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Ghost Stories
Contents (collection by H. Russell Wakefield [as by H. R. Wakefield])11 Messrs. Turkes and Talbot short story 27 A Peg on Which to Hang (1928) short story 42 Used Car short story 59 Damp Sheets (1929) short story 70 The Cairn (1929) short story 84 Blind Man's Bluff (1929) short story 90 "Look Up There!" (1929) short story 103 The Frontier Guards (1929) short story 111 Mr. Ash's Studio short story 129 Nurse's Tale (1929) short story 138 A Coincidence at Hunton (1929) short story 153 The Red Hand (1929) short story 162 An Echo (1928) short story 179 Day-Dream in Macedon (1930) short story 188 Knock! Knock! Who's There? short story 194 Epilogue by Roger Bantock (1930) short story 211 The Last to Leave (1929) short story 220 The Central Figure (1929) short story 233 Old Man's Beard (1929) short story 256 Present at the End (1929) short story 270 A Jolly Surprise for Henri (1929) short story
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1932
11 people want to read
About the author
H.R. Wakefield
72 books5 followersHerbert Russell Wakefield was an English short story writer, novelist, publisher, and civil servant. Wakefield is best known for his ghost stories, but he produced work outside the field. He was greatly interested in the criminal mind and wrote two non-fiction criminology studies
Used These Alternate Names: H.R. Wakefield, H. Russell Wakefield, Рассел Уэйкфилд?, Herbert Russell Wakefield, Herbert R. Wakefield, Henry Russell Wakefield, Henry R. Wakefield, Sir H. Russell Wakefield, Horace Russell Wakefield
Used These Alternate Names: H.R. Wakefield, H. Russell Wakefield, Рассел Уэйкфилд?, Herbert Russell Wakefield, Herbert R. Wakefield, Henry Russell Wakefield, Henry R. Wakefield, Sir H. Russell Wakefield, Horace Russell Wakefield
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 4, 2021
Still working my way through a bunch of Wakefield stories from my "To Read" list, this collection (originally from 1932, but reprinted in 1976) is a solid sampler, with only a few duds and quite a few really good reads! Here you can see Wakefield at the height of his powers, trying out various approaches to the classic "ghost story", although (despite the title of the collection) there are a few "psychic powers" tales without a ghost as we tend to think of it. Worth your time.
Barring the six stories I didn't read, here's the breakdown from weakest to strongest:
"A Jolly Surprise For Henri" - a bit of fluff about the wife of a wealthy man who strings along a series of "suitors" - while staying ever faithful to her husband - because that's what women of her station and social class are expected to do. This is only a "ghost story" in the sense that it appears in a book called GHOST STORIES and it has a minor appearance by a "ghost" (which could just as easily be seen as intuition or psychic vision). This story, despite the well-observed character psychology work, is a whimsical trifle to be chuckled over and forgotten. "An Echo" - a self-proclaimed "world's greatest clairvoyant" finds his uncontrollable ability to receive impressions/visions of past events a nuisance, frustrating and pointless as they prove illustrative of no greater truth/knowledge and instead seem random. Having one such vision (of a shooting on a forest trail), he tells his criminologist friend who asserts that he may have seen and solved one of the great legal murder mysteries of the age involving a wealthy man and a gold-digger... the story starts promisingly but ends up being a courtroom drama (with transcripts no less!) before resolving with the expected "your vision solved the mystery!" Not a ghost story, and not particularly well-constructed. In "Messrs. Turkes & Talbot" a young man begins his promising career in publishing at the titular organization (the named personage in the latter half of which has been missing for nearly a year, reportedly having abandoned his wife while having an affair) but soon finds, staying late at the office, that the personal upstairs chambers of Mr. Turkes sound occupied, even when their resident is away on business. While this tale has a few aspects of interest (solid character sketches of Turkes and our young protagonist are quite good, the contemporary view of publishing and those involved in it are interesting) but in the end it's yet another "Revenge of The Murdered Dead" and, notably, the haunting itself is not particularly impressive or creepy.
Slightly better were: "Daydream In Macedon" - A British man doing espionage work in Eastern Europe during WWI, is taking a rest cure in Macedon when he has a vision of his friend's death on the Front. Nicely done. Not a ghost story but a moving representation of psychic visions and the horrors of WWI. Meanwhile, a scheming couple invite their sickly but wealthy uncle over for a visit to hit him up for some cash, but the slightly craftier wife of the duo has more final plans in "Damp Sheets" - this is a fairly typical "revenge of the murdered spirit" story, wrapped up in some black comic character sketches - something like a more pedestrian and lower-class Saki. I liked the almost existentially absurd last line.
