Anaemic Ghosts

In my ’teens I was an omnivorous reader of ghost stories. Skeleton nuns and vampires, fiends and the living dead, were nasty in my mind on rainy Sunday afternoons. ‘With swift, hobbling steps a squat, malignant figure oozed up the mossy steps of the twilit sepulchre . . .’. Often I was afraid to look behind me. At night I pulled the bedclothes, ostrich-like, above eye level. But no image from a book could pluck at my nerves more terribly than a familiar empty room and half-open door. The unknown god or devil is always the most dreadful. The best fiction writers know it; but Mr MacGregor does not. His ghosts are as homely as sewing-machines. His ‘faery dogs’, vouched for as supernatural by ten trusty witnesses, frighten me no more than a boisterous Great Dane. For the very lovely photographs, especially of the Scottish Highlands, with which his book is studded, I thank him many times over. One ghost, the Maid of Glen Duror, is a member of my father’s family. But the Black Shuck, the Martyr King, Madonna lilies and poltergeists – at twelve o’clock, alone with a bottle maybe; but not under the influence of Mr MacGregor’s journalese.

1956 (139)