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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
S. Baring-Gould's "A Book of Ghosts" is a mesmerizing collection that interweaves folklore, superstition, and spectral encounters, capturing the essence of the Victorian fascination with the supernatural. This work employs a rich, narrative style that blends anecdotal storytelling with scholarly observation, providing a window into the rituals, beliefs, and cultural contexts that shaped the ghost stories of the time. Its eclectic range traverses various countries and epochs, making it not just a ghost story anthology, but a cultural study of humanity's enduring obsession with the afterlife. Baring-Gould was a prodigious author and folklorist, whose diverse interests in literature, religion, and anthropology influenced his exploration of ghostly phenomena. His unique background, which encompassed both academic rigor and a deep-seated curiosity about the unknown, propelled him to document the spectral lore surrounding him. His works often reflect his commitment to understanding the intricacies of human belief, inviting readers to ponder the intersections of fear and the sublime. For readers captivated by the interplay of myth and history, "A Book of Ghosts" stands as an essential compendium. It not only enchants with haunting tales but also invites contemplation on the universal themes of loss, memory, and the unseen realms that lie just beyond our understanding. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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A Book of Ghosts
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Book of Ghosts is a single-author collection by S. Baring-Gould that assembles a varied array of supernatural tales under one cover. Its scope is neither a complete works nor a genre-spanning omnibus, but a focused gathering of ghostly narratives presented to entertain, unsettle, and probe the edges of belief. The purpose is twofold: to showcase the imaginative possibilities of the ghost story and to test, through narrative experiment, how the supernatural reflects social custom, private conscience, and communal memory. The result is a coherent cabinet of spectres, curated by a writer steeped in lore and attentive to lived detail.
The collection is composed primarily of short stories and tale-like narratives, many of them self-contained episodes and some arranged in numbered parts. It opens with a preface and proceeds through a sequence of fictional accounts that often adopt the tone of anecdotes, case histories, or remembered incidents. A few pieces draw upon traditional materials and folk narratives, including retellings from northern European sources, while others are plainly modern in setting and sensibility. Occasional authorial asides supply context or suggest lines of interpretation, so that the volume moves fluidly between storytelling and a lightly essayistic register without abandoning its fictional core.
Across these pieces, unifying themes steadily emerge. Baring-Gould is interested in the borderland between credulity and skepticism, and in how communities negotiate what cannot be readily explained. Motifs recur—unquiet memory, retribution, mistaken identity, doubles, haunted objects, and the persistence of place—yet the emphasis remains on character and circumstance rather than spectacle. Domestic interiors, parish lanes, and workaday routines are interrupted by the uncanny, making ethical questions as central as chills: What is owed to the dead? Where does responsibility end? The stories typically sustain ambiguity, allowing rational and supernatural readings to coexist in productive tension.
Stylistically, the collection favors measured, exact prose and the cadence of oral narration. Baring-Gould often frames a tale as if it has been told or heard, layering voices to imply multiple witnesses while preserving a clear controlling narrator. Local color and specific detail—names, landscapes, customs—lend plausibility, while the supernatural is introduced with restraint, rising through suggestion rather than overt display. Structural variety keeps the rhythm brisk: embedded anecdotes, episodic divisions, and occasional documentary touches sit alongside more traditional story shapes. Irony is present but never cynical; the register stays courteous, lucid, and attentive to human motives.
As a whole, A Book of Ghosts stands at the confluence of literary storytelling and the study of tradition, characteristic of the English-language ghost tale at the turn of the twentieth century. Its significance lies in how it yokes folk-informed material to crafted fiction, revealing a continuum between oral report, local legend, and modern narrative art. Without insisting on doctrinal conclusions, the book maps the cultural uses of haunting—mourning, warning, vindication, and remembrance. It also offers an historical snapshot of contemporary anxieties and curiosities, from shifting social norms to technological change, refracted through apparitions that test fact against feeling.
Readers will find the contents arranged to encourage both sequential reading and serendipitous sampling. Some narratives are brief and pointed; others unfold across several parts, allowing incidents to echo and accrue. A prefatory note frames expectations, while the tales themselves balance variation in setting and mood with recurring patterns of causation and consequence. Throughout, Baring-Gould’s curatorial instinct is evident: materials derived from tradition sit beside modern inventions without friction, their kinship emphasized by shared concerns with witness, testimony, and truth. The book’s internal signposts and episodic architectures guide the eye while preserving the organic, conversational feel of a told tale.
