Ghosts in their many guises
The many faces of ghosts
This year has raced past in a blur of crises - first Brexit, then the Covid19 pandemic, lockdown, no lockdown, a bit of lockdown here and there, more regulations, fewer regulations, more cases, fewer deaths and the spectre of Brexit looming large at Midwinter. If that isn't food for a horror story or three, I don't know what is!
To cheer myself up, I am happy to hide away in the shelter of Halloween and its multifarious ghouls and ghosts. When faced with the relentless gloom of reality, the utter terror stimulated by the supernatural and the fear its many legends and stories has triggered over the millennia provides an almost relaxing break.
So, as my daughter happily carves a monstrous face into a pumpkin and my partner busies himself in the kitchen stirring a bowl of cake mix to make chocolate and ginger brownies, I have decided to delve into my favourite books and read up snippets of stories about ghosts, their many guises, and what to look out for at Halloween, when autumn declines into winter and the world of the living and the land of the dead overlap....
Now, I'm not a demonologist or an expert on the paranormal by any means or stretch of the imagination. I am just interested in a very detached, occasional sort of way. I am more of a non-believer and a cynic than anything else, but convinced enough by what ghost stories tell us about the human condition to enjoy nosing into the subject, especially at Halloween. And I enjoy reading about the many manifestations of ghosts: ghosts in all their glorious guises. Here are some of my favourite:
Shadows in the dark, wisps of mist in the fog
Those dark corners where shadows seem to vibrate in the air, that are darker than the dark around them, where the eye detects movement but strains to see anything definite...when something cannot be explained, it is tempting to create a cause or a reason for that something to exist. These days we seem to have a logical explanation for everything, but sometimes, when we experience something that we can't understand or find unusually mysterious, we do tend to resort to call 'ghost'. A cold spot in an otherwise perfectly warm room, or glints of light in the corner of a photograph, the rustle of fabric in an airless place; all these things can cause us a wonderful frisson of fear, and it is with utter glee that we claim to have endured a ghost encounter.
All these 'hauntings' are almost invariably linked to a place or setting: an old building, perhaps, especially with inadequate lighting, or some back street or alley, or out in the countryside where there are no streetlights and moonlight is dimmed by cloud. Even better locations are forests, thick with trees which move and creak and groan, and especially if there are tendrils of fog fingering their way in between the branches.
The headless horseman and friends
Delightful and sometimes spotted as the headless coachman. There is, for example, the ghost of Christopher Bloor seen in his carriage thundering through Rainham in Kent in the dead of night, head nowhere to be seen. A notorious ghost, of course, is that of the headless Queen Ann Boleyn, who mournfully stalks the grounds of the Tower of London where she was beheaded for treachery to her husband, King Henry VIII, conveniently leaving the way clear for him to marry Jane Seymour.
Headless ghosts can be ranked among those who appear to the living, fully displaying the injuries sustained at the times of their deaths. Decapitated ghosts are a particular favourite, but tales also abound of ghosts without other limbs such as arms and legs, and ghosts that only manifest from the waist up. For example, there is an entire ghostly Roman cohort that apparently marches through the basement of the old Treasurer's House in York that can only be seen from the knees up.
Perhaps the best-known headless horseman is the Headless Hessian of the Hollow, from the Washington Irving short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." However, many would suggest that the headless horseman is based on Celtic mythology and the Dullahan, the dark man, the harbinger of death, who was seen as a headless ghost, riding a horse, or driving a carriage, or striding through the countryside to gather those souls about to depart their earthly bodies. In Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, W B Yeats recorded: "An omen that sometimes accompanies the banshee is the coach-a-bower (cóiste bodhar) - an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a Dullahan. It will go rumbling to your door, and if you open it, according to Croker, a basin of blood will be thrown in your face. These headless phantoms are found elsewhere than in Ireland. In Norway the heads of corpses were cut off to make their ghosts feeble. Thus came into existence the Dullahans ...”
The floating apparition
This one comes in a multitude of guises and probably gave rise to the old idea of ghosts looking like sheets. For centuries corpses were wrapped in sheets for burial, so there is a clear link between the sheet and the dead. Of course, no longer having to worry about their bodies, ghosts can appear to glide just above the ground, like the ghostly lady that haunts a graveyard near Leeds Castle in Kent and is said to glide from grave to grave reading the tombstones as if searching for one in particular. Some ghostly figures have been said to appear floating outside upper storey windows as if summoning those inside to follow them to their own deaths. And still others ease their way through solid stone walls to the horror of those watching.
Decaying corpses
These are the really grim ones. These manifest themselves as if freshly arisen from the tomb, their bodies in various stages of decomposition, their burial shroud in tatters around what is left of their corpses. These always seem especially malevolent, in particular if their features are just about recognisable but in a dreadful state of decay, exposing parts of their skulls in a terrible, bony grin.
In a popular tale found in various versions pretty much around the world, it is a decaying corpse that manifests itself to his widow by rising from his grave and knocking on her window to ask her to join him. Or who return to haunt their murderers seeking eternal vengeance and justice. Or perhaps, as is the modern trend, these are not really dead at all; they are the undead, the living dead, the nation of zombies that eat the flesh of the living for sustenance that cannot ever satisfy their demonic craving.
Grim, ghastly and ghoulish, ghosts come in many guises. And thank goodness they do, because they have inspired some of the best books written. Here are some great autumn reads, for those long evenings, and especially this year, when perhaps we really are all that little bit safer indoors with the lights on.
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