Robertson Davies

High Spirits:

A Collection of Ghost Stories

How the High Spirits Came about—

A Chapter of Autobiography

Ghost stories came into my life before I could read. How well I remember the first one; it was at a party given by my parents, and it was not yet time for me to go to bed, because I remember that the sun was sinking outside the windows, and as the guests ate tulip jellies—they were streaked red and yellow and topped with whipped cream of a deliciousness that seems to have departed from the earth—Mrs. Currie told the strange tale of the Disappearance of Oliver Lurch. He was a farm youth in Kentucky who had gone out one night from a gathering just like ours, to fetch some wood for the fire, had not returned and when the others went to seek him he could be heard calling from the sky, “Here I am! Here I am! Help me! I am Oliver Lurch!” The cries became fainter and fainter, and Oliver was heard and seen no more. There were those who said he had been carried off by a great eagle but—a grown man? What sort of eagle was that? It must have been Something Else.

I fell asleep that night fearing the Mighty Clutch. And since then I have always felt that any party would be the better for a ghost story.

The first uncanny tale I read, when I was ten, was Frankenstein, which terrified me unforgettably and gloriously. None of the film versions, in my opinion, comes near the effect Mary Shelley produces by her special quality of prose. A story in this collection, The Cat That Went To Trinity, obviously owes much to this favourite of mine, and although it is far from serious, it is not meant to be derisive of the great original. No disrespect toward serious spectres is intended herein.

Although I have read tales of ghosts and the supernatural eagerly all my life I never thought of writing one until I went to Massey College in the University of Toronto, in 1963. The college had a Christmas party for its members and their friends, and some sort of entertainment was needed. There were lots.of gifted people to call on—poets and musicians—but I was expected to make a contribution, and I decided on a ghost story, the one which appears first in this book. For the eighteen years I was at the college a story was called for every Christmas, and here they are, gathered together, in the hope that other enthusiasts for this sort of tale will enjoy them.

It was never my intention to frighten anyone. Indeed I do not think that would have been possible; the audience was too big and to me, at least, terror is best when the group of listeners is small. No, these stories were to amuse, and perhaps to add a dimension to a building and a community that was brand-new. University College has a ghost, of which it is justifiably proud, and doubtless there are others around the University which have not yet found their chroniclers. Massey College is a building of great architectural beauty, and few things become architecture so well as a whiff of the past, and a hint of the uncanny. Canada needs ghosts, as a dietary supplement, a vitamin taken to stave off that most dreadful of modern ailments, the Rational Rickets.

Let no one suppose that I was the first to think that a few hauntings might be acceptable in the new college. Very early in its first autumn I was told that a figure had taken to appearing on the stairs, and in dark corners, who frightened some people, and disappeared when bolder people pursued it. I have never thought of myself as a ghost-catcher, but my work at the college demanded some unusual tasks, and I accepted this one as part of the job. I captured the ghost at last—sneaked up on him from behind—and he proved to be one of the students who, with a sheet and an ugly rubber mask, was trying to cheer the place up. That was his explanation, but there was a gleam in his eye that suggested to me that the ghost game fulfilled some need in his own character. That was not hard to understand, for he was engaged in a particularly rational and hard-headed form of study, and too much rationality, as I have suggested, calls for a balancing element.

Writing ghost stories, and in particular, cheerful ghost stories, set me to the task of examining the literature of the ghost story, and its technique. There are some very famous ghost stories, and perhaps the acknowledged masterpiece is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. James casts it in the form of a tale read at Christmas time to a party of friends in an English country house; what could be better? It is without doubt the best of James’ substantial and distinguished contribution to this branch of literature. There are also the fine stories written by Montague Rhodes James, which he composed and at first read aloud to groups of friends at King’s, Cambridge, and later at Eton, where he was Provost. My father-in-law heard him on a few of these occasions and many years later described to me the special pleasure they gave. Parties of friends, college occasions: yes, we could provide these elements at the Massey College Gaudy Nights; the word comes from the Latin gaude, and has long been applied to college parties. But what about style?

Ghost stories tend to be very serious affairs. Who has ever heard of a ghost cracking a joke? I wanted my ghosts to be light-hearted, if not in themselves, at least as they appeared to my hearers. No new style would suit a ghost story, so it would be necessary to parody the usual style. And the parody would have to be affectionate, for cruel parody is distasteful in itself, and utterly outside the spirit of a party.

I think I know the traditional ghost story style pretty thoroughly. It is solemn, and it frequently makes use of unusual words, designed to strike awe into the minds of the reader or the hearer. It is a style that can very easily become ridiculous, and even such a great master of the ghost story as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu does not always escape this peril. Poor LeFanu not only wrote uncanny tales, he lived one. The story has been told many times that he suffered from a recurrent nightmare, in which he stood at the foot of a macabre and menacing house which towered high in the air, and which he knew was about to collapse on him. When he died in 1873, of a heart seizure, his physician remarked dryly that the house had fallen at last.

It is one of the regrets of my life that I missed seeing, and perhaps even having some conversation with, a man who was a great scholar in the realm of magic, uncanny happenings, and of course ghost stories. He was, to give him his full resounding title and name, the Reverend Father Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, chiefly known for his work in the realm of Restoration drama, but also the author of The History of Witchcraft and many other books about werewolves, Satanism and the supernatural. He was a rum customer. He had left his home in Oxford shortly before I went there in 1936 and was remembered with affection, some mirth, and now and then with unexpected venom. He appeared in the streets dressed like a European priest, in cassock and shovel-hat, with a cloak and a bulky umbrella; some stories insisted that he always walked in the gutter, for no determinable reason. But—and it was this that raised eyebrows—he was invariably accompanied on his afternoon walk either by a pallid youth dressed in black, who was supposed to be his secretary, or by a large black dog, but never by both! Tongues wagged.

Although I never met Father Summers, I have all my life collected his books, among which are several collections of ghost stories, some of which he wrote himself, and to all of which he appends learned discussions of the kind of literature he knew and loved so well. His prose style, which sets the teeth of more austere readers on edge, fills me with delight. He had read so many tales of the supernatural, pored over so many old manuscripts and grimoires, that his writing had been infected by them, and displays a fruit cakyness and port-winyness that makes for very rich literary feeding. He delights in words like ‘sepulture’ and ‘charnel’ which it would be a pity to allow to fall out of the language. So when I set to work to write some ghost stories, with a glint of parody in my eye, I determined also to lay a few laurels on the tomb of that not always wholly admired scholar, Montague Summers. I shall be pleased if those who know his work feel that I have not altogether failed.