12 Best Ghost Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu (Not Including Carmilla or Green Tea)
J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Victorian master of shadowy terrors, is the undisputed prince of ghost story writers. While M. R. James may be their king, even Monty paid homage to his Irish inspiration, reviving Le Fanu’s reputation (by reprinting his stories in a 1923 anthology), and modelling many (if not most) of his more famous tales off of Le Fanu’s pattern. His ghost stories were chilling, and his ghosts were terrifyingly original – invasive, intrusive, aggressive: they left their spaces and turned the mortal world into a shadowy, liminal territory. These are not ghosts who appear before your eyes like images from a projector, reenact an evil deed, then fade to black: they stand by your bed and take hold of your foot while gazing lustfully into your eyes. They are carnal, carnivorous, and conspicuous. They reach out of the past and thrust your head under the current of time.
Le Fanu’s most famous ghost stories – if such they should be called – are “Carmilla” (a tale of a seductive female vampire who preys on young women) and “Green Tea” (wherein a reclusive, fusty minister is haunted by a demonic black monkey: the specter of deviancy and debauchery). Today I’d like to look at twelve of Le Fanu’s lesser known ghost stories which every connoisseur of the genre should take some time to read by the light of a single lamp in a dark room (Le Fanu’s ghostly tales always have a murky, chiaroscuro effect to them, so there’s no better way to read them!).
12. LAURA SILVER BELL
Le Fanu’s fiction is loaded with instances of abductions, kidnappings, and disappearances: it’s a recurring motif that causes his works to resonate with a sense of inevitable doom. One of the creepiest of these stories – and the most underrated – is “Laura Silver Bell,” which follows the seduction of a young woman by a shapeshifting fairy or demon. An orphan who has yet to be baptized, the beautiful girl is the awe of her tiny Irish village, and the envy of her peers, yet she longs for more. This taste for adventure is satisfied when she falls in love with a handsome nobleman she spies one night in the countryside. She determines to run away with her bonnie cavalier, but one of her friends is shocked to see her stealing away toward the fairy land with a raggedy, swarthy, glowering scarecrow of an apparition. Her brief return to the mortal world – impregnated with a devil spawn – is even more disturbing.
11. DICKON THE DEVIL
M. R. James based several of his stories on “Dickon the Devil” which warns ambitious newcomers not to screw around with ancient landmarks. After the death of a cruel landowner, his heirs decide to rearrange his properties to their advantage, but against his wishes. The spirit of the squire – recognizable by his deformed, en-talloned finger on one hand – returns to punish the farmhands who are carrying out these orders, and one of the men – a likeable sod guilty only of carrying out the heirs’ orders – is struck mad for life. He spends the rest of his days howling and roaming frantically about the property: a living landmark and a chilling warning against interfering with tradition.
10. WICKED CAPTAIN WALSHAWE OF WAULING
Ever hear of a haunted candle? In this lovely-named story (say it out loud and revel in the alliteration) – a brilliant allegory of Anglo-Irish relations – an English soldier of fortune seduces and ruins an Irish nun (or possibly a witch) whom he marries for her money. After she dies her sisters (other witch-nuns) return to speed her damned soul out of purgatory, but he interrupts their candlelit ceremony, banishing them from his house and her soul to hell. The sisters put a curse on him, consigning his soul to the one of the candles, trapping it therein until it is burned out. Decades after his gruesome death, the new owner of his somber house is experiencing a fitful night of sleeplessness. He decides to light a candle, and unwittingly welcomes a guest into his bedroom.
9. ULTOR DE LACY
One of Le Fanu’s most horribly underrated stories, “Ultor de Lacy” has much of the groundwork of “Dracula” laid out in it: two beautiful sisters (of the Mina and Lucy type) inhabit a dilapidated tower where their father – a Jacobite who has been banished from Ireland – secretly hides them during his exile. Attended to by a faithful servant, they lead a rather Rapunzel-like existence of boredom and wistfulness, but all of this is interrupted by the appearance of an apparition in a Spanish cloak with a revolting birthmark on one cheek. The older sister begins sleepwalking, disappearing for hours at night, and having conversations in her sleep. She drifts further and further away from her devoted sibling, who vainly tries to discover her sister’s secret. One night, the girl disappears for ever – like Laura Silver Bell – spirited away by a vampiric ghost whose identity is no surprise to the father who had been trying to protect his daughters from a family curse. Read on to learn just who the ghost was!
8. GHOST STORIES OF THE TILED HOUSE (aka, THE GHOST OF A HAND)
Frequently excerpted from “The House by the Churchyard,” this chapter can be read alone as the story of an old maid relating grisly legends of the house next door to her youthful mistress. The so-called Tiled House has long been haunted by several deadly ghosts, namely a sensual earl who committed suicide and has a penchant for frightening women to death. In the most notable episode, he manifests in a girl’s bedroom, seductively wearing nothing but a dressing gown, scarf, and nightcap. He mumbles something to her in a garbled voice, then – grinning – pulls away the cravat to reveal “his throat … cut across like another mouth, wide and laughing at her.” Brrrr… In the other, more famous episode, a fat, pudgy male hand haunts a family who lives there – at the window, in the kitchen, on the table, beside a sleeping child. A symbol of the aristocracy’s depraved sense of hedonistic entitlement, the hand is later connected to the lecherous earl when the grown child remembers the fat man in a dressing gown staring evilly down into his crib.
7. THE CHILD THAT WENT WITH THE FAIRIES