‘Through dead men’s eyes’
Sep 15, 2021
4 minutes
IN July 1925, M. R. James published one of his most disturbing ghost stories, . It begins on a hot June afternoon, when a Cambridge academic called Fanshawe arrives at the house of his friend Squire Richards, deep in the rural South-West of England. Richards proposes an evening walk to a nearby hilltop, from where they can ‘look over the country’. Fanshawe asks if he can borrow some binoculars. After initial hesitation, Richards agrees—and gives Fanshawe a smooth wooden box. It contains, he explains, a pair of unusually heavy field-glasses, made by a local antiquary named Baxter, who died under mysterious circumstances a decade or so earlier. In opening the
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