Most Ghostly

 by Colin Davies

 I'd always promised myself a trip to a haunted house. As a child I was fascinated by the idea of the paranormal, ghosts and other such spooky shenanigans. That's why, when given the opportunity, I jumped at the chance.

The journey to the house was extremely uneventful. So much so, that I can hardly remember the trip. Everything was about the house: would I feel the eerie ambience as soon as I laid my eyes on it?

Walking up the drive I can tell you now the answer to that question is yes.

The general vista was one of any oldish country house. It had sand coloured rendered walls, large ornate windows and a front door that was begging to be opened by a doorman in pantaloons and a red velvet jacket.

The shadows that hung from the various reliefs in the architecture transformed the clean lines of gentry housing to the foreboding repression of Gothic majesty. Everything about this building in the light of evening song was sinister and intimidating.

The hypnotic effect of this construction held me so captivated, that I found myself staring at the ornate ceiling in the main entrance hall without realising I'd actually walked through the door. The delicate mouldings blended with imposing ease through the Regency decor into the smooth polished redwood banisters that twisted their way upstairs. The chill in the air was amplified by the realisation that I was standing on the spot at the foot of the stairs where Lady Lancaster was found with a broken neck in 1764.

I decided to start my exploration on the upper level. The ascent felt effortless as my mind was filled with the stories that have become embedded deep within the very fabric of these walls over hundreds of years.

The layout was so natural that it was easy to think I’d been there before: like a new song that sounds familiar the first time it’s heard.

I looked down the dark, shadow-guarded corridor.

At the far end, on the right, I could see movement.

I had thought I was on my own this weekend.

Walking into the room I found a group of people, two held video cameras and one had a boom mic. They seemed to be concentrating their attention on two other people stood by an obvious statement of wealth in the form of a fire place.

I recognised these people.

They reminded me of a couple I’d seen on TV called Yevett and Derek.

Derek turned to look at me. "There's someone here," he said. "A man."
"What's his name?" asked Yevett.
Derek repeated the question to me, so I answered: "Colin."
"Colin," he told her.
She responded with another question. "Did you die in this house?"
Again Derek repeated her enquiry towards me.

The question was so preposterous that I was dumbstruck.

Derek asked the question again, only with a little more force. "Did you die in this house?"
I was beginning to feel offended by this seeming lack of respect so I answered "NO!" Only the sound that fell from my lips with a whisper was, "Yes."
Have you ever had a realisation that felt like the entire world around has stopped while a sick empty feeling hits you in the middle of your stomach so hard your arms and legs go cold? Your lips become numb, unable to form words and your vision develops a slight vignette which removes you from the situation, turning you into an observer rather than the player.

Suddenly I was stood at the top of the main stairs. A man was shouting at me. I told him, "You're finished, I'm going to bring you down". I felt his hands on my chest, then panic, like that moment when you realise the chair is about to topple backwards.

I suddenly looked at Derek.

"I'm in the cellar, under the apple barrels"

The TV psychic started wearing an expression of concern.

"And phone my editor at the Mirror." I pause. Sometimes being proved wrong is a strangely wonderful feeling. Like here: years trying to show the world that psychics and haunted houses are just elaborate frauds, and now I am about to help one go stratospheric with his own fame.

"You're about to solve a murder."

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Doorways to everywhere

By Jacob Silkstone

‘Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted,’ as Emily Dickinson once wrote (displaying both her customary eloquence and her customary fondness for dashes). It seems reasonable to add that all the best haunted houses are crammed with doorways: trap doors, concealed doors, doors to labyrinthine passages, doors to nowhere at all.

If a poem truly is a house that tries to be haunted, where do the doors lead? I imagine that the space behind the poem is similar to the hallway and the Great Hall in House of Leaves – a space which at first seems easily navigable and then, on further exploration, begins to seem infinite. The doorways opened by a poem frequently lead anywhere and everywhere.

In addition to doorways, haunted houses should also contain echoes, distant voices, voices which come and go and occasionally demand to be heard. T. S. Eliot believed that ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his [or, presumably, her] complete meaning alone’, and the doorways in a poem often lead to other poems and other poets, until everything seems interconnected. We work in different rooms, but we occupy the same house.

Reading a poem is partly a process of looking for doorways. If I pick a line almost at random (allowing myself to cheat slightly) from one of the collections on my shelf, I come up with ‘You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine...’ from Robin Robertson’s ‘At Roane Head’. ‘Pine’ opens doors to two other poems on the same shelf: a door to the first line of ‘Evangeline’ (‘This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...’), and a door to the ninth of Neruda’s twenty love poems (‘Drunk with pines and long kisses...’, in Merwin’s English translation).

The doors associated with ‘quicken’ are harder (or slower, if you’re in the mood for a laboured pun) to open, but an endnote from Robertson explains that quicken is an alternative name for the rowan, and suddenly the poem seems haunted by itself: the quicken/rowan contains a faint echo of ‘Roane Head’. ‘Echo’ opens a door of its own – a door to Seamus Heaney’s ‘Personal Helicon’, the final poem in Death of a Naturalist, which ends:

... I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I wonder whether, sometimes, it’s worth reading to set the darkness echoing. Moving through a poem can be like riding a ghost train (‘ghost train’ echoes too: it’s the title of Sean O’Brien’s fourth collection), passing door after door, always surrounded by the many-voiced dark. Entering the space created by a poem involves putting aside your fear of the unknown and being prepared to try as many doors as possible – even when, initially, they refuse to yield.

Read, explore, see where each poem leads and what each poem tries to be haunted by: if left unobserved, all doorways tend, over time, to disappear.

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