AND ANOTHER THING
Ghosts stirring among the electronic gear in the cellar
PAUL JOHNSON
You don't hear much of ghosts nowa- days. Will our 21st century see the final end of haunting? I ask this because my grandchil- dren never mention ghosts. All sorts of other creatures cause them delight and terror, but ghouls, gibbering, graveyards and gibbets do not figure in their imagery. It was quite dif- ferent in my childhood in Staffordshire, whose wild moors and thorpes on its north- east fringes were untamed ghost country in those days. I could think of half-a-dozen farmhouses, inns and cottages which were said to be haunted. Ghosts existed in the Potteries too, in abandoned coal-mines and quarries, little branch-line railway stations and old pot-banks. Ancient steam engines from the first phase of the Industrial Revolu- tion were made to work again by spectral workmen on dark nights, and wicked fore- men, hot from hell, would curse poor, fright- ened pot-girls as they scuttled about remote brick cellars. The old crones would tell the tales and the young believed them. Indeed, we made them up. On gloomy afternoons, my elder sisters and their school- !nends would gather in a coven to take turns to inventing stories of goblins and anthro- Pophagites, and I would listen in the hud- dled mass, my hair, normally carroty-curly, vertical with terror. One early evening, at lieme, my parents being away, and rumbles of thunder setting the scene, we were gath- ered for this ritual in the art-room, a tene- brous place. Suddenly the narrative was Punctuated by a distinct tapping, below the floorboards. We froze in consternation. The there was a faint sound of a rictus chuckle. At that moment, the storm struck with tremendous flashes of lightning. Some of the girls screamed, and there was much clutch- ing. an d hand-holding. The tapping became noisier, the chuckling exultant, and one of the older girls, a hardy soul, said, "This is too good to be true and needs investigation.' So We got lamps and torches and candles, armed ourselves with cricket bats and stumps, and descended to the cellars. And, 1_11 an inner cellar, behind a mouldy door, o_e.ver normally opened, we found the source u, I the .chuckling: my elder brother and his lugubrious friend, Marshall, had prised open ....me door and crawled under the art-room to re_, us a fright. To relieve the tension, we rile toasted cheese while the storm rever- berated around us. In due course, .this episode became a saga of its own, with real ghosts and genuine spectral tappings.
That was the pre-television age, when we created our own entertainment — and ghosts. Some believe that technology is the enemy of superstition. John Aubrey held this view, noting from his own experience that hauntings were much commoner before the Civil War than after it. 'Gunpowder', he wrote, 'is a great fugator of phantasmes.' That may be so, and it is notable that in the 18th century, for the first time, fraudsters began to exploit belief in ghosts for profit. Hence the Cock Lane Ghost, a crafty dodge which Dr Johnson played a notable role in exposing. But ghost-lovers also have a way of incorporating new-fangled things in their tales. Thus we get that remarkable gathering of young friends in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, 'the Summer That Never Was'. It was marked everywhere by incessant rain, and in the Alps tremendous thunderstorms occurred daily and lit the mountains across the lake with spectacular flashes. The young people — Lord Byron, his mistress Claire Clairmont, Shelley and his mistress Mary Godwin — were fascinated by electricity, then the latest craze among the intelli- gentsia. On the wet afternoons, while the thunder rolled and the lightning flickered, they took it in turns to concoct stories. Mary conceived the brilliant idea of putting the escaping electricity and thunderbolts to use, and came up with the story of Frankenstein's Monster, who is vivified by lightning. It is not, strictly speaking, a ghost story but it is the greatest horror tale of all time, and right, as Harold Wilson used to say, 'at the cutting- edge [or was it the coalface?] of the [then] technological revolution'.
Indeed, the 19th century, despite its ubiq- uitous scientific progress, was a classic age of ghosts. All good tale-tellers loved them. Dickens, like Shakespeare, was fond of ghosts. Victor Hugo whiled away his exile years in the Channel Islands by a regular summoning of spirits and table-tapping ses- sions. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dismissed Sherlock Holmes in favour of communing with the dead. Not until H.G. Wells and Jules Verne introduced science fiction to milk technology of its imaginative opportu- nities did ghosts and progress part comp- any. When M. R. James wrote his Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, the best of all spook tales, he fell back on mouldering parch- ments and mediaeval muniment rooms. But you never know: as we hurtle ever faster into the future, the apparatus of new sciences may breed technological hobgoblins of its own. The other day a woman told me the following tale. She was having lunch in a restaurant in the centre of London, and went downstairs to the ladies'. Alone there, as it appeared, she suddenly became conscious of another person's presence in the room. There was a perceptible fall in temperature. She took no notice and continued her ablu- tions, but the presence made itself obvious again. She saw no one but, as she went up the stairs to return to the restaurant, she felt a force pulling her back and, in particular, her handbag felt weighty and almost unbearable. She was mightily relieved to get to her table, and the company of other people.
When she asked the waiter, 'Is there a ghost in the basement here?' he made a non-committal remark and scurried away. A few moments later the manager appeared, asked for permission to sit down, and said, 'You have been inquiring about ghosts here, madam. That is interesting. There is a ghost here, or at least I think so. When I am here at night, after all the cus- tomers and staff have left, and I am doing the paperwork, I have heard all kinds of noises, and am conscious of somebody mov- ing around. My predecessor was so fright- ened on one occasion that he locked him- self in the office and called the police. Of course they found nothing. This restaurant was made quite recently out of the premis- es of a bank, and the basement is where the strong-room and vaults were. Much gold was held at one time and it may be that evil was done over its possession, or someone was trapped in a vault and died, and is now seeking escape for their soul.'
Of course there may be a completely dif- ferent explanation, as a friend has suggested. `Banks contain a great deal of electronic equipment and it's well known that these machines are haunted. They ought to behave in an entirely logical and rational way but they don't. They often baffle the experts. They harbour gremlins and thieves and nut- ters — and ghosts. In the bank you talk about, the ghost lived in the electronic gear and was content, occasionally causing a puz- zle to the operators. Now they've taken his gear away and he has nowhere to live, so he's sad, and haunting. They should hire an elec- tronic exorcist. Or, better, put some dot.com stuff in the place and he'll be happy.'
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