Ghosts and Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James

AS IN A GLASS DIMLY Shane Leslie

Sir Shane Leslie (1885–1971), Irish baronet and first cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, was a very prolific author who wrote the occasional Jamesian tale and also collected a number of allegedly ‘true’ supernatural stories for his own Ghost Book in 1955. He was educated at Eton and King’s, and it was at the latter (from 1904 onwards) that he began a long friendship with M. R. James—‘the greatest of Provosts . . . now enthroned like a smiling Sphinx’, as Leslie described in his autobiography, recalling James’s gift of mimicry and first-hand recitals of his early ghost stories.

As a rule nobody enjoys better health than the race of Egyptian archaeologists. Yet they are supposed to live under a curse and to be liable to weird accidents and sudden deaths. How can they walk the streets as other men and sleep quiet of nights when it is known that they roused the vengeful passions of many disturbed mummies?

Have they not broken into the sacred resting-places of the dead and breathed the baleful air which rushes out of the tombs laden with the dust and something more than the dust of a thousand years? Regardless of the warnings and entreaties of occultists (many of advanced adeptship) who write to men of science and curators of museums, from boarding-houses in Brighton and Brixton, they live their official lives and continue sorting the mummies as though they were bird-skins or corked insects. They receive threats and curses by post from folk who believe they are reborn out of the land of Egypt into modern life. From others they receive propitiatory offerings, talismans, or money to buy flowers to lay before the desecrated dead behind glass cases. Spirits, which like tumours can be malignant, are supposed to cling to embalmed bodies which have been dispossessed of life since before Greece or Rome were, and even to possess those dry, painted coffins which adorn our museums. Our ancestors had less fear, though, perhaps, not more sense, for they pounded mummies into medicines.

In more nervous days the strangest stories have been told of the fate which indirectly reaches the vandalizer of mummies. Gossip and journalism have spread strong rumours of the succession of disasters and sudden misadventures which invariably follow the excavator or collector. Burnt houses and sunken liners are sometimes connected with the shipment of a mummy. Still, there is no record of the unexpected salvage of a mummy from the scene of a naval disaster. And the percentage of burnt mansions in which there were Egyptian curiosities is so small that it has not attracted the attention of the insurance companies.

Nevertheless, the great Egyptian myth has proceeded gaily. Who does not know a friend whose friend slipped and broke an ankle on the steps of the British Museum after peering too inquisitively into a mummy? Who has not heard of the explorer and hunter who, after shipping a mummy home, proceeded into the African bush never to be seen alive again? Years afterwards his companions relate that he was killed by a buffalo or lion and his remains hastily buried in a river bank. They returned later to find that it had been carried away by the floods. A strange corroboration follows in England. Some expert, who is quite unaware of the circumstances of the mummy, has deciphered the inscription on the coffin wood and found stated in hieroglyphics as plain as many pikestaffs that the violator of this particular mummy will perish by a sudden and violent death.

‘Out of the forest shall the destroyer come upon him, and the voice of the waters shall be lifted against him, and the place of his burial shall not be known.’

And the legend assumes a very sturdy size. It is believed and vouched for. And wherever the mummy is placed, troubles begin. One legend spreads the seed of others, and there is no sifting of the different tales. Egyptologists find themselves tripping up on staircases and on ballroom floors. Their houses are mysteriously ignited, and they do not live out the period which is set for the life of man. A series of inexplicable accidents are reserved for those who photograph mummies. Nothing seems to cause such annoyance to the dead as photography. The troubles which befall curators and van-men are nothing in comparison. Nothing is more resented by the mummy than reduplication upon sensitized plates. Curses take effect upon honest photographers, which are collected and retailed by honest journalists, and these, in turn, are investigated and pronounced upon by honest spiritualists.

The general reader accumulates a hazy memory of these yarns, but decides to wait the day until an Egyptian expert crosses his path before taking a final opinion. Such an occasion once came to us. An old Egyptian explorer had joined the same house-party in the South of England, and it was easy to draw him on the only subject about which he would speak at all.

