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Prevailing Spirits: A Book of Scottish Ghost Stories
Haunting images of the strange, sinister, and paranormal have scarred the beauty of the Scottish landscape for centuries. Here in "Prevailing Spirits", macabre myseries of the unknown, past and present, are unravelled in twelve tales of suspense by Scotland's most popular contemporary writers. Enter the corridors of fear - if you dare!
Antonia Fraser, Robert Nye, Iain Crichton Smith, Clifford Hanley, Elspeth Davie, George Mackay Brown, Gordon Williams, Dorothy K. Haynes, Fred Urquart, Angus Wolfe Murray, Forbes Bramble, James Allan Ford.
Antonia Fraser, Robert Nye, Iain Crichton Smith, Clifford Hanley, Elspeth Davie, George Mackay Brown, Gordon Williams, Dorothy K. Haynes, Fred Urquart, Angus Wolfe Murray, Forbes Bramble, James Allan Ford.
194 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
1 person is currently reading
6 people want to read
About the author
Giles Gordon
86 books1 followerGiles Gordon was the son of the architect Esmé Gordon. He was brought up in Edinburgh but moved to London where he worked as a literary agent. He edited Drama quarterly and was The Spectator's theatre critic. He published six novels and three collections of short stories. He also edited many collections of short stories and the Saltire Society's magazine, New Saltire.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 14, 2019
I enjoy a variety of book compilations. I was excited to discover “Prevailing Spirits: A Book Of Scottish Ghost Stories”, 1976, many years ago and put it aside as something looked forward to. Hallowe’en was the right time for Giles Gordon’s selection. A forward proudly reveals that this is the first time these authors’ short stories were printed; solicited for this purpose. I love the spiritual, ethereal, and I love Scotland. These criteria in the title make me a ready audience to please.
I am surprised to give this short story collection two stars and have no desire to keep it; which I do with books I like. The problem, one surmises with editor, Giles’s assent; is that not merely the concept of the “paranormal” but even the much clearer word “ghost”, was interpreted so loosely as to be unrecognizable and to readers choosing this theme, bafflingly inapplicable. I regard spirits as very positive. Nonetheless, it is nothing new that the tendency in fiction is to make of them, a spooky twist. Oftentimes eerie fiction produces a grim outcome. However, every contributor leaped to the macabre extreme; leaving out spirits and anything recognizable as the paranormal, for which readers choose this book.
The conclusions are depressing and some disturbing. One of the last stories contained an evil being forcing a lady’s hand to murder her brother’s infant. The first upset me: an accursed place drove a Father to kill a seal he thought was after his Daughter. I felt they were befriending her. In either case, his perception switched his Daughter’s place; killed instead of a seal. These stories are not for me, thank-you. If you prefer ghost stories, see Elliott O’Donnell instead. Two stars acknowledge Scotland and a few stories that endeavoured to approach what we have in mind.
I am surprised to give this short story collection two stars and have no desire to keep it; which I do with books I like. The problem, one surmises with editor, Giles’s assent; is that not merely the concept of the “paranormal” but even the much clearer word “ghost”, was interpreted so loosely as to be unrecognizable and to readers choosing this theme, bafflingly inapplicable. I regard spirits as very positive. Nonetheless, it is nothing new that the tendency in fiction is to make of them, a spooky twist. Oftentimes eerie fiction produces a grim outcome. However, every contributor leaped to the macabre extreme; leaving out spirits and anything recognizable as the paranormal, for which readers choose this book.
The conclusions are depressing and some disturbing. One of the last stories contained an evil being forcing a lady’s hand to murder her brother’s infant. The first upset me: an accursed place drove a Father to kill a seal he thought was after his Daughter. I felt they were befriending her. In either case, his perception switched his Daughter’s place; killed instead of a seal. These stories are not for me, thank-you. If you prefer ghost stories, see Elliott O’Donnell instead. Two stars acknowledge Scotland and a few stories that endeavoured to approach what we have in mind.
