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GHOSTS & LIBRARIES Andrew Martin, whose book Ghoul Britannia has just been published, reveals some worrying links between apparitions and libraries
I
don’t wish to be alarmist but, having written a book about British ghostliness, it does seem to me that a library is about the most likely place for a haunting. In ghost stories, libraries symbolise the complacency of the rationalist. In Afterward (1910), the short story by Edith Wharton, the library is the ‘pivotal’ feature of the Tudor house in ‘Dorsetshire’ that the American couple, Ned and Mary Boyne, are so keen to occupy, even though they have been warned it is haunted. They move into the house, and Ned Boyne begins work in the library on a book with the title – highly provocative to any spirit – ‘The Economic Basis of Culture’ . It is while ‘waiting in the library for the lamps to come’ that Mary has her first misgivings about the house: ‘The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the rows of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hearth.’ And it is in the library that her husband will encounter the ghost. M.R. James’s stories feature many examples of hubris among library users. In The Tractate Middoth (1911), it is a librarian who is destined to receive a jolt. Towards the end of an autumn afternoon, a man with ‘grey Piccadilly weepers’ (mutton-chop whiskers) enters the library vestibule and presents to the assistant a slip on which is written the title of the book he seeks. The assistant, a Mr Garrett, looks it up in the index, and observes: ‘Talmud: Tractate Middoth, with the commentary of Nachmanides, Amsterdam, 1707. 11.3.34. Hebrew class, of course. Not a very difficult job this.’ He’s wrong about that, actually. When Mr Garrett goes to find the book, he sees it being taken off the shelf by an ‘old gentleman, perhaps a clergyman, in a cloak’ who, on further investigation, turns out not to be there ... Conversely, the possession or use of a library might be employed to buttress the intellectual credentials of some sinister individual. The occultist in a smoking jacket, for whom Latin is practically a first language, always comes equipped with a wellstocked library. In another M.R. James story, Casting the Runes (1911), the diabolist Karswell is not only a thoroughly creepy individual, but fiendishly clever as well – he must be, since he practically lives in the rare manuscript room of the British Museum. 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Harry Price described Borley Rectory in Essex as the ‘Most Haunted House in England’.
It is also the case that in true, or (if you must) ‘true’, accounts of ghosts, a library is often the scene of the manifestation. One of the most compelling accounts in Apparitions and Thought Transference (1894), compiled by Frank Podmore, is listed as ‘Number 123’ under the heading ‘Less Common Forms of Hallucination’. It is recounted by a ‘Mr J—’ , who had succeeded the late ‘Mr Q—’ as the librarian of a Berkshire library. Late one evening, Mr J— was working in the library when he looked up to see a face peering round one of the bookcases. The face was pallid and hairless. ‘I saw an old man with high shoulders seem to rotate out of the end of the bookcase, and with his back towards me and with a shuffling gait walk rather quickly from the bookcase to the door of a small lavatory. ’ Mr J— followed the figure into the lavatory, and found it empty. He later mentioned the sighting to a local vicar, who said, ‘Why, that’s old Q—’. Podmore rationalised this as a case of thought transference, the fashionable theory of the time: ‘Mr J— saw the figure of Mr Q— in the library because some friend of Mr Q—’s was at that moment vividly picturing to himself the late librarian in his old haunts. ’ Of course, Mr J— is all the more credible because he is a librarian. Libraries bestow respectability, which is why that celebrated ghost-hunter of the inter-war years, Harry Price, was