We told him some of these fantastic tales and asked him about his health. Had he ever had any accidents during his work? He smiled and then laughed. We laughed and then smiled as he made fun of the whole type of story. His burly health and sound common sense seemed an assurance in favour of the life he led. He looked like a retired football-player with a sense of humour, not in the least like a man who devoted his soul to unwrapping the dead and, when possible, to deciphering their hidden secrets. He told us some interesting things, but quite scientific, about Egyptians and their writings.

After dinner we tried him again, especially about the famous mummy in the British Museum which had wrought such devastation. This particular case had never crossed his path. He had read about it in the papers. In fact he looked to the daily Press for all the exciting sidelights of his profession, but those kind of things didn’t happen as a rule. He was disinclined to believe this wonderful tale, and he smiled and laughed in turn. But the simpler theories of the spiritualists which we propounded to him he was willing to accept, because, he said, there were no facts to prove or controvert them.

As far as facts stood, he insisted that he must remain a materialist. He had never investigated the spirits of those whom he unravelled, but he was interested when we suggested that the Egyptians were thinking of their spirits rather than their bodies when they went to such elaborate lengths of bodily preservation; our theory being that the astral body, or ghost, is entirely delivered by fire or cremation, but in the case of earth-burial is liable to linger perhaps as long as the process of decay itself. This was more so the case when the body was laid away secretly or ill-buried behind panelling or under flooring.

Suicides were often earth-bound, and this seemed to be the reason why in the Middle Ages their bodies were staked at the cross-roads. Somebody suggested that people who had been burnt never left a ghost. By the burning of the astral body they escaped instantly to the next plane. But no cut-and-dried rule could be laid down. Some occultists were deeply opposed to the destruction of the astral body involved in cremation. Others welcomed the great release.

The Egyptians seemed to have gone to the opposite extreme, as their complicated burial system was an effort to retain the body and its astral shape together in the indefinite silence of the tombs. As long as the body was undecayed, the astral body remained. There must be some powerful reason behind the amazing immobility which they decreed to their dead. No other race had made the tomb its national monument. What a people! Their art was devoted to the dead, and their hierarchy was one of undertakers!

Naturally, our view, being based a little on rumoured happenings, was that the ghost was unable to escape from the undecaying mummy, but that when the coffins were opened and the spices and preservatives were interfered with anything might happen. Astral forms, though reduced to feeble transparency by time, were bound to pass out. In some cases it was possible that they should assume a malevolent medium, but it was difficult to say how long they survived the opening of the coffins in which they had been immobile so long.

This was pure theory, and our wise old friend took it very well. He was even considerate. Yes, it might be so. He was bound to take a scientific attitude himself towards mummies. He had dug them up as stolidly as other men dig up potatoes or nuggets, according to their respective callings. He had examined, dissected, labelled, and exported them. He had packed them for the post and arranged them on shelves. He had lectured about them holding specimens in his hand, and here he was. He had often arranged for them to be photographed. We listened very humbly.

But when he mentioned photography he ceased in his talk. We thought he became rather more solemn, and, as though unwilling to carry us over relentlessly to his own arguments, he was giving us a chance of recovery.

‘Talking of photography, I do remember something happening which to my mind remains quite unexplained.’

We begged him to tell us. He seemed unwilling, but with great fairness he told us what seemed to be a singular exception against his theories and belief that mummies could be dealt with like merchandise from the grocer or the apothecary.

‘Yes, there was one event in my life which remains inexplicable. I was collecting Egyptian curios for an amateur who had commissioned me to buy whatever genuine stuff came into the market. One day a traveller called and asked me if I were interested in mummy-cases. I replied I certainly was, provided they had not been manufactured in Paris with French paupers’ bodies wrapped up in modern preservatives. He said he had no mummy, but an Egyptian coffin-board to dispose of—and that immediately. He asked me if I could feel interested in a single board, which was painted with hieroglyphics from the Book of the Dead. What he showed me was rare and interesting, and I asked him the price.

“Oh, it’s valuable, is it?” he asked. “May I inquire what it would fetch in the auction rooms?” I was prepared to do an honest deal with him, and I said that such a rarity was worth two hundred pounds to me.

“Well,” he snapped, “suppose I were to let you have it for nothing!”

‘“As a gift? Well, I should be very grateful.”

‘Before I could speak further, he said: “Done! You can have it, but on one condition—that you fetch it from my address today.”