December 29, 2021
“…he met the bonnet of the van with an impact that shuddered through my body. He was flung back and, when I heard his skull break on granite, I dropped out of the shattered light and the fury of the rain…”
Prevailing Spirits: A Book Of Scottish Ghost Stories edited by Giles Gordon (Giles Alexander Esmé Gordon: 1940-2003) was an anthology that existed to showcase the talents of some of Scotland’s more notable literary lights of the sixties and the early seventies. According to my copy of this book most of these author’s had never written a ghost story before, and when authors write in a genre that they are unfamiliar with, they either tend to fall flat on their faces, or they tend to reinvent the wheel, and while some of these authors will do that, some of these authors will do a fine job none-the-less. Anyway, for one reason or another, Prevailing Spirits: A Book Of Scottish Ghost Stories pretty much flew under the radar, at least as far as the American press was concerned.
Maybe this was because this is an anthology of non-sensational slow-burn ghost stories was not reviewed in any of the genre magazines, and maybe because most of the authors were unknown to the average American reader, ultimately most of these stories didn’t gather any attention, or were reprinted anywhere. The cover of my book was also bland beyond bland, and was easy to pass by on the bookshelves.
●Up first in this anthology is Holiday by Forbes Bramble (1939-) and has the Clark family on a holiday when the stop to camp at Loch Sgeir an t’Uruig and it there that their small daughter Sheila starts noticing an accumulating number of seals in the nearby lake. Worse, the seals seem to be communicating with Sheila and she seems to be falling under their spell until everything comes to a tragic climax one night.
●Up next is Beliah by George Mackay Brown (1921-96) tells the story of the bullied and introverted Hubert who is sent to his Uncle Timothy’s estate “The Howe” where he is continued to be bullied by his three cousins. He also starts to take on a delusionary personality and starts hearing the voice of Beliah in his head. This will lead to murder and Hubert’s stay at an asylum where his delusion just deepens over the years. A good story of madness, but not a ghost story.
● The Foothold by Elspeth Davie (1918-95) deals with a young man who inherits the management position at a shoe store when the owner goes on vacation. He is plagued by a difficult customer who insists on going through the store’s whole inventory, but this customer never seems to find anything to his satisfaction. The customer a plague to the young man’s existence and his job. An okay story, but I didn’t see anything supernatural about it.
●James Allan Ford (1920-2009) then gives us A Kind Of Possession and it takes place in 1932 and involves the death of George “Dod” Cameron. Cameron is a shell-shocked veteran of WWI and he is constantly persecuted by members of the village that he lives in. More of a story of a relationship between an unnamed narrator and Cameron rather than a story with only a very, very tangential supernatural context.
● Who’s Been Sitting In My Car? is, I believe, the first published piece of fiction by future best-selling crime novelist Antonia Fraser (Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser: 1932-). Jacocobine has just purchased an auto cheap, only to soon find that despite locking it up, somebody has been smoking in her car, and then not only smoking in her car, they have also been driving it. Deciding to camp out in the car overnight to find out what is happening, she is subsequently raped. Things then go from very bad to worse, including something in the car starts threatening her children. The story ends up being a ghastly, and chilling, allegory on a woman stuck in an escalating abusive relationship.
●Clifford Hanley (Clifford Leonard Clark Hanley: 1922-1999) then offers up the humorous The Haunted Chimley . A bar owner decides to make bank on a possible haunting on his haunted chimney. Humor is a relative thing, but this story is buried under its characters’ thick Scottish brogue.
●Crosbie is the main character of Dorothy Kittayne’s (Dorothy Kate Haynes: 1918-87) story The Curator , and he is one miserable and bitter person indeed. He is the co-curator of the J. Crawford Melvin Memorial. Crosbie resents his co-curator, the crowds that come to the memorial, in fact, Crosbie resents everything but the pigeons that crowd about the memorial.
Then he notices a little girl in a ragged red dress running about. The girl slowly starts to humanize Crosbie, and this would have been a good character piece if only Kittayne hadn’t ruined it with a crappy and weak ending.
●This is followed by Angus Wolfe Murray’s (Angus Malcolm Wolfe Murray: 1937-0000) story The Curse Of Mathair Nan Uisgeachan and it is a family curse story. Hugh and his wife Anne have inherited some land and a castle in Hamptonshire, in the Highlands of Scotland, and they immediately get off on the wrong foot with locals as they mangle local protocols, customs, and traditions. Hugh also allows his cousin to move in with him, and it is his cousin who narrates this story. The cousin gradually falls in love with the bored Anne as Hugh spends most of his time away from his wife and home with the taking care of his properties. And as Anne becomes more and more bored and distant, and the family’s curse is starting to kick in, Anne is seen in the company of a gypsy girl. Everything goes as curse stories go, and things end well for nobody. This is a story that fans of Algernon Blackwoood, and classic old-style gothic stories should like.
