Haunted Houses
A haunted house is defined (Wiki-defined anyway) as 'a house that is believed to be a centre for supernatural occurrences or paranormal phenomena'. So now you know. I've just finished reading Charles Dickens' story in my Oxfam-bought Oxford Short Story anthology, entitled simply 'The Haunted House'. What an extraordinary piece - it starts off so invitingly with its personable, though eminently nineteenth-century-gentlemanly narrator describing his encounter with and setting up house in a large, forbidding property said to be rife with unnatural - supernatural even - occurrences.
He is not a 'family' man but imports his 'maiden sister' and her protofeminist friend Miss Bates concerned with All Things Woman, a host of troublemaking servants and the Odd Girl, a kind of rescue-servant employed out of charity and regretted ever after. All the servants start to pick up, and play up to, rumours of paranormal phenomena without much hesitation, and the Odd Girl goes into extended 'cataleptic' states, demonstrating a somatic conversion of her experience of being nothing but an 'object' to all around her, whether explicitly abusive or not. Eventually the servants are dismissed and friends invited to live in community, vowed not to spread any scaremongering tales of paranormal experiences until an allocated future date. Lots to think about in the set up and some kind of quasi-uncanny, quasi-rational denouement to come, I thought - until our narrator awakens in his small room, which it is indicated is the focal point of psychic distress, to find himself in bed with a skeleton, addressed as a barber, and slung around the world on a painted rocking horse, during which adventures he sets himself up as the leader of a stock-cliched (even for the mid nineteenth century) orientalist 'seraglio' in the middle of London. There's not much of a conclusion either; nothing you could really describe as resolution or closure, though he does end up back in bed with the skeleton. I was quite astonished. This is Dickens, the showman, the magazine prince! Yet he seemed to go well and truly off the linear rails here.
I did a bit of research and subsequently found that this is merely one story for an anthology of many, with the first section of Dickens' tale serving as set-up for multiple stories to follow by a real showcase of Victorian literati, including Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. The whole series was conceived for Round The Year Magazine in 1862. Nicholas Lezzard in an old online Guardian review describes Dickens' surreal fictional excursion here as something that 'seems to be the product of an extended hallucination' and I can't disagree with that. Definitely going to try to get the whole collection of tales now though.
Haunted houses never go out of fashion, though theories and explanations and methods of resolving, curing, debunking or otherwise disclaiming change to reflect our own perceptions. It is the fundamental example of the homely becoming its own exact opposite - the unhomely, the uncanny. Heimlich into unheimlich, as Freud identifies. And stories that twist into this realm are enomously compelling. I don't suppose Dickens and his co collaborators all stayed together in a likely house to spin our their interweaving stories, but an earlier house party in the Villa Diodati bordering Lake Geneva, where Byron, Polidori, Mary Shelley et all dreamt and wove their vampiric, monstrous stories is a haunting tale in its own right. There was a film of that memorable gathering in Swizerland, in Gothic. It sums up the birth of the genre.
Theories of hauntings. Well one could write a great deal here, most of it falling foul of the parapsychologists. I've read up on the general idea of 'place ghosts'; a supernatural disturbance clinging to a particular location due to prior incident. Then there's 'stone tape' theory; the intriguing idea that innanimate material can absorb energy from us living entities, locking the information in to be replayed one day somehow. I also like the phrase of Susan Howatch's in her marvellous anglo mystical soap operas the Starbridge novels...ghosts located in place are identified as 'discarnate shreds of former personalities'; as though the personality is like a garment, left torn, fraying, fragmented when the soul, whether damaged or completed, disrobes and moves on.
But the poetic fusing of psychology, perception and the haunted domain is more complex still than this. Poets who have written about this? Many I'm sure; numerous ballads spring to mind, of haunted place if not domicile. Here's an excerpt from Esther Morgan's delicately wrought collection, The Silence Living in Houses: 'Self Possession' (a nicely ambiguous title) begins
I am making a ghost for this house
so I can sleep safe at night,
her footsteps light on the stairs
answering the disconnected bells.
The female ghost figure is carefully - painstakingly - constructed. She takes her toll on her speaker -
Tonight, I can feel her
in this incipient headache:
she is coming, my less than familiar,
hot with impatience to exist.
An 'angel in the house' (to use Victorian poet Coventry Patmore's designation of a woman who keeps to her proper domestic sphere) constructing her unheimlich doppleganger perhaps, that house's ghost. Yet the poem (and others in this collection) genuinely disturb; are not just psychological verse tricks. That's the spell of poetry.