‘It was already late in the afternoon, and I doubted if I could get my furnisher’s van round to him before it was put away for the night. I suggested coming next day. No, it must be that afternoon—before midnight or never. I did not wish to lose such a chance, and called my workmen back from supper to perform a special job. That evening the painted plank stood in my study, and my benefactor, with a sigh of relief, shook my hands and I never saw him again.

‘That night the plank remained in my rooms, and I was complimenting myself on my luck in picking up such a good item. Suddenly the bell rang, and some excitable gentlemen arrived who said they were spiritualists as hot in the search of their science as I was in my line. They were very interested in this famous mummy-plank, which had already given some rather wonderful results to their medium. Unfortunately the owner had become nervous or frightened, thought he was incurring bad luck, and had sold it. I did not inform them that he had been very glad to give it away.

‘The upshot of their visit was that they were anxious to carry out a seance with this object, and, if I would permit them, to make a photograph of it. After a little questioning I learnt from them that it had been photographed once and that the plate had revealed an unpleasant face in the wood. They were unwilling to show it to me, as there had been some question of a fraud. I made up my mind. I said I had no intention of allowing a seance, especially as they proposed to sit up all night in my rooms. But I was willing to allow the plank to be photographed under my own conditions, which were that I should choose the photographer and use the firm who usually developed my plates for me, and that six negatives should be taken and kept locked in a box for future reference.

‘To these conditions they agreed, and for a week I was left alone.

‘When they returned to the charge I was ready for them. I had communicated with my photographer and my trustworthy firm, who agreed to take every precaution against the slightest fake. Mr Bashford, the photographer, arrived with the head of the firm I had mentioned the matter to. The latter had been so interested that he had the box for the negatives prepared under his own supervision and a special lock fitted. The plank was photographed six times in the presence of witnesses, and the negatives taken away to be developed.

‘On the morning following I was surprised, though not alarmed, to receive a telegram from Bashford asking me to telegraph him money to return to London with. As he lived at Enfield I was surprised to notice that he telegraphed from Edinburgh. The resemblance between the two names was slight. However, I forwarded him the money and he returned that night. He came to see me, a little worried and not quite coherent. He had fallen down my steps when leaving my house, and struck his head. He must have asked for the wrong train, for he knew nothing about it until he found himself at Edinburgh. That was all he had to say.

‘The next day I was sorry to receive word that the gentleman who was developing my negatives had had an accident in his family. A daughter of his had fallen through a glass window and severely cut her face. I remember pulling myself together and resolutely assuring myself that these were both accidental happenings and that neither could have had anything to do with the coffin-plank they had shared in photographing.

‘I waited till my spiritualist friends applied to see the results and I went round to the shop where they were to have been developed. The head of the firm talked with me for half an hour before we touched on the photographs. I was glad to hear that his daughter was well on the way to recovery. It was now only a question of scars. As for the negatives, he had developed them successfully and placed them in the box, which he had locked and left in his safe. His safe was never interfered with and, indeed, he had unlocked it that morning and found the box exactly as he had stored it. He had unlocked it only an hour back. He was sorry he had not studied the negatives when they were first developed. They were now impossible to make out!

‘“What,” I insisted, “they haven’t changed colour since you put them away?” He was silent for a minute. Then he said very quietly: “They have not only changed colour, but they have changed substance. There are six thin trails of dust where the glass plates stood last night. I am very sorry, and that is all that is to be said about it. Such a thing has never happened to me before.”

‘He showed the box to me, and I touched the thin grey dust with my finger-tip.

‘As I say, there has been one occurrence in my life which remains absolutely inexplicable to this day. I leave it there.’

Some time had passed after recording the Egyptian experience and that at second-hand. I had recorded it in a cell of memory, for one does incline to save up little fragments of the supernatural during life in the hope that one may meet a clue or a piece of the missing jig-saw later.

I was asked by a friend to visit a church in the Diocese of London which was giving the Rector a considerable amount of trouble. Not a mile from Kensington, it was a peaceful little church in its way, but it had become disagreeable spiritually. Moderate in ritual, and old-fashioned in doctrine, it lay in an ecclesiastical backwater. My friend called me on the telephone and asked me to come round and have a talk with the Rector. I agreed at a few hours’ notice, and we found ourselves passing rapidly out of the maelstrom of a bus route through narrow and short streets until we caught sight of a Georgian chapel with Victorian additions. It was a dull and drab edifice, and if it were a haunted building this was its only distinction.

