Greetings, my name is Barry Cripps, I live in Bowling Green Kentucky, where over the last few years I have regularly visited a long forgotten grave yard, on the outskirts of the City. The grave yard is located close to the house in which its occupants once resided. Even though the house has now been torn down to make way for progress, the grave yard remains undisturbed in the woods about two hundred yards from where the house once stood. The grave yard consists of a single stone wall circle, containing the graves of the owners of the house, and varios other graves outside of the circle, known to be the graves of slaves who once worked in the house and surrounding area. The whole thing is very overgrown and surrounded by tall trees. One of the graves has a tall grave stone that has a man's name, birthday and death date carved upon it. It says the man died in 1865, but the most amazing thing about it, is that "First whiteman born this side of the Green river" is written upon it. The other graves are not marked as substantially as this one. Some, presumably the slaves, have only a 5" by 9" piece of stone with three initials carved onto them.

   The house is a story in itself. It served as Post 114 in the Civil War, and has thus seen a lot of action, and many people have taken residence within its walls. The stories of occurrences within the house and the corroborative stories of my friends alone would make a great novel, but on the night of Thursday 12 March 1998, at around 11 p.m. something happened that gave me conclusive prooof of a paranormal anomaly in the grave yard.

   I had been telling a new work associate about all the strange occurrences of past in the grave yard, so of course he said: "Let's go there after work!" I agreed. When time to leave came about, one of my best friends "Chris" came through the door, and decided to go with us. So off we went, Chris, Stuart and I, to see the ghosts.

   The immediate area around the grave yard always induced a nauseous feeling in me upon nearing the site, and again it happened this night. We parked the car and climbed out, beginning the walk to the entrance down a short unused path. We reached the opening of the woods that lead to the grave yard. I stopped, attempting to sense a presence... by now there was usually a very evident feeling of Energy but tonight... there was none. We proceeded in to the woods, and then stepped over a break in the wall into the stone circle. Stuart was amazed at the tranquil beauty of the area, the light from the Full-moon shining down through the bare trees. For the first time since I had started coming here there was no discernible presence... this was strange! Stuart and Chris begain to walk back towards the path, leaving me behind. Suddenly I got a feeling... like... something was coming my way. I started walking backwards in the belief that I would see something following me, but there was nothing there. I rejoined the two guys outside the circle, where we stood for a few seconds, listening for any sounds in the night air. Then, Chris turned to me and said, "What?...."

   I looked at him and replied "What?"

   "Didn't you just say something to me? I thought you said, 'Leave!'"

   I told him I didn't say anything, and we began to walk back towards the road. I walked with Stuart to the right of me, and Chris behind and slightly to the right. Suddenly, I heard a low guttural Growl... in the split second I heard this, I jumped, and turned to look at Stuart to see if he had made the noise as a joke. He was just taking the cigarette away from his mouth after taking a draw, looking straight ahead. As I turned to look at Chris to see if he had made the noise, I was hit from behind by what felt like a wall of freezing cold energy. It pushed me forward like a huge pair of hands, trying to force me to leave. I exclaimed, "Fuck that, I'm gone!" and began walking very fast, away from whatever pushed me.

   When we got back in the car, I asked the others what they had seen or heard. Stuart said that he saw me jump, then it looked like I fell over something on the ground. Chris said he saw me fly forward also, but they both denied hearing or producing the animal like growl that I heard.

   Call me crazy, but that was 100% real to me and my two friends.

The Sydney Tunnel Man

  I live in Sydney, Australia. I'm also a sceptic.  I haven't changed my mind but this really did happen to me and I can find no rational explanation.

     Well, I'm a 'drainer' (you know, like a caver or spelunker, but since I live in the city I tend to explore drains and sewers more than caves and crevices) as a hobby. I've always been interested in the convict-built structures around Sydney, so when a friend of mine decided he wanted to have a look at the old Northern Harbour defense tunnels built by the English when they first landed here in Sydney I was interested.

     Just a little note for you all...Sydney's harbour has risen quite a lot over the last 200 years.  Places like The Tank Stream and both Northern and Southern Defense Tunnels are (at the very least) partially water filled. So we got permission from the local Council and took full wetsuits and scuba gear, an inflatable dingy and waterproofed EVERYTHING and were at the Reserve (on the Harbour foreshore below Taronga Park Zoo) by about 11am, February 15, 1997 (a beautiful end-of-Summer Saturday). There were six of us in total, but only four of us were going in this time. The four of us suited up and started into the tunnels at exactly midday.

     The first thing I must say is that we walked into the dark, musty smelling square-cut cobweb-filled tunnels that
everyone knows who's been down there (near the rusted up cannons in their turning circles). And let me tell you if you can't handle spiders, cobwebs and rats you'd best not try draining! After a certain distance you could see where whatever kids had been brave enough to visit the tunnels gave up (no more graffiti, the dirty floors were not scuffed up as much) And then I seriously started looking at the convict-cut and built walls...there was even a bit of graffiti dating back to 1809! Cooool!

     The old place had certainly lost whatever charm it may have had though...the tunnels actually wind around at
(mostly) ground level for quite a few kilometers, and I think we did just about all of them.  Sometimes you could see out of almost-totally overgrown eyeholes (gun holes?) the city, or in the other direction, down Middle Harbour to the Heads, or just bushland. At other times we were almost up to our hips in...well, I never say the liquid is ONLY water... But mostly there was just blackness and an untraceable stench of sewerage.  Some parts of the tunnels had collapsed under the ministrations of the Reserve's bushland above, with roots and stuff poking through the sandstone blocks.