Some truly solid stories make up the bulk of the book: "Used Car" is an early exploration of the idea of the "haunted car". A British father buys a used car - an American Highway Straight Edge, originally brought over from Chicago - for his family, but they all soon begin to experience troubling events - glimpsed figures, a stain that won't come out, an odd smell - and sinister, repeated visions of being assaulted and attacked in the car. While the outcome may be obvious, this is a quite well done story - the horror of the hallucinations is nicely handled, nightmarish and invasive - and I like all the details one gets about the life of a family of this class, during this time period (the family dog, Jumbo, is almost another character himself - he doesn't trust the car, needless to say). In "Mr. Ash's Studio", a writer, needing quiet to finish his book, rents a small shack in a suburban mews and (while he gets his work done surprisingly well) finds a certain invasive and repetitive oppressiveness about the place. This is another quite nice example of Wakefield shifting the parameters slightly - here, the idea is again how a "haunted" place may infiltrate the consciousness, but set against a creative individual (whose work does not suffer - and he writes "ghost stories" on the side!) and the place is not one that a person dwells in (and so, by implication, the "haunting" is a bit more malignant and accelerated, including some very threatening moths). An effective little piece. In "The Last To Leave", Number 5 Equity Court, currently home to as small publisher, is condemned to be torn down in the near future, and one of the staff, working late, hears the house pass away, with the expected physical result... Nicely done and expertly conveyed - a "ghost of a house" story. "The Central Figure" has an academic playwright, inspired by a toy theater he had as a child (which occasionally seemed to have a will of its own), writes his first play (recapitulating the love triangle he saw played out by his figures in his youth) and then casts it with the perfect actors - who seem to then inhabit the roles of the characters in their own lives/feelings/motivations - ending in murder. Not bad, the scenario is basically familiar (although something of a variation on Montague Summers & M.R. James) but Wakefield brings it to life, including the remorseful "a man is happier mad" coda.
Still more solid stories include: "A Peg On Which To Hang" - Mr. James Partridge, a minor essayist, is annoyed that his golfing party has been shorted a room at the hotel (despite advance reservations) - but after rejecting the offer of a bed and breakfast, an accommodation is found (with some trepidation) in room 39. After a discussion of ghosts over dinner, and the discovery that a minor detail in the room has changed, Partridge finds his sleep disturbed by a haunting, symbolic dream... This is a very solid, typical Wakefield "bad things happened in this room" story. There is the usual intimation of previous psychic flashes on the part of Partridge, which make him sensitive to the room's influence, but also the statement that the supernatural shows "no consciousness working" and hauntings as "unfocused and indiscriminate." There's a nice bit of social/class understanding/awareness in the ending. The revelatory/eerie dream is well done, as are the "very British" touches in dialogue and temperament (as Partridge makes a fuss, and later the hotelier apologizes for even suggesting the room). Good stuff. In "The Cairn" two friends are vacationing in the Lake Country district. One wants to spend the day climbing a local hill topped by a cairn, but the other has hurt his foot and can't accompany. No one else in the town will go as there is a local legend warning against climbing the hill when there is snow on it, so he sets off alone, his bed-ridden friend observing by telescope... I liked this, but at first was annoyed by the timidity of the presentation. On thinking on it, I realized that the story is all about distances, and how they keep us safe - the distance of the hill as observed by telescope, the distance of local folklore, the distance of police reports. Not bad at all. A civil servant relaxing a nerve rest-cure on the Adriatic isle of Brioni (in "'Look Up There!'") becomes fascinated with an odd man who is always fixedly staring up at an angle. Eventually, the strange man tells his story - he was invited to Gauntry Hall, a famous old show-place recently bought and refurbished by some nouveau riche who chose to ignore the ancient tradition that no one occupy the place on New Year's Eve, instead throwing a party... Quite a nice little piece, all about the build-up to the ineffable and the unasked question...and "would you REALLY want to know the answer?"
