Dead Trouble & Other Ghost Stories

By Aidan Chambers

I saw a face, bloated, much larger than any face I'd ever seen before. It hung in the air above me, and there was no sign of a body, just the swollen truncated head. The eyes were sunk deep into their sockets. Thick stringy hair fell in tangled knots from the crown of the skull. The skin on the face was blotched with festering patches, as though it had been violently bruised. The lips were drawn wide and taut across the mouth, revealing the teeth and gums so that the head seemed to grin in malice.

Aidan Chambers has been collecting ghost stories for decades. For Dead Trouble & Other Ghost Stories the award-winning author and editor has selected some of his favourite supernatural tales of haunted houses and restless spirits. Inside these pages you will encounter 'The Nameless Horror of Berkeley Square', 'The Ghostly Skulls of Calgarth Hall', 'The Mystery Ghost of Amherst, Nova Scotia' and 'The Grey Lady of Jarolen House', to name only a few.
But be warned—you may have trouble deciding between which of these tales are "true" and those that are purely fiction . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362605

Book preview

FOREWORD

THE CHAMBERS OF HORROR

––––––––

THERE IS NO doubt that Aidan Chambers is a true Renaissance man: a former grammar school teacher of English and a secondary school librarian and drama teacher, he became a playwright and novice Anglican monk before taking the decision in 1967 to become a freelance writer, editor, publisher, journalist and lecturer. He has never looked back since.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including The British Carnegie Medal, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Children’s Literature Association (USA) Award, the International Hans Christian Andersen Medal and the National Association for the Teaching of English Award for Lifetime Services to English Education. He was President of the School Library Association from 2003–06, and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

That is an impressive list of honours, and all are well-deserved—not only for Aidan’s own writing, but also his continued commitment to encouraging youngsters to pick up a book and read.

However, if you were a child growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, and like me you had even a passing interest in all things spooky and supernatural, then you would most probably know his name for an entirely different reason.

Because Aidan Chambers scared a whole generation of British children and young people out of their wits with his horror anthologies and true tales of haunted houses, screaming skulls and restless revenants!

Starting with the paperback anthology Ghosts in 1969, which he co-edited with his wife, Nancy, Aidan revealed a sure and detailed knowledge of supernatural fiction, not only including classic tales by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde, but also two obscure reprints, a recent story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and even a contribution of his own (‘Room 18’, included in this volume) under the pseudonym Malcolm Blacklin.

Aidan and Nancy teamed up again to edit two science fiction anthologies, World Zero Minus (1971) and In Time to Come (1973), which mostly reprinted stories from the 1950s by, amongst others, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, John Christopher, Brian W. Aldiss and Ray Bradbury.

In 1974 Aidan took over the editorship of the tenth volume of Barrie & Jenkins’ popular The Ghost Book series, which had actually begun with Lady Cynthia Asquith back in 1926. More recently it had continued with one volume in 1965 edited by James Turner and five further volumes under the editorship of Rosemary Timperley.

Once again, Aidan proved himself a talented editor, including one reprint by Joan Aiken and new fiction from contemporary authors he admired such as Dorothy K. Haynes, L.P. Davies, Peter Dickinson, John Burke, Christopher Leach, former editor Rosemary Timperley and, once again, R. Chetwynd-Hayes.

Aidan returned the following year with The Eleventh Ghost Book, which contained twelve original stories by William Trevor, Dorothy K. Haynes, Giles Gordon, John Burke, Christopher Leach and others. Pan Books issued an omnibus paperback of both anthologies in 1976, aptly titled The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories and containing all twenty-eight stories.

The 1978 anthology Ghosts Four was credited to Aidan’s Malcolm Blacklin alias, but was still an interesting mixture of essays and short stories, including a re-titled version of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’s Guest’. Ghosts That Haunt You (1980) and Ghost After Ghost (1982) were both compiled for Penguin’s Kestrel Books imprint, the first containing all reprints and the second mostly new fiction from such luminaries as John Gordon, Catherine Storr, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Joan Aiken and Robert Westall, amongst others. In 1984 Aidan returned to science fiction with the anthology Out of Time: Stories of the Future for The Bodley Head.

That same year Aidan also revisited the supernatural in the original anthology Shades of Dark: A Collection of Ghost Stories . He followed that in 1987 with A Haunt of Ghosts, which contained six of his own tales along with the work of other authors, and another anthology of original stories, A Quiver of Ghosts, which saw the first publication of his story ‘The Tower’ (also included in this volume).

Favourite Ghost Stories, for which Aidan selected fifteen of his favourite chilling tales, appeared in 2002 from the Kingfisher Story Library in both hardcover and paperback, illustrated by Tim Stevens. The same publisher reissued the book in paperback as More Ghost Stories in 2004, and yet again the following year under the title Haunted Stories .