●Something must have been lost in translation, but Robert Nye’s (1939-2016) Randal just left me mystified. I didn’t know what it was about, why circumstances were happening, or even if there was any form of supernatural here. In-the-end, it was just so much argle-bargle.
●However, the quality of the stories in this anthology goes back up with The Brothers by Ian Crichton Smith (1928-1998) and deals with the repatriated ex-Scottish Highlander writer who keeps finding that the pages to his new novel keep disappearing, but new pages, written in Gaelic, keep being substituted, this continues night after night, with this action gradually changing both the man, and his environment.
●Fred Urquart (Frederick Burrows Urquhart: 1912-95) then gives us the penultimate story Proud Lady In A Cage in which a woman starts having flashbacks to a long time ago when she was a royal lady accused of a crime and hung out in a age to e ridiculed by the locals. The flashbacks keep getting worse, and worse. Spoiled only by an inconclusive and weak ending.
●And now we come to the last story in the anthology and it is The Horseshoe Inn by Gordon Williams (Gordon MacLean Williams: 1934-). Actually, the Horseshoe Inn seems to be the main character of the story and now it’s dead. It is closed when footie star Jackie Caskie shows up and demands to be taken are of. Caskie is an arrogant, egotistical, self-centered, demanding, boring git, and he soon finds out that the inn was built overt the area of a mass hanging, and one of those involved was his namesake. Has the house been waiting all these years for vengeance? Hmmm, read and see. All-in-all, a great little tale.
Still, for me it was worth reading for the Bramble, Fraser, Murray, Smith, Urquart, and Williams stories, which were stories that I would never have encountered elsewhere. A three-and-a-half-star anthology, but I won’t round up.
Prevailing Spirits: A Book Of Scottish Ghost Stories edited by Giles Gordon (Giles Alexander Esmé Gordon: 1940-2003) was an anthology that existed to showcase the talents of some of Scotland’s more notable literary lights of the sixties and the early seventies. According to my copy of this book most of these author’s had never written a ghost story before, and when authors write in a genre that they are unfamiliar with, they either tend to fall flat on their faces, or they tend to reinvent the wheel, and while some of these authors will do that, some of these authors will do a fine job none-the-less. Anyway, for one reason or another, Prevailing Spirits: A Book Of Scottish Ghost Stories pretty much flew under the radar, at least as far as the American press was concerned.
Maybe this was because this is an anthology of non-sensational slow-burn ghost stories was not reviewed in any of the genre magazines, and maybe because most of the authors were unknown to the average American reader, ultimately most of these stories didn’t gather any attention, or were reprinted anywhere. The cover of my book was also bland beyond bland, and was easy to pass by on the bookshelves.
●Up first in this anthology is Holiday by Forbes Bramble (1939-) and has the Clark family on a holiday when the stop to camp at Loch Sgeir an t’Uruig and it there that their small daughter Sheila starts noticing an accumulating number of seals in the nearby lake. Worse, the seals seem to be communicating with Sheila and she seems to be falling under their spell until everything comes to a tragic climax one night.
●Up next is Beliah by George Mackay Brown (1921-96) tells the story of the bullied and introverted Hubert who is sent to his Uncle Timothy’s estate “The Howe” where he is continued to be bullied by his three cousins. He also starts to take on a delusionary personality and starts hearing the voice of Beliah in his head. This will lead to murder and Hubert’s stay at an asylum where his delusion just deepens over the years. A good story of madness, but not a ghost story.
● The Foothold by Elspeth Davie (1918-95) deals with a young man who inherits the management position at a shoe store when the owner goes on vacation. He is plagued by a difficult customer who insists on going through the store’s whole inventory, but this customer never seems to find anything to his satisfaction. The customer a plague to the young man’s existence and his job. An okay story, but I didn’t see anything supernatural about it.
●James Allan Ford (1920-2009) then gives us A Kind Of Possession and it takes place in 1932 and involves the death of George “Dod” Cameron. Cameron is a shell-shocked veteran of WWI and he is constantly persecuted by members of the village that he lives in. More of a story of a relationship between an unnamed narrator and Cameron rather than a story with only a very, very tangential supernatural context.