There are, of course, many haunted churches in London. There is a Catholic Church where the interior confessional bell is frequently rung at night and Masses are said as though in response to the call of unknown souls. There is an Anglican Church where the stamp of the lame clergyman, long dead, is heard pacing round his aisles as though for ever counting his absent congregation. But this was a different case, we were told, and impossible to explain.

We called on the Rector, who said he would show us over his church before he gave us any indication of what was worrying him. We passed solemnly up and down the quiet, dusty pews. There had not been many improvements and there was little beauty to restore from the beginning. Except for some stained-glass windows of recent origin there was nothing of colour to relieve the dull walls. These the Rector pointed out to us, and begged us to take stock of them. Besides the conventional English saints, whose dullness in the case of Bishops, and plainness in the case of Holy Virgins, seems to ensure against any temptation to invoke their aid, there was a Last Supper, in which the only lifelike figure was that of Judas as he hurried from the upper room. There was also a scene from the Miracles, which was concealed by a board partition. We glimpsed behind it at the conventional picture—quite unnoteworthy. Then we searched the whole church very thoroughly, and, finding less than nothing to remark, we withdrew to the Rectory.

Over a strong brew of tea the Rector explained his difficulties. Morning Prayer was all right and Evening Prayer likewise. His troubles always came at the Communion Service.

‘I might tell you that in the eighteen months I have been quartered here I have not yet been able to bring the most sacred of services to a decorous finish. The service is held in the early morning to very small congregations. The majority prefer the choral Matins with a very short sermon.’

I asked him whether the assistants were troubled as well as he was. He answered that there were different communicants at the services. Some had perceived these incidents once or twice and had mistaken them for accidents. But he had celebrated on each occasion and felt that the strange hand of coincidence could not have been exerted Sunday after Sunday. In the end he had abandoned the early service for some months, but he felt uneasy about having done so, and was anxious to resume it. It was some time before he would give us any inkling into his past experiences. But they had not been pleasant. On one occasion the window covered by the boarding had blown in and an icy air had penetrated as far as the Communion Table, where he felt too chilly to proceed, and had dismissed the communicants. On another occasion the Cup had been snatched from his hands and the unconsecrated wine poured over the cloth. He had never commenced the service without a feeling of dread creeping upon him. He never felt nervous at the services later in the day. The climax had come when he turned towards the congregation and, as he believed, noticed one of the figures in the boarded window standing reflected against the opposite wall with its tongue hanging out. It gave him so considerable a shock that he had abandoned the service straight away, and had the window boarded under the pretext that it was in need of repairs.

We returned to the church and examined the window carefully. He showed us the figure which had, in his imagination, apparently become separated from its glazing. But there were two remarkable things about it. First of all, it was impossible that the sun could ever have thrown the shape like a magic-lantern, because the window looked out on a blank wall. Secondly, the leaded mouth in the figure was tightly closed. It was apparently meant to represent the young man with the loaves and fishes.

It was puzzling to know why such an innocent figure should have taken upon itself so gruesome an aspect. Again the Rector assured us that on two occasions he had seen the window reflected almost in facsimile upon the opposite wall, but with the awful change in the tongue which he was certain was hanging out of the lips. Under careful examination we elicited the fact that the two appearances had occurred at the same service, and that the glass had been made by a reputable firm in Birmingham, though the designs had been suggested by the Rector’s predecessor. About him we knew nothing, but fortunately the old pew-opener, who had accompanied us, was at this juncture able to offer a valuable comment—to wit, that the last Rector of the church, in her opinion, went mad, and that was why he resigned the living. It turned out that he was dead, or he would have afforded a valuable witness. The pew-opener, on being further examined, remembered that the late Rector had been interested in prison work and that his brother had been a Deputy Governor in some gaol. That was all that could be remembered.