Approach this collection expecting quiet shocks, moral weight, and the patient accumulation of unease rather than relentless terror. The hauntings are diverse—some rooted in place, others in objects or family histories—but they consistently serve human stories first. Atmosphere, not gore, carries the effect; implication often does more work than explanation. Baring-Gould trusts the reader to inhabit uncertainty, to listen for the undertone of custom and conscience beneath each disturbance. Taken together, these tales offer an enduring invitation: to consider what lingers after deeds and desires have passed, and to measure the living by how they honor the unseen.
Historical Context
Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Anglican priest, antiquary, novelist, and folklorist, wrote A Book of Ghosts near the end of the long Victorian century, published in London by Methuen in 1904. Born at Exeter and later squire-parson of Lew Trenchard on the edge of Dartmoor, he fused clerical experience with deep knowledge of West Country lore. Across the collection, narrators who are clergy, soldiers, physicians, or country people reflect strata of British society he knew first-hand. The tales are informed by his lifelong habit of collecting beliefs and curiosities—seen also in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866–68) and The Book of Were-Wolves (1865)—and by his effort to reconcile tradition with modern inquiry.
The Victorian fascination with spiritualism provides a crucial backdrop. From the Fox sisters’ rappings in 1848 to fashionable séances in London drawing rooms, belief in communication with the dead flourished even as laboratory science advanced. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 by figures such as Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers, sought to test apparitions, haunted houses, and telepathy. Baring-Gould read and observed with a cleric’s pastoral skepticism, often framing marvels against sober inquiry rather than credulity. His collection thus sits between Sheridan Le Fanu’s refined terrors and, in the very year 1904, M. R. James’s antiquarian ghosts, sharing concerns while retaining a distinctly regional voice.
Many settings draw upon the West Country, where Baring-Gould served as rector of Lew Trenchard, Devon, from 1881 until his death in 1924. Dartmoor’s tors, church towers and leads, fishing coves, and decaying manor houses supply atmospheres that recur across the tales, from peril at sea to apparitions in parsonages. His regional studies A Book of the West (Devon, 1899; Cornwall, 1900) and his biography The Vicar of Morwenstow (1876) reveal the same fascination with moorland custom, wrecks, miners, and old parish feasts. This ethnographic habit animates characters who speak in dialect, share farm tasks, ride trains to market towns, and confront beliefs inherited from earlier centuries.
His medievalism, nurtured by the Gothic Revival, is equally important. Baring-Gould restored his parish church and manor house at Lew Trenchard in a revivalist spirit, and wrote Lives of the Saints (1872–77), mapping late antique and medieval piety onto Victorian concerns. Travels in Iceland in 1862–63 produced Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas (1863), and furnished material for retellings from Grettis saga, notably the revenant episode of Glámr. That dialogue between saga-cruel North and English parish life threads the book, as do motifs taken from medieval miracle-collections, exempla, and demonologies he catalogued in Curious Myths. The result is a supernatural framed by antiquarian citation and liturgical cadence.
Modern technologies press upon the uncanny in these pages. The railway age—accelerating since the 1840s and fixed nationally by the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act, 1880—brought timetables, telegraphs, and the possibility of the 9.30 up-train racing through the night while rumors outrun it in the press. Steam and sail met along the Devon and Cornish coasts where wreck, salvage, and maritime insurance created stories like those aboard a bold venture. Firearms culture in the Volunteer movement after 1859 and in colonial policing entered provincial life, as did gaslight, photography, and the telephone, each promising clarity while providing new settings for misapprehension, coincidence, and spectral afterimages.
Imperial and Mediterranean horizons complicate his provincial stage. Baring-Gould travelled widely on the Continent—In Troubadour-Land (1891) and The Deserts of Southern France (1895) testify to his curiosity about borderlands of faith and custom—and he followed imperial news from Egypt and the Sudan after Britain’s occupation of Cairo in 1882. Tales of soldiers, sailors, and itinerants return from Malta, Constantinople, or Algiers with habits and vendettas that unsettle English decorum, as a figure named Mustapha suggests. The recent South African War (1899–1902), with its contested white flags and urban sieges, shadowed ideas of honour, atrocity, and reconciliation, themes that seep into apparitions of guilt, loyalty, and return.