Finally, there were three really excellent stories here (two I had read previously in other collections): a very nice and very short piece is "Blind Man's Bluff" (which seems to be taking place at the same location as Ramsey Campbell's much later "At Lorn Hall"). It's a short and super-concentrated haunted house story - so concentrated, in fact, that I can't really say much about it without ruining the fun (there's some excellent evocation of groping around in the dark) - let's just say our main character doesn't get very far upon entering... In "Present At The End" a famous blood-sport games-man finds that he can no longer shake the sights and sounds of needless and cruel animal death he has witnessed, and eventually turns his vast fortune over to an SPCA group to change public opinion. This may be the most successful of Wakefield's "psychic sensitivity" pieces - starting with some awful imagery, bridged with the man's actions, and ending on a quiet, hopeful, moving and redemptive moment. Finally, in "The Red Hand", a cynical writer of ghost stories, pondering his motivations, runs through his notes of potential stories and finds the synopsis for "The Red Hand". But writing the story, he inevitably succumbs to it... Nice little snapshot of the ghost story writer's "mind" at the time it was written, with some nice teases (who are fellow writers Lowell & Agnew supposed to be? The latter sounds like Arthur Machen), and a surprisingly level of metatextuality about it. Really good stuff!
Barring the six stories I didn't read, here's the breakdown from weakest to strongest:
"A Jolly Surprise For Henri" - a bit of fluff about the wife of a wealthy man who strings along a series of "suitors" - while staying ever faithful to her husband - because that's what women of her station and social class are expected to do. This is only a "ghost story" in the sense that it appears in a book called GHOST STORIES and it has a minor appearance by a "ghost" (which could just as easily be seen as intuition or psychic vision). This story, despite the well-observed character psychology work, is a whimsical trifle to be chuckled over and forgotten. "An Echo" - a self-proclaimed "world's greatest clairvoyant" finds his uncontrollable ability to receive impressions/visions of past events a nuisance, frustrating and pointless as they prove illustrative of no greater truth/knowledge and instead seem random. Having one such vision (of a shooting on a forest trail), he tells his criminologist friend who asserts that he may have seen and solved one of the great legal murder mysteries of the age involving a wealthy man and a gold-digger... the story starts promisingly but ends up being a courtroom drama (with transcripts no less!) before resolving with the expected "your vision solved the mystery!" Not a ghost story, and not particularly well-constructed. In "Messrs. Turkes & Talbot" a young man begins his promising career in publishing at the titular organization (the named personage in the latter half of which has been missing for nearly a year, reportedly having abandoned his wife while having an affair) but soon finds, staying late at the office, that the personal upstairs chambers of Mr. Turkes sound occupied, even when their resident is away on business. While this tale has a few aspects of interest (solid character sketches of Turkes and our young protagonist are quite good, the contemporary view of publishing and those involved in it are interesting) but in the end it's yet another "Revenge of The Murdered Dead" and, notably, the haunting itself is not particularly impressive or creepy.
Slightly better were: "Daydream In Macedon" - A British man doing espionage work in Eastern Europe during WWI, is taking a rest cure in Macedon when he has a vision of his friend's death on the Front. Nicely done. Not a ghost story but a moving representation of psychic visions and the horrors of WWI. Meanwhile, a scheming couple invite their sickly but wealthy uncle over for a visit to hit him up for some cash, but the slightly craftier wife of the duo has more final plans in "Damp Sheets" - this is a fairly typical "revenge of the murdered spirit" story, wrapped up in some black comic character sketches - something like a more pedestrian and lower-class Saki. I liked the almost existentially absurd last line.
Some truly solid stories make up the bulk of the book: "Used Car" is an early exploration of the idea of the "haunted car". A British father buys a used car - an American Highway Straight Edge, originally brought over from Chicago - for his family, but they all soon begin to experience troubling events - glimpsed figures, a stain that won't come out, an odd smell - and sinister, repeated visions of being assaulted and attacked in the car. While the outcome may be obvious, this is a quite well done story - the horror of the hallucinations is nicely handled, nightmarish and invasive - and I like all the details one gets about the life of a family of this class, during this time period (the family dog, Jumbo, is almost another character himself - he doesn't trust the car, needless to say). In "Mr. Ash's Studio", a writer, needing quiet to finish his book, rents a small shack in a suburban mews and (while he gets his work done surprisingly well) finds a certain invasive and repetitive oppressiveness about the place. This is another quite nice example of Wakefield shifting the parameters slightly - here, the idea is again how a "haunted" place may infiltrate the consciousness, but set against a creative individual (whose work does not suffer - and he writes "ghost stories" on the side!) and the place is not one that a person dwells in (and so, by implication, the "haunting" is a bit more malignant and accelerated, including some very threatening moths). An effective little piece. In "The Last To Leave", Number 5 Equity Court, currently home to as small publisher, is condemned to be torn down in the near future, and one of the staff, working late, hears the house pass away, with the expected physical result... Nicely done and expertly conveyed - a "ghost of a house" story. "The Central Figure" has an academic playwright, inspired by a toy theater he had as a child (which occasionally seemed to have a will of its own), writes his first play (recapitulating the love triangle he saw played out by his figures in his youth) and then casts it with the perfect actors - who seem to then inhabit the roles of the characters in their own lives/feelings/motivations - ending in murder. Not bad, the scenario is basically familiar (although something of a variation on Montague Summers & M.R. James) but Wakefield brings it to life, including the remorseful "a man is happier mad" coda.
