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.

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.’

Harry Price described Borley Rectory in Essex as the ‘Most Haunted House in England’.

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 keen to associate himself with them. During his investigation of Borley Rectory in Essex (he called it the ‘Most Haunted House in England’), Price accommodated his researchers (often, as he would boast, ‘young Oxford men’) in a ‘base room’. The room, he was keen to remind everyone, had been the library of the house in the days when it was inhabited. This was supposedly for practical reasons: the room was convenient for the hall, where many strange things had occurred, and directly beneath the ‘blue room’ in which many strange things had also occurred. Its French windows gave easy access to the garden, patrolled by a ghostly nun. The room was also ‘comfortable’ and equipped with ‘a large number of shelves which were permanently fixed to the walls’.

Well, it would do if it was a library. There weren’t any books left on those shelves, but my suspicion would be that the library appealed to Price as a base of operations because it symbolised intellectualism, and ghost-hunters need this association to counter the suspicion among many that they are simply mad. Price had built up his own library in Kensington, part of a set-up he called the National Laboratory of Psychical Research. He wanted to merge this with the library of the Society for Psychical Research to create a sort of university of the supernatural, but he kept having political disputes with the SPR. (He eventually left his collection to London University who are now, I believe, looking to offload it.) Price can be seen speaking from his library in YouTube footage, boasting of his rare and ancient volumes, while chain-smoking and lurching strangely.

The SPR’s own library – which is every bit as civilised as our own, if much smaller – is located in Kensington above ‘J.H. Kenyon Limited, Funeral Directors’. And if that weren’t Ealing Comedy-ish enough, it is not quite clear which bell-push belongs to which concern. (This must be doubly annoying, since it’s the business of each to put the other out of business.) In the library, the orderly shelves, the sedate potted palms and the civility of the two staff contrast with the extravagance of the book titles: Almanac of the Uncanny, Heavenly Lights, The Other Side of Death, Ecstasy. On top of one bookcase is something resembling an old-fashioned radio. This relic of the heroic days of spiritualism is ‘a machine for testing mediums’. Nobody knows quite how it worked, but there is a switch marked ‘sensitivity’, graded from 1/50, via 1/20 and 3/4 to ‘Full’.

The London Library has perhaps the next best collection of borrowable ghost books in London. Some are in Religion: Spiritualism, including Phantasms of the Living (1886) by Edmund Gurney, Frederick Myers and Podmore. The title of this beautiful, melancholic book (two of its authors would commit suicide) is a desperate lunge after optimism and a misnomer, since the work is a collection of accounts of what were known as ‘death wraiths’: visions of people who were at that moment dying in some distant location. (A typical example might feature an army officer reading in a fourth-floor London flat at midnight. He looks up, and sees at the window the face of his wife, who is in Brighton with her sister. The next day he receives a telegram informing him that his wife died at midnight in Brighton.)

Most of the Library’s ghost books are to be found, fittingly enough, in the dark recesses of Science, under Occult Sciences. There, readers will find Apparitions and Haunted Houses (1939), edited by Sir Ernest Bennett, a compendium of plausible sightings, sent in by middle-class percipients. The tone is genteel. An extra man is observed by several guests at a ‘tea and music’ house party. He looked a ‘legal type’, and was observed to do nothing more alarming than sit on the sofa reading newspapers. But who was he? Four guests asked the hostess, who absolutely denied that he had been present. Entries include lines like, ‘After I had spent the afternoon, writing letters and reading’, ‘I looked up from my book’, ‘I was smoking a cigarette and reading’ . There is praise for the ‘intellectual quality’ and ‘soundness of mind’ of the percipients, and their bookishness seems to back this up. It struck me, reading this book, that people are much more likely to see ghosts when they are sitting quietly, in the semi-dream state that reading or writing can bring on. This is why ghosts and libraries go together, and why fewer ghosts are seen in the raucous modern world.

I did see a ghost in the London Library stacks once. Well, a potential ghost: an utterly pale, utterly silent man who sat in the same attitude over a thick volume for the entirety of one winter Saturday. I was sitting nearby, and he left without making a sound. One minute he was there, the next not. The book he’d been reading remained on his desk. It was The Registers of the Protestant Church at Caen (Normandy), edited by C.E. Hart and published in 1907 … which was just about right, I thought.