My time's up until the next manifestation. Have I had any personal experiences of haunted homes? The disturbed dreams, the cold spots, the ringing of the doorbell when no one's at the door? Perhaps. Not here though, and perhaps I was a different girl back then, an odd girl, unsettled by my own impatience to exist.
He is not a 'family' man but imports his 'maiden sister' and her protofeminist friend Miss Bates concerned with All Things Woman, a host of troublemaking servants and the Odd Girl, a kind of rescue-servant employed out of charity and regretted ever after. All the servants start to pick up, and play up to, rumours of paranormal phenomena without much hesitation, and the Odd Girl goes into extended 'cataleptic' states, demonstrating a somatic conversion of her experience of being nothing but an 'object' to all around her, whether explicitly abusive or not. Eventually the servants are dismissed and friends invited to live in community, vowed not to spread any scaremongering tales of paranormal experiences until an allocated future date. Lots to think about in the set up and some kind of quasi-uncanny, quasi-rational denouement to come, I thought - until our narrator awakens in his small room, which it is indicated is the focal point of psychic distress, to find himself in bed with a skeleton, addressed as a barber, and slung around the world on a painted rocking horse, during which adventures he sets himself up as the leader of a stock-cliched (even for the mid nineteenth century) orientalist 'seraglio' in the middle of London. There's not much of a conclusion either; nothing you could really describe as resolution or closure, though he does end up back in bed with the skeleton. I was quite astonished. This is Dickens, the showman, the magazine prince! Yet he seemed to go well and truly off the linear rails here.
I did a bit of research and subsequently found that this is merely one story for an anthology of many, with the first section of Dickens' tale serving as set-up for multiple stories to follow by a real showcase of Victorian literati, including Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. The whole series was conceived for Round The Year Magazine in 1862. Nicholas Lezzard in an old online Guardian review describes Dickens' surreal fictional excursion here as something that 'seems to be the product of an extended hallucination' and I can't disagree with that. Definitely going to try to get the whole collection of tales now though.
Haunted houses never go out of fashion, though theories and explanations and methods of resolving, curing, debunking or otherwise disclaiming change to reflect our own perceptions. It is the fundamental example of the homely becoming its own exact opposite - the unhomely, the uncanny. Heimlich into unheimlich, as Freud identifies. And stories that twist into this realm are enomously compelling. I don't suppose Dickens and his co collaborators all stayed together in a likely house to spin our their interweaving stories, but an earlier house party in the Villa Diodati bordering Lake Geneva, where Byron, Polidori, Mary Shelley et all dreamt and wove their vampiric, monstrous stories is a haunting tale in its own right. There was a film of that memorable gathering in Swizerland, in Gothic. It sums up the birth of the genre.
Theories of hauntings. Well one could write a great deal here, most of it falling foul of the parapsychologists. I've read up on the general idea of 'place ghosts'; a supernatural disturbance clinging to a particular location due to prior incident. Then there's 'stone tape' theory; the intriguing idea that innanimate material can absorb energy from us living entities, locking the information in to be replayed one day somehow. I also like the phrase of Susan Howatch's in her marvellous anglo mystical soap operas the Starbridge novels...ghosts located in place are identified as 'discarnate shreds of former personalities'; as though the personality is like a garment, left torn, fraying, fragmented when the soul, whether damaged or completed, disrobes and moves on.
But the poetic fusing of psychology, perception and the haunted domain is more complex still than this. Poets who have written about this? Many I'm sure; numerous ballads spring to mind, of haunted place if not domicile. Here's an excerpt from Esther Morgan's delicately wrought collection, The Silence Living in Houses: 'Self Possession' (a nicely ambiguous title) begins
I am making a ghost for this house
so I can sleep safe at night,
her footsteps light on the stairs
answering the disconnected bells.
The female ghost figure is carefully - painstakingly - constructed. She takes her toll on her speaker -
Tonight, I can feel her
in this incipient headache:
she is coming, my less than familiar,
hot with impatience to exist.
An 'angel in the house' (to use Victorian poet Coventry Patmore's designation of a woman who keeps to her proper domestic sphere) constructing her unheimlich doppleganger perhaps, that house's ghost. Yet the poem (and others in this collection) genuinely disturb; are not just psychological verse tricks. That's the spell of poetry.
My time's up until the next manifestation. Have I had any personal experiences of haunted homes? The disturbed dreams, the cold spots, the ringing of the doorbell when no one's at the door? Perhaps. Not here though, and perhaps I was a different girl back then, an odd girl, unsettled by my own impatience to exist.
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