Still more solid stories include: "A Peg On Which To Hang" - Mr. James Partridge, a minor essayist, is annoyed that his golfing party has been shorted a room at the hotel (despite advance reservations) - but after rejecting the offer of a bed and breakfast, an accommodation is found (with some trepidation) in room 39. After a discussion of ghosts over dinner, and the discovery that a minor detail in the room has changed, Partridge finds his sleep disturbed by a haunting, symbolic dream... This is a very solid, typical Wakefield "bad things happened in this room" story. There is the usual intimation of previous psychic flashes on the part of Partridge, which make him sensitive to the room's influence, but also the statement that the supernatural shows "no consciousness working" and hauntings as "unfocused and indiscriminate." There's a nice bit of social/class understanding/awareness in the ending. The revelatory/eerie dream is well done, as are the "very British" touches in dialogue and temperament (as Partridge makes a fuss, and later the hotelier apologizes for even suggesting the room). Good stuff. In "The Cairn" two friends are vacationing in the Lake Country district. One wants to spend the day climbing a local hill topped by a cairn, but the other has hurt his foot and can't accompany. No one else in the town will go as there is a local legend warning against climbing the hill when there is snow on it, so he sets off alone, his bed-ridden friend observing by telescope... I liked this, but at first was annoyed by the timidity of the presentation. On thinking on it, I realized that the story is all about distances, and how they keep us safe - the distance of the hill as observed by telescope, the distance of local folklore, the distance of police reports. Not bad at all. A civil servant relaxing a nerve rest-cure on the Adriatic isle of Brioni (in "'Look Up There!'") becomes fascinated with an odd man who is always fixedly staring up at an angle. Eventually, the strange man tells his story - he was invited to Gauntry Hall, a famous old show-place recently bought and refurbished by some nouveau riche who chose to ignore the ancient tradition that no one occupy the place on New Year's Eve, instead throwing a party... Quite a nice little piece, all about the build-up to the ineffable and the unasked question...and "would you REALLY want to know the answer?"
Finally, there were three really excellent stories here (two I had read previously in other collections): a very nice and very short piece is "Blind Man's Bluff" (which seems to be taking place at the same location as Ramsey Campbell's much later "At Lorn Hall"). It's a short and super-concentrated haunted house story - so concentrated, in fact, that I can't really say much about it without ruining the fun (there's some excellent evocation of groping around in the dark) - let's just say our main character doesn't get very far upon entering... In "Present At The End" a famous blood-sport games-man finds that he can no longer shake the sights and sounds of needless and cruel animal death he has witnessed, and eventually turns his vast fortune over to an SPCA group to change public opinion. This may be the most successful of Wakefield's "psychic sensitivity" pieces - starting with some awful imagery, bridged with the man's actions, and ending on a quiet, hopeful, moving and redemptive moment. Finally, in "The Red Hand", a cynical writer of ghost stories, pondering his motivations, runs through his notes of potential stories and finds the synopsis for "The Red Hand". But writing the story, he inevitably succumbs to it... Nice little snapshot of the ghost story writer's "mind" at the time it was written, with some nice teases (who are fellow writers Lowell & Agnew supposed to be? The latter sounds like Arthur Machen), and a surprisingly level of metatextuality about it. Really good stuff!
August 19, 2025
[Jonathan Cape] (1932). HB/DJ. First Edition. 288 Pages. Purchased from Skirrid Books.
Physically, this is a displeasing article. The wrapper’s drab, the cloth-covered boards have a nasty texture and the binding’s uneven.
That all said, the contents - 21 short stories - are mostly Good or better.
HRW (1888-1964) was a versatile, gifted writer who ranged beyond tedious, genre-polluting tropes. “Present at the End” is possibly the weakest entry, but it’s (somewhat) salvaged in serving up a painful end to a bloodsports practitioner.
Physically, this is a displeasing article. The wrapper’s drab, the cloth-covered boards have a nasty texture and the binding’s uneven.
That all said, the contents - 21 short stories - are mostly Good or better.
HRW (1888-1964) was a versatile, gifted writer who ranged beyond tedious, genre-polluting tropes. “Present at the End” is possibly the weakest entry, but it’s (somewhat) salvaged in serving up a painful end to a bloodsports practitioner.
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