Book Review: Victorian Ghost Stories

I was sifting through a thrift store when I found a frayed, ragged book sleeve titled "A Treasury of Victorian Ghost Stories" Edited by Everett F. Bleiler. As a lover of the macabre, I could feel the book pulling at me, yearning to be read. The Victorians were death-obsessed — mourning, deceased portraits, jewelry made of loved one's hair  — it made sense that they found salvation in ghost stories. How often do we hear the re-telling a good "old fashioned" ghost story? I was intrigued, and I had no idea what  was lurking beneath the sleeve.

Ghost stories were a very fine-tuned art form, but all of them had one thing in common: they involved ghosts, literally. If I could explain the journey of reading this book with an analogy, it would be this: it might feel redundant to visit the same painting over and over again, but I bet that each and every time you look at it you see something you hadn't seen before. Do I believe in ghosts? Perhaps. The closest thing to a ghost I experienced was during the first night of moving into my house when I was ten years old. I saw a mushy outline of a man smiling, and waving at me through the bathroom window. I went downstairs to ask my mom if there was someone working on the side of the house, she said no. 

There were so many stories in this book; old ghost dog barking when soldiers fell asleep, dark cloaked woman waiting in a cemetery for her one true love, old dead lady wearing black in a casino, wet ghost footsteps from a girl who drowned. Even though all of the stories are centered around ghosts, they were each so unique and separate from one another which goes to show the diversity of the genre and how many places it could go. 

One of my favorite stories was "The Library Window" by Margaret Oliphant. There's this young girl who becomes obsessed, almost driven to madness, while looking across the street into this window of a library. As the story develops, she begins to see a man through the window, a man devoted to writing. She begins to tether herself to this phantom, obsessing over who he is and whether she will continue to see him. Oliphant makes you feel this sort of relentless frustration and yearning. The man never acknowledges the girl, going about his writing as if she wasn't even there. Through her words, it feels as if you're climbing on a ladder, only to be pushed off of it when you realize that the man does not exist. For a moment, I actually hoped that he did exist. A part of me hoped that he would look across the window and finally see her, but alas he was just a ghost. This story mimics the many tales of female insanity and obsession that were written during that time (very "The Yellow Wallpaper" kind of vibes)

​Another story that really caught my attention was "Ken's Mystery" by Julian Hawthorne. Ken was traveling and ends up in a cemetery with a ghost of a woman who asks him to play his banjo. Upon the end of the trip, he finds that his banjo is rotted as if it were centuries old even though it was given to him by his friend quite recently. This story is fascinating because there are a lot of questions that left to be answered, specifically how did his banjo rot after playing for the ghost? The tying of a physical object to the horrific experience that he endured made the story a lot more intriguing, giving it a more tangible presence. It would've been one thing if he just saw the ghost and it disappeared, but he now has something to prove that this encounter really did happen. 

There's a certain mysterious, romanticism in the way Victorian writers told these stories, even if they were meant to be horrific and gruesome. These stories were good at making you feel uneasy, and apprehensive of what was going to happen next. Even though you had an idea of what might happen, the journey getting there left you on the edge of your seat. You knew the pin would drop, but you wouldn't know when, and that kind of tactic is effective when telling ghost stories. It also helps that there is no perfect ending to these stories; you're left wondering what actually did or didn't happen. As Edgar Allen Poe once said, "Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see." 

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