Tag: Ghost stories

The Signalman by Charles Dickens

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A railway journey could be a dangerous undertaking in the 19th century. We take safety for granted today, but most of the devices that ensure it came into use after several awful accidents. Dickens himself was a passenger on a train that was involved in a serious accident in 1865. He helped rescue the survivors of the Staplehurst crash in Kent. Out of that experience came his short ghost story The Signalman, published in 1866.

No other form of transport has produced as many ghost stories as the railway. Here, I think, is the first suggestion that there is something uncanny about railways, the whole apparatus of awaiting, arrival and departure, the particular architecture of stations, embankments, cuttings, and viaducts.

The signalman lives out his life in a strange and gloomy environment, alone in his signalbox at the bottom of a deep cutting. In one direction is a dark and foreboding tunnel entrance, in the other the dripping and dank walls of the cutting as far as one can see. Not much light penetrates to the bottom of this place.

His job is a strange one, calling for him to be in attendance and constantly alert, but leaving him with long stretches of inactivity. We learn that he is a man of some intelligence, but who missed opportunities earlier in life and has accepted his role in life. He tries to fill the time with academic exercises, such as algebra and language learning.

The narrator thinks that the signalman might be a contented man, until he reveals that he is haunted by a mysterious figure that appears as a premonition. Indeed, right at the beginning he mistakes the narrator, who calls down to him from above the cutting, for the spectre. Why this should be we find out at the end of the story.

The wind produces an eerie moaning in the telegraph wires. The spirit announces its arrival by a ghostly ringing of the telegraph bell that only the signalman can discern.

The apparition has appeared twice, and the narrator has made two visits. His third and final visit reveals the real meaning of the ghost. Part of the eerie power of the story comes from the feeling that there is some kind of connection between the narrator and the ghost. It has something in common with other “double” stories of the era, such as Conrad’s Secret Sharer. It deserves its reputation as one of the truly great ghost stories.

Neither the signalman nor his visitor are named. It is written in a plainer prose style than is usual for Dickens, a bit more like his writing in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens had written earlier about the impact of the railway in Dombey and Son (1848), which has a description of the destruction of old buildings in Camden to enable the lines to reach Euston.

The Signalman was unforgettably filmed by the BBC in 1976 as part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series. It was an early screenplay adaptation by Andrew Davies. The film is very faithful to the story and Denholm Elliott gives a wonderful performance as the tormented signalman.

Haunted by the past: E F Benson

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When is a ghost story not a ghost story? We talk about being “haunted” by the past and so on. It would be a shame to give away too much of the plot of this story to those who have not read it. Let’s just say that a man, the last survivor of his siblings, has the idea of buying his childhood home and recreating it as it was during his happiest years.

It seems an impossible project, but then circumstances combine to make it possible. The enigmatic title refers to a game the children used to play in the garden. In the story we are presented with a lush, idyllic dream of Cornwall. The overall effect is rather reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s story They.

Benson was well-connected in the world of early 20th century supernatural writing. He was one of the audience when M R James read his first ghost stories to a group of undergraduates at Cambridge, and he maintained a friendship with James. He knew Henry James too, staying with him at Lamb House in Rye. Benson took over the lease and made Lamb House famous as “Mallards” in the Mapp and Lucia novels. He saw a ghost there, an incident fictionalised in Joan Aiken’s 1991 novel The Haunting of Lamb House.

He wrote more than fifty “spook stories” as he called them, among the most famous The Bus Conductor, a story of premonition coming true. His best stories are quite the equal of anything in the genre. His descriptive talents and sense of place mean that you can recognise a real-life location even if he does not name it.

However, it has to be said that the creation of suspense is not his strongest point. What he does have is the ability to be supremely effective in stories that involve predestination, the sense of proceeding to an inevitable conclusion. Pirates has this, and also another element that makes Benson distinctive in the genre; the ghosts, if ghosts they are, are benign rather than malevolent. It stands apart from his other stories, being richly nostalgic and consoling, somehow, rather than frightening.

The story becomes all the more interesting if one is aware that it is fairly autobiographical, and the Cornish setting is indeed where Benson spent his childhood years with his large brood of brothers and sisters when his father was Bishop there. Pirates was published in More Spook Stories in 1934, towards the end of Benson’s life.

By writing the story, Benson was doing what his character did within it, re-visiting the scenes of childhood. He is not the only writer to have done this at the end of a long career. One thinks of Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, where the house is again, a re-creation of her childhood home. There is also Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, set around Greene’s childhood landscape of Berkhampstead.

The ending of Pirates leaves scope for a follow-up, but I can’t say too much about that without spoiling this marvellous story for those who have not had the pleasure of reading it yet.