without, and the horrors about to be told. This set-up introduces a truly creepy tale in which a hanging judge infests the rooms of two young students: infests is the right word, since he sometimes appears in the guise of a giant rat, and one of the creepiest things about the story is the “slap, slap” of his naked feet on the stairs outside the narrator’s bedroom which nearly drives one of the students to suicide. Here is another subject for early debate: what frightens us, and how and why are we afraid of particular things? Are there patterns in our fear? It is a chilling subject for conversation, but it is also, paradoxically, a pretty good icebreaker.

It is not worth telling this story of mine – at least, not worth writing. Told … to a circle of intelligent eager faces, lighted up by a good after-dinner fire of a winter’s evening, with a cold wind rising and wailing outside, and all snug and cosy within, it has gone off … indifferent well. But it is a venture to do as you would have me. Pen, ink and paper are cold vehicles for the marvellous, and a “reader” decidedly a more critical animal than a “listener.”

(Le Fanu in Cox and Gilbert, 1991, p. 19)