● Who’s Been Sitting In My Car? is, I believe, the first published piece of fiction by future best-selling crime novelist Antonia Fraser (Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser: 1932-). Jacocobine has just purchased an auto cheap, only to soon find that despite locking it up, somebody has been smoking in her car, and then not only smoking in her car, they have also been driving it. Deciding to camp out in the car overnight to find out what is happening, she is subsequently raped. Things then go from very bad to worse, including something in the car starts threatening her children. The story ends up being a ghastly, and chilling, allegory on a woman stuck in an escalating abusive relationship.
●Clifford Hanley (Clifford Leonard Clark Hanley: 1922-1999) then offers up the humorous The Haunted Chimley . A bar owner decides to make bank on a possible haunting on his haunted chimney. Humor is a relative thing, but this story is buried under its characters’ thick Scottish brogue.
●Crosbie is the main character of Dorothy Kittayne’s (Dorothy Kate Haynes: 1918-87) story The Curator , and he is one miserable and bitter person indeed. He is the co-curator of the J. Crawford Melvin Memorial. Crosbie resents his co-curator, the crowds that come to the memorial, in fact, Crosbie resents everything but the pigeons that crowd about the memorial.
Then he notices a little girl in a ragged red dress running about. The girl slowly starts to humanize Crosbie, and this would have been a good character piece if only Kittayne hadn’t ruined it with a crappy and weak ending.
●This is followed by Angus Wolfe Murray’s (Angus Malcolm Wolfe Murray: 1937-0000) story The Curse Of Mathair Nan Uisgeachan and it is a family curse story. Hugh and his wife Anne have inherited some land and a castle in Hamptonshire, in the Highlands of Scotland, and they immediately get off on the wrong foot with locals as they mangle local protocols, customs, and traditions. Hugh also allows his cousin to move in with him, and it is his cousin who narrates this story. The cousin gradually falls in love with the bored Anne as Hugh spends most of his time away from his wife and home with the taking care of his properties. And as Anne becomes more and more bored and distant, and the family’s curse is starting to kick in, Anne is seen in the company of a gypsy girl. Everything goes as curse stories go, and things end well for nobody. This is a story that fans of Algernon Blackwoood, and classic old-style gothic stories should like.
●Something must have been lost in translation, but Robert Nye’s (1939-2016) Randal just left me mystified. I didn’t know what it was about, why circumstances were happening, or even if there was any form of supernatural here. In-the-end, it was just so much argle-bargle.
●However, the quality of the stories in this anthology goes back up with The Brothers by Ian Crichton Smith (1928-1998) and deals with the repatriated ex-Scottish Highlander writer who keeps finding that the pages to his new novel keep disappearing, but new pages, written in Gaelic, keep being substituted, this continues night after night, with this action gradually changing both the man, and his environment.
●Fred Urquart (Frederick Burrows Urquhart: 1912-95) then gives us the penultimate story Proud Lady In A Cage in which a woman starts having flashbacks to a long time ago when she was a royal lady accused of a crime and hung out in a age to e ridiculed by the locals. The flashbacks keep getting worse, and worse. Spoiled only by an inconclusive and weak ending.
●And now we come to the last story in the anthology and it is The Horseshoe Inn by Gordon Williams (Gordon MacLean Williams: 1934-). Actually, the Horseshoe Inn seems to be the main character of the story and now it’s dead. It is closed when footie star Jackie Caskie shows up and demands to be taken are of. Caskie is an arrogant, egotistical, self-centered, demanding, boring git, and he soon finds out that the inn was built overt the area of a mass hanging, and one of those involved was his namesake. Has the house been waiting all these years for vengeance? Hmmm, read and see. All-in-all, a great little tale.
Still, for me it was worth reading for the Bramble, Fraser, Murray, Smith, Urquart, and Williams stories, which were stories that I would never have encountered elsewhere. A three-and-a-half-star anthology, but I won’t round up.
June 23, 2017
I found this book in the cottage I stayed at in the highlands of Scotland and it seemed appropriate to read. A collection of short stories. I liked some of them better than others. Many of them end quite abruptly. Good thing this cottage doesn't have a ghost...
January 6, 2024
'The Curse of Mathair Nan Uisgeachan' is a ghost story that is well told. It involves a castle, two cousins, and one of the men's wife. This story can be found on the Classic Ghost Stories podcast narrated by Tony Walker.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews