Sometimes he would for hours together walk to and fro throughout the long oak-wainscoted apartment which he generally occupied, with wild gesticulations and agitated pace, in the manner of one who has been roused to a state of unnatural excitement by some sudden and appalling intimation.

-from ‘The Fortunes Of Sir Robert Ardagh’

I recently got into the roots of Gothic horror, a road which led me first to the short stories of Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. If you ask around, the first names in the genre are often this man and M.R. James (who is next on my list). Now Le Fanu is primarily famous for Carmilla, the scintillating lesbian vampire tale, but here I’d like to look into his ghost stories. Haunted house tales, once a staple in horror.

Ghost stories have existed for as long as people have huddled around a fire, turning true and make believe tales of terror into fun frights, true fears, or hard lessons. Sometimes they can get gory at the end, but generally their horror comes in attacks upon the senses, auditory and visual assaults. Weird shadows. Creaking floorboards. The classics.

Le Fanu possessed an adept writing style, and I love his artistic use of words. Like Lovecraft he is highly descriptive of locations and structures (though not nearly as exhaustive as old H.P.). Otherwise he plays it straightforward, until the end, those last one or two pages when truth comes out and characters are left with lifelong doubts about what they experienced.

Take the short ‘The Fortunes Of Sir Robert Ardagh,’ a classic tale of an Irish man who had been in war, and was seen as bizarre by those in his contemporaries on the return home. Much of the story reads as Robert is strange. It’s ‘only’ when he receives a paralyzing visitation from a stranger that the tale goes off the rails. The ending holds a tuft of jagged savagery that startled, and afterward, even now, I’m left wondering just what happened.

I can count on one hand the number of stories that have had that effect on me. Was this a ghost story, the Devil, Death, madness, or imagination? I can’t tell. Right away Le Fanu became a favorite, for I knew he was messing with me from the grave.

‘An Authentic Narrative Of A Haunted House’ is perhaps the most direct horror story I’ve read. It has all the bits of a ghost story, but is told from the assumption that people rummaging through a house are really thieves getting in from the upstairs. Along with this are oddly quivering shadows, old women who appear from random corners. Phantasms slowly witnessed by all the house members. But the narrator dismisses these things as human. The degree of cringe in the story is so low, so slothful in its buildup as to catch you off guard. You’re convince it perhaps is all normal, until the end.

Here, in the second story, I began to wonder what the difference is between a ghost story and psychological horror. The latter is surely internalized, a downward spiral triggered by real or imagined external stimuli. But isn’t this what ghosts do? Disturb the psyche. Upset the sanctity of the household, its family and its sense of self. Both are centipedal, creeping dreads disrespecting more and more parts of the nervous system until the human frays….then tears.

Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth – an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can’t.

-from ‘The Ghost Of A Hand’

Lastly in this trilogy of shorts is perhaps my favorite thus far, for the title says it all. A family house. A hand without a body. Moving. Acting. Rapping on chamber doors and causing misery. So deliciously simple. No bloodshed. No jump scares. Simply the hand, fat and healthy, showing up again and again to unravel an entire household. Every single instance Le Fanu used for the hand’s return reads different than the last, slightly creepier, and in the end its purpose is as mysterious as it was dangerous. I love this story.

The haunted house is a bit of a bore these days, isn’t it? It doesn’t hold the respect of, say, vampires or slasher films, Lovecraftian or Stephen King franchises. But if developed using a Le Fanu tale, I think it could make a strong comeback. I never gave these stories any time, and now, I can’t get enough. The atmosphere is palpably tense and confounding, the people realistic, the ghosts slight, demanding. Unnerving.

I don’t think I have to preach the virtues of ghost stories to followers of these fair Threads, but hey, can’t hurt. I’m newly converted to its charms, though I still say its psychological horror. That’s fine. I don’t define genres or sub-genres for anybody but myself.

Le Fanu embodies the captivity of hauntings. The fright put into a person whenever they are alone, even for a minute, in a house full of people. But they aren’t there with you in the moment, and the spirit knows. It’s a sinister divide and conquer without any effort, waiting for you to choose being on your own in the study, washing clothes in the laundry room, cooking dinner, reading before going to sleep, etc. All one can do is freak out, then try to explain to a house of loved ones of why you haven’t lost your mind, on how you experienced a thing they did not but were right down the hall. A shadow. A hand. A finger scratching, reaching. One move, and the walls of Jericho tumble.

As much as I adore atomic horror, a good slasher, and cosmic horror, this one may beat them all. Maybe.

So if you have never read this man’s works, please endeavor to do so. Mister Sheridan Le Fanu, you have your flowers, good sir.