Victorian debates about medicine, law, and the family also inform the plots. The Anatomy Act of 1832 lingered in popular memory as disquiet about dissection and body parts, while new hospital disciplines created a rhetoric of professional secrecy and expert testimony at inquests under the Coroners Act, 1887. The Matrimonial Causes Act, 1857, and the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 reshaped domestic power, a background to stories of jealousy, inheritance, and moral trespass. Baring-Gould’s own ministry—curacies in Yorkshire at Horbury in the 1860s, and long pastoral work in Devon with schools and charities—gave him intimate access to households across class lines.
Finally, the print and musical cultures in which Baring-Gould moved shaped tone and form. He issued hundreds of books, from his hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers (1865) to the two-volume The Origin and Development of Religious Belief (1869–70), and edited Songs of the West (1889–91), a landmark in English folk-song collecting. Ghost narratives had a thriving market in Christmas numbers and family magazines, where moral closure vied with frisson. Appearing in 1904, A Book of Ghosts stands at the Edwardian threshold: after the Boer War, before the cataclysm of 1914, combining parish chronicle, saga memory, imperial aftershock, and the late-Victorian habit of testing marvels against conscience and evidence.
Synopsis (Selection)
Preface
Baring-Gould states his aims, distinguishes folklore from superstition, and sets expectations for varied kinds of hauntings gathered from history, travel, and local tradition.
A Book of Ghosts (Introduction)
An orienting essay that surveys types of apparitions and evidentiary standards, framing the ensuing tales as illustrative cases rather than mere sensationalism.
Jean Bouchon
In a provincial community, an old injustice awakens a namesake haunting that returns at critical moments to demand acknowledgment and redress.
Pomps and Vanities
A wedding day is overshadowed by a chilling double that recalls a dead sister, confronting the living with past promises and the price of appearances.
McAlister
A reserved Scotsman’s pragmatism is strained by apparitions that seem to foreshadow danger, forcing him to reckon with fate and forewarning.
The Leaden Ring
A humble ring binds its wearer to a dark compulsion, drawing her into the echo of a past act that refuses to be forgotten.
The Mother of Pansies
In a quiet parish, a child and a garden become the medium through which a mother’s love persists, guiding the living through subtle signs.
The Red-Haired Girl
Village whispers coalesce around a red-haired apparition whose appearances entwine desire, jealousy, and a mounting sense of ill luck.
A Wife's Story
A married woman narrates domestic disturbances that entwine marital secrets with a presence that grows harder to deny.
A Professional Secret
A practitioner bound by confidentiality confronts a case where spectral knowledge presses against ethical limits and personal safety.
H. P.
A cryptic pair of initials leads to the unraveling of a small-town mystery, as recurrent signs suggest an unfinished story behind a haunting.
Glámr
A retelling from Icelandic saga tradition: the hero confronts the fearsome revenant Glámr, whose dying curse shadows his victories.
Colonel Halifax's Ghost Story
An old soldier delivers a precise account of a haunting bound up with duty, coincidence, and a narrowly averted disaster.
The Merewigs
A West Country tale where marsh-side ‘specters’ blur into folklore and natural misreadings, until a deeper truth surfaces.
The "Bold Venture"
A proud enterprise—ship or shaft—gathers omens and apparitions around it, and survivors recount how warnings were read too late.
Mustapha
A man becomes convinced an Ottoman adversary stalks him across borders; as fear hardens into obsession, the pursuer’s appearances take on the force of the uncanny.
Little Joe Gander
A poor boy’s bargain violin yields uncanny music and a lingering connection to its former owner that will not let the past rest.
A Dead Finger
After a ring is taken from a corpse, a grisly token—a single dead finger—seems to pursue its claimant with implacable purpose.
Black Ram
A rural legend of a sinister ram, whose appearances unsettle a hard-handed household and drive a reckoning with hidden guilt.
A Happy Release
An oppressive home is abruptly freed by death, but small, sardonic manifestations suggest the departed has not entirely relinquished control.
The 9.30 Up-Train
On a routine evening train, witnesses meet an inexplicable passenger whose presence intersects with a looming railway mischance.
On the Leads
A figure repeatedly glimpsed upon an old house’s roof-walk draws the household toward an attic secret and an unresolved past.
Aunt Joanna
A miserly relative’s habits—and hoard—leave a residue in the family home, where ordinary rituals take on an eerie afterlife.
The White Flag
Against wartime codes of honor, a violated truce breeds a spectral reminder that follows the living until truth is faced.
