The Contemporary Ghost Story

Do ghosts haunt your mind? Perhaps they are the ghosts of past mistakes, waiting to rise from unconscious darkness into the horror of full awareness. They may be the ghosts of past relationships, those “It might have been….” “I wish it had been….” Or “What if it had been… questions that are guests of near-photographic memories flooding consciousness at the most unexpected moments. Perhaps you have experienced a classic ghost, the spirit of a person who has died. All these subjects have been treated in the contemporary ghost story.

The classic ghost story of the nineteenth century was about the return of a spirit of a dead person, perhaps vengeful, perhaps not, but the goal is to create in the reader a sense of the uncanny, the mysterious, a fear that brings chills that continue long after someone finishes reading a story. One of the classics is M. R. James’s “O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, my Lad,” quoting a haunting line from Robert Burns, the Scottish poet. If you have not read the story, I hope you do. I will not give away the plot, but like most James stories, the tension builds slowly and a chill grows until the reader experiences a feeling somewhat like Rudolf Otto’s notion of mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “mysterious, tremendous, yet fascinating.” The feeling is more like a creepy sense of awe, though it is mixed in with a good deal of old-fashioned fear. The traditional story has continued in contemporary fiction; a contemporary master of the traditional ghost story was Russell Kirk (1918-1994) in his fine collection, Ancestral Shadows (ISI, 2004). His stories left me with more of a feeling of awe that James’s, and that says a lot. One must include Peter Straub’s fine 1979 novel, Ghost Story.

Although traditional ghost stories are still being written, they usually have to have a unique twist to avoid repeating the same plot line and themes of earlier stories too closely. Many contemporary ghost stories focus on psychological forces that haunt us—tragic errors, personality flaws, mental health issues, living people who continue to haunt, sometimes in negative ways. The “ghost” might be memories of abuse or memories of a first kiss full of promise of happiness that led to heartache. A ghost might be a hallucination produced by the mind alone based on nothing that is externally real. It might be the return of a deadly temper suppressed for many years that explodes into murder and mayhem. The psychological sophistication of contemporary ghost stories is significantly greater than those written in the past (except for, perhaps, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw). Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House leaves it an open question whether the ghosts are objectively real or the psychological horrors of the protagonist. The stories in Joe Hill’s 20^th Century Ghosts mainly concern psychological ghosts rather than “dead people ghosts.” A masterpiece of stories regarding psychological ghosts is Mort Castle’s Knowing When to Die: Uncollected Stories (Independent Legions Publishing, 2018), which is literary horror of the highest order. Since my bias is toward the supernatural ghost story, I was not a fan of the collections of psychological ghost stories I had read before I read Castle’s book. I am a fan of this collection; it is excellent.

I still prefer the supernatural ghost story (“dead people ghosts”), but I am more open than before to non-supernatural, psychological ghost stories if they result in a similar mysterium tremendum feeling I have when reading good supernatural ghost stories. Reading both kinds is essential for any writer of ghost stories today.