Never did a psychic hunting-ground provide less clues. The structure of the church proved drab, modern, and featureless. The boards were taken down from the suspected window. We arranged mirrors in a number of positions to catch the stained glass, but the effect was always the same. The young man with the loaves and the fishes always preserved his well-mannered look. When the light threw the colours against the opposite wall they seemed blurred but not in the least ghastly or unpleasant. Suddenly I heard a groan from the Rector, who was holding a mirror in a far corner of the church. We both hurried to his side where he stood petrified with terror. It seemed obvious, at the moment, that the solution of everything lay in his own nervous disposition. He stood there holding out the mirror and clasping it with both hands. We glanced over his shoulder. The stained-glass window was reflected small and clearly against the quicksilver. Every detail was discernible, including one which was not in the original—a wagging tongue. It was so uncalled for and so unexplicable that we both uttered a cry of bewilderment, passing into a groan. This was too much for the Rector, who dropped the mirror with a crash to the floor and sank upon his knees in the nearest pew.

We hurried back to the original and scrutinized with eye and finger. It was exactly as when it left the Birmingham makers. But we made no further experiments with mirrors.

There was nothing more to be done, and the next morning the boards were restored to the window, and church services were resumed. We put ourselves into communication with the manufacturers. Our correspondence conveyed, of course, not the least hint that their fine work of art had been behaving in such disorderly fashion. But we represented that we were interested in the work and would be anxious to know if the firm could reproduce a similar window from the old designs. In any case we wished to know the name of the designer. The firm replied that they would be happy to supply us with a similar, or, rather, better example of their art. Unfortunately the designs for the particular window we mentioned could not be found. They were able to put their hands on any others of their work during the past fifty years. It was very curious (to us a little more than curious) that it should be so, but they were not to be found. So scent failed there at an important point.

A few weeks passed, and we received a letter from the firm to say that the reason why they had not been able to find the designs of the window in which we were interested was that, unlike all others produced by the firm, this one had been drawn by a brother of the former Rector, the Deputy Governor of a certain gaol. This was the first unusual fact we had discovered, and the next step was to visit the gaol in question. Though the Deputy Governor was dead, there were several warders who remembered him. I fell into conversation with one of these and asked him if the late Deputy were very fond of drawing. The warder thought for a moment, and said: ‘Well, now I think about him, he was, and he sometimes drew sketches of the prisoners here.’

I tried a long shot. ‘Do you remember if he ever made any designs for the prison chapel?’

‘Why, yes,’ replied the warder, ‘he most certainly did. The whole of the altar was painted by him and he drew pictures for the walls from faces in the prison.’

We visited the chapel, and the warder was amused, pointing out the pictures of various characters, such as the previous Governor, warders he had known, and several prisoners who had been used as models. Suddenly my eye fell on a visage which I remembered in a flash. In one of the frescoes was a young, perfectly expressionless, face, identical with the young man who had given us so much trouble in the window of the London church. I asked very quietly if he remembered the model who had been used.

‘It’s curious you should ask that,’ answered the warder, ‘for, though you would never think it, that was a young and desperate criminal. I was in the prison when he was executed; and very unpleasant it was. The Deputy Governor was taken by his looks—from an artistic point of view—and tried to draw him when he was in his cell. But the prisoner objected so much that the Governor came one day with an old camera and photographed him while he was asleep, and I believe he used the photograph to make a drawing for the picture on the chapel wall. It certainly looks uncommonly like that prisoner . . .’

There was no need to tell the warder that the photograph must have been later enlarged and used to fill a light in a London church. When we returned, we told the Rector the curious clue we had discovered. He could judge for himself whether the glass were haunted and whether the spirit of the hanged man had been able to possess itself of the texture of the glass. I do not know whether hanging has any effect on a man’s tongue or whether it could cause it to protrude. We decided that would be an unnecessary inquiry. We also forwent any research into the career of the prisoner. It was sufficient once to have heard his name. But, at our advice, the Rector removed the whole window, which we buried subsequently in a country churchyard and left to its fate.

I always connected the evil possession of this glass with the curious story I had heard about the negative plates of the Egyptian coffin-board. In each case some malefic power had installed itself invisibly in the glass. There was no conclusion to come to except that they were parallels. Neither really made a story, but the two episodes remained not utterly unrelated in my memory. I could still say that two and two make four, but further I could not carry any calculation into the world of ghostly relativity.