We’ve all heard them, the stories that are alleged to have happened to a ‘friend of a friend’ of someone whom we know. Folklorists use the term ‘urban legend’ to describe such tales in order to distinguish them from traditional fairy tales from pre-industrial times, although the two story forms have much in common. Like any other story they have a cast of characters and a beginning, middle and end. They often serve as cautionary tales but are presented in a compelling format due to the utilisation of such elements as mystery, horror, fear and (often dark) humour. Nevertheless they are at heart still morality tales that depict someone acting in a disagreeable manner, only to wind up in trouble, hurt, or dead by way of comeuppance. Many urban legends depict horrific crimes or frightening supernatural occurrences e.g. the story of a woman killed by spiders nesting in her elaborate hairdo; the ‘kidney heist’ story of people being ambushed, anaesthetised, and waking up minus one kidney; and ‘The Death Car’ story, which is probably too gruesome to go into here. The existence of popular contemporary legends is compelling evidence that myths and folklore do not occur exclusively in so-called primitive or traditional societies and that there seems to be an in-built human need to terrify in order to educate. Two of the best examples of such urban legends are Bloody Mary and The Hook Man legend.
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Liddell’s Ghost
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Click image to read my short story 'First Date' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
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M R James
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The Enduring Legacy of M R James: How His Ghostly Tales Defined the Genre
Welcome to my humble abode, dear readers of the supernatural! Today, we’re going to have a creep-tastic time exploring the question of whether M R James was the father of the supernatural ghost story genre. Now, if you’re not familiar with M R James, he was an English author who wrote some of the most […]
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Ghosts of Christmas Past
‘There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas,’ wrote Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to his darkly comic collection Told After Supper (1891), ‘something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails’. Dickens would no doubt agree, […]
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M R James’s Suffolk
The macabre beneath the landscape is not dispelled by nearness to the sea. What Henry James knew, and described in English Hours (1905) – the strangeness present on a flattened seashore – M R James (no blood relation, although the two were acquainted) expressed in two of his best-known ghost stories: Oh, Whistle, and I’ll […]
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A Warning to the Curious
Here’s a real festive treat. In 2000 the BBC produced a series called Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee in which Lee played M R James reading four of his own stories. Lee, who actually once met James, obviously enjoyed making this series and A Warning to the Curious is a real highlight – enjoy!
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Lost Hearts
I have been haunted by the writings of M R James since childhood but when asked what is my favourite of all his ghostly tales I’ve never fully been able to answer. Lost Hearts, an early tale which apparently James didn’t much care for, and which only appeared in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to […]
Ghost Cities 