The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I’m reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it’s where I keep a collection of ghost books. The idea, I suppose, is that whenever I’m too agitated to sleep, I pull out a ghost book – truth or fiction – and can sit there, huddled up while the rain beats against the windowpanes, and read about the spirits that walk at three.
Keep in mind, I don’t actually believe in ghosts. A few years ago, my girlfriend and I lived in a supposedly haunted house. It was built in 1810 and ready to fall down. There were voices in the basement and murmuring in the hallway outside our bedroom. I can’t tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house. You spend half your time complaining there’s no life after death, and the other half bitching that the dead are making so much noise.
So I don’t know where this mania for collecting ghost books comes from. But whenever I’m on tour, I buy a book of the local “true” ghost lore as my memento (mori) of the visit. I love the regionality of these slim volumes, the piratical gloom of tales from the northern coast as opposed to the parasols and hoop-dresses of the gracious cities of the South; the grim winters in Minnesota’s stories and the Cajun spice of Louisiana’s lore. I love the narrators with their passion for local history and their batty, tag-along psychics. A few from my own region that I’ll mention by name: Joseph Citro’s earlier books really capture the weird angles of New England’s haunted past. Robert Cahill, once Sheriff of Salem, has written an engaging series of booklets on recondite northeastern mysteries which are available in any store that sells candles shaped like galleons. And I have an ancient first edition of Blue Balliett’s Nantucket Ghosts, written decades before she became known for her mystery novels for kids.
Then there are the stacks of 19th-century ghost fiction. Dover Books has done great reprints of a lot of the classic ghost collections – not merely your Bierce and Collins and Doyle and Dickens, but Oliver Onions, Algernon Blackwood, and Sheridan Le Fanu. A few lesser-known turn-of-the-century tales I’d recommend (all of which are out of copyright and available for free now at Project Gutenberg and the like): William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder tales, about a scientific paranormal investigator c. 1910, is fine phantom fluff for those who want to see what the TAPS team would have pursued in an age before HVAC; Margaret Oliphant’s novella “The Library Window” is an excellent gloomy cure for those sick of face-sparkles in their paranormal romance; and lastly, for those who do want some sparkle, I don’t know why people haven’t revived Robert W. Chambers’s In Search of the Unknown (1904), the chronicles of a romantically hapless cryptobiologist stumbling around in search of the world’s weirdest monstrosities. It’s every bit as bizarre as Chambers’s more famous collection, The King in Yellow, but charming, too, with a hint of a gormless Wodehouse hero consigned to pith-helmeted teratology expeditions. It’s a pleasure to read.
I don’t know why these books appeal to me as a rationalist who doesn’t believe in any chain-rattling claptrap. Maybe I find beautiful the idea of being haunted by our own history. Maybe I yearn for continuation after death. Or maybe the ghosts are a relief; the human animal, still alive, is what really terrifies me.
