Ghosts

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 4

Ghosts

The Fourth Ghost Book. Edited by James Turner. Barrie and Rockcliff. 303 PPIt is obvious from the subject matter of these 23 ghost stories that the traditional pattern of such fiction is changing. Of them all, only one purports to be a “True story,” and as the events related happened 45 years ago, it is possible that the author has not made his assertion just for dramatic effect. “Dear Ghost . . .” by Fielden Hughes, tells of a student, staying in an unpretentious cottage in East Anglia, whose fear of an unseen presence is revolved finally >n the form of a pathetic message from a suicide to the young man’s landlady who had been the dead man’s wife. With this exception the stories are either of traumatic experience, such as that of the tuberculosis patient who, under the influence of drugs, believes that she is being nursed by someone who does not, in fact, exist; or frankly contrived, as in the two stories where sexual relations between a ghost and a live woman are alleged to have taken place. “Hapladies” by Anthony Rye provides a genuine chill, for it foreshadows a murder witnessed, in phantasmic form, by two people who shortly afterwards meet the characters concerned and know that they themselves are powerless to avert an impending tragedy. “The Guardian,” by James Turner, is equally horrifying, describing the continuing power of a dead mother over her son, and its gruesome consequences.

None of the tales demonstrate a widely-held theory that ghostly phenomena represent "some former happening which has somehow impressed itself indelibly on the terrestrial scene in which it took place: though “Water, Water, Wallflower.” by Fred Urquhart comes close to doing so with its story of a haunted kitchen in a house in France. None of these psychic manifestations, except the first and last mentioned, could add to the data of the Society for Psychical Research.