Ghostly tales and the horror within

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2015/10/26/ghostly-tales-and-the-horror-within/

Tales of uncanny phenomena stir the imagination, engender discomfort, and challenge the intellectual assumptions which pervade our rational senses.

Having been displaced by slasher movies, science fiction, and psychological horror flicks, spectral tales are largely out of fashion today; however, such stories can serve an important literary and psychological function.

Ghostly tales can possess direction and purpose—they can, according to Russell Kirk, “touch upon the old reality of evil.”  In the twenty-first century, tales of the supernatural force us to confront the ugly darkness that resides within each of our souls and within our communities.

George MacDonald knew this well, as did Bram Stoker, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  These writers uniquely understood the spiritual nature of humanity and the enigmatic, seductive power of sin.  They feared it, confronted it, and, through their fiction, made its presence an uncomfortable, tangible reality.  Through the power of allegory, they gave us a glimpse into the dark forces at work in our world and the forces that cloak it with false meaning.

Ultimately, our most enduring ghost stories possess more than the ability to unnerve—they illustrate the clash between good and evil, reveal certain moral truths, and demonstrate that the struggle against malevolence requires courage, fortitude, and self-awareness.  Often, the struggle against darkness requires self-sacrifice, and in some cases, the sacrifice of one’s own life.  They are tales of heroism and triumph in the face of horror and doubt.

The most powerful ghost stories have a spiritual and moral message and show the interconnection between time and eternity.  George MacDonald’s Lilith, for example, is the dark tale of a country-gentleman, Mr. Vane, whose library is haunted by the ghost of Mr. Raven, a former librarian.  After following Mr. Raven into the uppermost garrets of his ancient house, Mr. Vane finds himself stepping through a mirror into an unknown universe.  Unsure as to whether he is dead, Mr. Vane struggles against the temptations of a beautiful “white lady” whom he nurses back to health after finding her lifeless body along a riverbank, battles against giants who enslave him, walks among dancing skeletons, and fights a battle against an evil, vampiric princess who rules a wealthy, yet enslaved people.  Essentially a good man, Mr. Vane must confront his own vanities, lusts, and appetites in order to sleep in the “house of the dead” and achieve everlasting bliss.  Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Mr. Vane is caught between Death and Life-in-Death —a struggle between true salvation and an everlasting existence void of meaning or hope.

Similarly, in Dracula, Bram Stoker explores the power of evil using inverted Christian symbolism—a perversion of the sacred Mass.  Whereas in the traditional Christian Mass, celebrants consume bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ in the hope of eternal salvation (eternal life through death), Dracula and his female companions drink the blood of innocents to spread their curse of the undead (eternal life-in-death).  Wandering without love or hope, and thriving on the their appetitive instincts, Dracula and his mistresses seek to erect an empire of darkness by a slow seduction of the body and the soul.  Wrought with strong sexual undertones, Stoker’s dark tale illustrates that unmitigated indulgence in the pleasures of this world must lead to an ever-lasting life outside the presence of God—again, it is the conscious choice of an everlasting, but meaningless, life (in death) over the promise of actual salvation.

Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” similarly touches upon the prospect of “Life-in-Death,” after the protagonist mariner uses his crossbow to slay an innocent albatross.  The mariner’s actions were freely chosen—he rejected righteousness and good, thereby risking eternal damnation.  As a result of his own choices, he was condemned to wear the albatross around his neck, both physically and metaphorically.  Most importantly, the mariner’s soul became the property of Life-in-Death, so that he would forever pay the price for his evil.  To Coleridge, sin and evil are things we embrace through our own actions.

Finally, in Russell Kirk’s short story “An Encounter by Mortstone Pond,” an old man, Gerard Pierce, returns to the place of his youth to put his affairs in order after receiving a disturbing medical diagnosis.  An accomplished solider who had been shattered on the battlefield, Gerard travels to his childhood home to confront his own mortality and his place in time.  While walking down a wooded path toward the graves of his long-deceased parents, he recalls an incident that occurred in that same place shortly following his parents’ deaths.  Lonely and depressed, the young Gerard had felt the presence of an old man who, though invisible and without audible speech, spoke to him.  In comforting tones, the old man told Gerard that his parents would be with him forever, being made for eternity.  Now, decades later, Gerard feels the presence of a devastated young boy walking at his side, and he speaks those same comforting words to him.  It is the intersection of time and eternity, the coming together of two moments in a single instant.

This story shows that Kirk knew all too well, in the words of his friend T.S. Eliot, “what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

And so, we are everywhere haunted — whether we care to acknowledge it or not.  We partake in a community of souls in which the living, the dead, and the unborn are joined in an eternal union.  We are mere custodians of this world of shadows and we ignore the noble dead at our peril.  To that end, stories of the divine and diabolical reveal truths that are hidden to the materialist or positivistic psychologist—they are vivid reminders of our place in the eternal order of things.

We are frightened by tales of the otherworld not simply because of the ghouls and phantoms they suggest may be lurking in our attics, but because of what those stories reflect about ourselves and because they remind us that there is an existential reality beyond the mundane order of this world.

Literary ghost stories force us to confront our true nature, our fears, our weaknesses, and the limits of our knowledge.  They remind us that we are imperfect and frail, lacking omniscience and imagination, plagued by cowardice and easily seduced by corporeal pleasures.

A well-written ghost story distills truths far deeper and far more important than those that can be ascertained by our five senses.  It will cut to the core of our existence and reach to the very depths of our reality.  If we are honest, we fear the ghostly tale because we are terrified, in the truest sense, of the darkness we conjure in our own souls.

Glen A. Sproviero is a commercial litigator in New York.

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