As discerning as Aidan Chambers is as an editor of anthologies—and that alone would ensure his place in our genre—he is perhaps even better known for his atmospheric retellings of traditional tales of true hauntings, to which he brings an erudite knowledge and a natural storyteller’s skill.

Starting with Haunted Houses in 1971, Aidan published a string of story collections that combined his fascination for real-life apparitions with the occasional new ghost story of his own. These included Ghosts 2 (1972, with Brian Morse), More Haunted Houses (1973), Aidan Chambers’ Book of Ghosts and Hauntings (1973), Great British Ghosts (1974), Great Ghosts of the World (1974), Ghost Carnival: Stories of Ghosts in Their Haunts (1977), This Place is Haunted (1990) and Great Ghosts (1991). A number of these purportedly true encounters are included herein, although—given the quality of Aidan’s storytelling abilities—some readers may have trouble deciding between which tales are the true ones and those that are purely fiction!

This present volume came about when I contacted Aidan about another book project I was working on. He proved to be an enlightening and affable correspondent and, in the course of our discussions, he happened to mention to me that he would like to see a new collection of some of his best ghost stories.

I needed no further encouragement, and immediately started putting together a proposal for Dead Trouble & Other Ghost Stories . I grew up with these tales—as I’m sure many other readers did—but for those who are coming to these stories of sinister shades and shrill spectres for the first time, then my hope is that you will find them every bit as entertaining as I still do.

—Stephen Jones

London, England

January, 2020

INTRODUCTION

MY GHOSTLY COMPANION

––––––––

ONE DAY I saw a ghost.

It happened late one evening in the 1970s while I was watching a film on television.

The set was in an alcove formed by the spiral stairs rising from the ground floor to the rooms above. There is a door at the bottom of the stairs, which was closed. As I was watching the film I became aware out of the corner of my eye of a figure standing by the door. It was a woman wearing a thick black dress. Layers of shimmering satin firmly covered a heavy medium-tall body that I could not help thinking was the shape of a Coke bottle. She had a full, round, heavy bosom, was narrow at the waist, before swelling out into substantial hips. The dress covered her to the floor. And the odd thing was the figure had no head or hands or feet. I knew at once that I was glimpsing, not a living person, but a ghost.

I couldn’t stop myself from turning to look straight at it. But instantly the ghost disappeared.

I wasn’t in the slightest afraid. Surprised, yes, but not scared. Quite the opposite. I felt rather pleased, as you would if someone you were glad to see turned up unexpectedly. But I was excited too, and couldn’t go on watching the film. I sat still for some time, calming down, and wondering what the figure could be, before I could go to bed.

I told no one about this, not even my wife, for some days. Until one afternoon a few weeks later I was talking over the garden fence to the old man who lived next door. He’d lived there since he married his wife, who had been born and grew up in the house I now live in and from whom I bought it. It happened that at the time I was writing ghost stories, some of which appear in this book. My neighbour asked me what I was doing. I told him. And he said, Have you seen anything strange in your house? I said I had. He asked, Is it at the bottom of the stairs? I said it was and described what I’d seen. Yes, he said. Other people have seen it too.

Until then I’d sometimes wondered whether I had actually seen anything or was so tired I’d half-dreamt it or been hallucinating. But now I was convinced and my curiosity was stirred. And increased when, a few days later, I saw her, as I’d come to think of the figure, this time in broad daylight, standing as before, unmoving, at the bottom of the stairs, no head or hands or feet. And this time I saw her straight on, not only out of the corner of my eye. I felt she was a young woman, and that she was looking at the room with satisfied pleasure as if—as if what? But odder than that, I felt she knew I was there. As I watched, she faded away like a patch of mist in the sun.

Afterwards, I couldn’t help wondering who she was, why she was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and, if she really was the ghost of someone, when had she lived here? Perhaps her dress was a clue. It looked Victorian. When I looked up images of women’s clothes for that period, there were dresses that resembled hers.

A few days later I was talking to my neighbour’s wife. As if out of idle curiosity I asked who used to live in the house around the time she was born in the early 1920s. She mentioned her father and mother, her sister and brother and herself. No one else? An old aunt. A sad story. She had married the son of the family. A week after the wedding he had died. She had stayed on as a member of the family, but was expected to do most of the housework. In those days, with few labour-saving devices like vacuum cleaners and washing machines, with no indoor bathroom or lavatory, her life couldn’t have been easy. There were chamber pots to be emptied and cleaned every morning, open fires to be attended to, endless cooking and cleaning and laundry and ironing in a house too small for everyone who lived in it.

Then an extension was added at the back of the house sometime around the turn of the century. Two more rooms, one downstairs, one above, a kitchen and a bathroom. Now there was more space. Her life must have been a lot easier. And it was at the bottom of the new flight of stairs, in what was then the new ground floor back room, where I saw her standing in her black mourning dress, viewing the room with pleasure. A happy ghost!

