By james art Midlands Canal Ghost Stories, recommended by Dr. Jimmy Packham, Associate Professor of North American Literature
Jimmy says: “The Midlands has a rich and quirky – if strangely neglected – Gothic tradition of its own, much of which is linked to the industrialization that is so central to the Midlands’ modern identity. I’d like to make a specific case for the ghost stories set along the canals of the West Midlands (the arteries of industrial process) as being among the most chilling and rewarding of this regional tradition.
“Perhaps the best ghost story filmed on the channel is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Three miles up from 1951. Don’t look now). Howard’s story takes place somewhere near Tamworth and Lichfield. A more conventional iteration of the ghost story may be, set in a fictional ‘North Midlands’, is LTC Rolt Bosworth pound (1948): if Rolt’s story lacks the mysterious and nightmarish logic of Howard’s story, it provides us with a perhaps more obviously terrifying haunting.
“But it is not so much the ghosts that stay with us from these canal tales. Instead, it’s the canals themselves that strike us as the most powerful haunting here – abandoned, overgrown with attractive plants and saturated with damp mist and an eerie atmosphere. The troubling implication of these stories is that once we’ve taken to the canals—once we’ve made the short hop from towpath to narrowboat—it’s very, very hard to get back on land. After all, the tales aim to change the ways we see and travel through the supposedly stable and landlocked Midlands…”
Are the dead dead? by Emma Frances Dawson, recommended by Dr. Emily Vincent, Research Fellow
Emily says: “Are the dead dead? (1897) by the lesser-known American author Emma Frances Dawson celebrates the nineteenth-century fascination with spiritualism, a movement that in its later years focused on the study of ghostly occurrences through occult research known as “psychic research.”
“Dawson’s story is particularly compelling because it explores many different kinds of ghosts: from the hypnotic power of music, mysterious figures returning from the past, and investigations into a supposedly haunted house through an institutionalized ‘ghost club.’
“Dawson’s story is also one of fourteen stories featured in the British Library’s Emily Vincent collection of séance stories for the Tales of the Strange series, Summoned for a Seance: Stories of the Spirits Beyond the Veilwhich is due out in December 2024.”
“Oh whistle and I’ll come to you my boy” from Ghost stories of an antiquarian from Mr. James and loved ones by Toni Morrison, recommended by Dr Chris Lautaris, Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare.
Chris says: “When Parkins, a professor of ontography, discovers an ancient whistle at the site of a former Templar stronghold, he unleashes a menacing presence he can’t shake. James weaves a mysterious world of shadows, vague shapes and mercurial creatures made all the more unnerving by their obscurity, what makes this story so eerie is its atmospheric evocation of the not-quite-human, forcing the reader’s imagination to run wild!
“For years, the house on Bluestone Road has been occupied by Seth’s young daughter, the child she killed. One day a strange woman appears on her doorstep. Her name is Beloved, the same word Seth had engraved on her daughter’s tombstone. accompanied by the memories of Sethe’s former life as an enslaved woman called Sweet Home also brings with it the unleashing of dangerous and strange parasitic forces that threaten to take over Sethe and all she loves the ghost of her little girl, now brought back to seeking revenge? A powerful novel about the ghosts of the past and the slave trade that took the lives – as the novel’s poignant epigraph informs us – of “Sixty Millions and More”.
So there you have it, a selection of suitably spooky stories to explore this Halloween!