That might have been the end of it. But a few years later, one bright Sunday morning, the sun was shining into our front sitting room as I lounged in an armchair, recovering after being away on a long lecture tour. I was sitting half-asleep with my right leg crossed over my left. My wife was sitting on the sofa to my left, reading the newspaper.

Suddenly, I was aware of someone approaching from behind, through the open door from the back room. A second later I saw her out of the corner of my eye, not dressed in black this time, but wearing a flowing white dress with a white veil covering her head, revealing its shape though I still couldn’t see it. She came floating rather than walking into the room. As she passed me she went through my right leg as if it were not there. And my leg went cold from foot to knee. Now I looked at her straight on. She reached the middle of the room and stopped, facing the window, her back to me. She was no more than a metre from my wife.

At this moment, my wife lowered the newspaper to turn the page, looked at me as she did, and said, You’re seeing the ghost!

At which the ghost vanished.

I asked my wife how she knew. From the look on your face, she said.

If this were not odd enough, here is the oddest thing of all. It is that I felt in some strange way that she was giving me a message.

The message was, I like you being here. You must stay. If you leave you will have nothing but trouble.

I was so convinced that I have stayed. But there was one occasion when I seriously considered selling the house. I was sitting in a chair in the front room and could see through the door into the back room. As I was thinking of selling, I saw green and blue and white lights flash violently, back and forth in the room as they might in an electrical storm. I couldn’t help feeling that this had something to do with the her and her message.

So far, when I saw the ghost, I had felt no fear, never felt that she was malign or dangerous. Quite the opposite. But this time I was scared. I came out in a cold sweat. Felt I might pass out. And knew I couldn’t sell the house, couldn’t move away, didn’t want to, and would be here till I was carried out in my coffin.

I’m still here many years later. In those years I’ve seen her now and then. Once, for example, peering into the new kitchen we added at the back of the house. Another time standing at the door of my workroom, which was meant to be the main bedroom before I took it over. I couldn’t see her face but felt she was curious to see what I was up to. Each time the visit was short, only a few seconds long. Always she was in her black dress, no face or head, no hands, no feet.

I’d never believed there were such phenomena as ghosts. But having seen one I wanted to find out all I could about what ghosts might be—or are. I researched, found hundreds of reports by people who claimed to have seen ghosts, and learned various scientific explanations about what ghosts might be and why we see them. I boiled this down into a book called Aidan Chambers’ Book of Ghosts and Hauntings in which I tried to explain what we think we know about ghosts. I’m sorry to say it’s out of print now, but can be bought second-hand or found in libraries. It was while I was doing this research that I discovered how very often people who say they have seen a ghost mention that they saw it out of a corner of their eye, and that when they looked straight on, the ghost vanished.

That said, I’ve always enjoyed reading ghost stories, whether real or fiction, and have written quite a few myself. Some of the ones I like best are in this book. I wrote them for my own pleasure and amusement. And yours too, I hope.

—Aidan Chambers,

Stroud, Gloucestershire,

October 2019

THE HAUNTING OF ASHLEY HALL

THIS IS THE story of the ghost of Ashley Hall, an old house that still stands on the banks of the River Bollin in Cheshire. It was originally told by the young woman who knew all the details to a friend of hers then at Cambridge University. As it happened many years ago, the young woman’s language now seems old-fashioned and her account here and there long-winded. So I have retold her tale in words she might have used were she alive and writing today. But all the important details are just as she recorded them.

When I had just left school I went with my best friend, Miss Meredith, on a visit to her mother at Ashley Hall. Mrs. Meredith was a wealthy widow, very lively and great fun. She laughed a lot—I remember that most of all—and she ate a lot too, and was always kind and generous to her guests whom she seemed to enjoy making happy. It is also important to know, because of what happened later, that Mrs. Meredith was afraid of nothing. I haven’t a nerve in my body! she used to say and then laugh; and it was her constant hope that she would die as she had lived, in luxury and comfort. Altogether, she was the sort of old person I couldn’t help liking—lively, gay, not a bit stick-in-the-mud.

When my friend and I arrived, we found the house crowded with guests, so crowded, in fact, that all the usual bedrooms were occupied. Mrs. Meredith apologised for having to put me in the Cedar room, which wasn’t really a bedroom at all, but an antechamber, a sort of corridor-room with doors leading to different parts of the house. But I didn’t mind. It was large and old and had a beautiful high wainscot of cedar wood (from which the room took its name), and it wasn’t a bit spooky—there were no dark old pictures or hanging tapestries or bulky bits of furniture to set you imagining strange figures were lingering in the shadows. In fact, there were very few