     Then the tunnels right underground (we figured they must be almost under the Zoo itself) sloped downwards.
This is where we stopped to puff up the dingy (usually when the water in places like this gets deep enough it
can be dangerous to attempt to wade or swim though it, let's just say rats like chewing air hoses and scubawear,
but don't like 'big' boats and so keep away.) and continued on our way. I was sitting on the left hand rear side of the dingy,  and it got to a point during our travels that the top of the dingy was scraping the roofs! It was during this part of the draining that I noticed what looked like more tunnels than there had been for quite a while...I pointed this fact out to the guys and they agreed with me...but we only had a certain amount of time and we were going to head back in about 10 minutes or so.  One of the fellas noticed the water was becoming 'tidal' (being pushed and pulled by the Harbour currents) and figured we'd best turn around and start heading back.

     We did just that, but as we were coming to where the water seriously bounced the dingy off the roof I was laying flat in the boat, and the only things outside the dingy I could see were through the plastic oar holes on the side of the boat. At one time, over at one of the tunnels coming off the main one we had travelled down, I thought I saw a blueish/green light, hovering - I figured it was the sewer equivalent to 'swamp gas', but it was a little unnerving.  Shortly after that I looked out again and saw...what looked like a glowing man.  In rags that could have once been a tailored suit (you know what I mean, you see homeless men wearing the sort of "over-crushed suitish things" in the city all the time) and he was watching us go past. I figured I was hallucinating...since none of the others saw it. But...It shook me up pretty badly. I mean, we're in nearly 6 foot deep water, in a tunnel no one (and I mean NO ONE) could have come down without the same sort of equipment as we had, the place REEKED of sewerage so badly we were using our airtanks, and there's this GUY standing hunched, covered in water but GLOWING in one of the side tunnels! One of the guys in our dingy said he felt so very cold (even in his wetsuit) when we passed both times at a spot that must have been pretty close to where I saw ... whatever I saw.
But no-one has been in those particular tunnels since (or before, as far as I am aware) and so I've got no one to
compare notes with....

  Shadows of the Master

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but to my mind it is inconceivable that anyone who has read the ghost stories of M.R. James can be anything but influenced or inspired when trying to write his own supernatural tales. So powerful is James's technique that it remains engraved on the reader's mind, as strong as the malevolent spirits that haunt James's fictional world.

James did not openly admit a belief in ghosts, but reserved the right to reconsider should any tangible evidence be revealed. Even so, the situations and events in his stories are so convincingly related that the reader becomes totally involved. The feeling that such could happen any moment is shiveringly real.

The way M.R. James achieved this was simple. Unlike the melodrama of Gothic horror, James underplayed everything. He never went out of his way to shock, merely unnerve. His spirits had to be evil in intent, but never would he break the spell by describing them in detail. Only a few hints are necessary, and the reader's imagination does the rest.

James used three basic rules. First and foremost was that the spirits had to be malevolent. There was no point in having a pitiful ghost since he believed the purpose of a ghost story was to frighten. Amiable ghosts were for legends, he maintained. His second rule was that the events had to be convincing, and this could be achieved not just by the writing but also by the setting: the more commonplace the surroundings the better. Finally the story had to be easily understood and not overloaded with occult jargon as if it were a thesis rather than fiction.

One of the most frequently quoted examples of James's methods is that beautiful phrase from "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad", when the phantom is described as having a "face of crumpled linen", but I feel a better, and longer, example comes from his less well known tale, "There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard":

"Then he went to the window and looked out into the churchyard. Have you ever seen an old brass in a church with a figure of a person in a shroud? It is bunched together at the top of the head in a curious way. Something like that was sticking up out of the earth in a spot of the churchyard which John Poole knew very well. He darted into his bed and lay there very still indeed.

"Presently something made a very faint rattling at the casement. With a dreadful reluctance John Poole turned his eyes that way. Alas! Between him and the moonlight was the black outline of the curious bunched head..."

James was a renowned antiquarian and used this impressive knowledge to excellent effect in most of his stories, and it is only natural therefore that a number of his best known imitators were adept antiquarians in their own right. Many are associated with Cambridge University, especially King's College. It was here that James would read his stories, written purely for his own amusement, to his friends at Christmas. James later became Provost of King's in 1905 and subsequently Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and, from 1918, Provost of Eton.

It is this group of imitators that I intend to cover here, rather than the far larger throng whose work shows the undeniable influence of the James technique. My friend, the redoubtable anthologist Hugh Lamb, has compiled an ever-growing list of some forty of these writers such as J. Cecil Maby, Dermot Chesson Spence and Christopher Woodforde. However, I always step warily in the field of detecting fictional influence. Remember James was writing during a Golden Age which also witnessed the growing talents of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Vernon Lee and scores more, and do not forget that James was himself directly inspired by J. Sheridan Le Fanu whose work was also accessible to those wishing to look.

Almost certainly these other writers also influenced budding new talents, so for the purpose of this article, I intend to look at the work of those conscious imitators of the Master.

First let's just look at the people involved, then afterwards I'll quote some examples of their fiction.

The earliest to appear in print was Edmund Gill Swain, who used the setting of the real-life village of Stanground on the borders of Huntingdonshire and Peterborough for his stories published as The Stoneground Ghost Tales in 1912. Swain had been the chaplain of King's College at the time M.R. James gave his first memorable reading in 1893.

Richard Malden became acquainted with James whilst studying at King's. He went on to become Dean of Wells, and in 1943 published his volume Nine Ghosts. Frederick Cowles served for a while as the librarian at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a tireless traveller and published many books about Britain. Two published collections were The Horror of Abbot's Grange (1936) and The Night Wind Howls (1938), whilst a third remains unpublished.

A.N.L. Munby also studied at King's College, and later served as its librarian. His stories, written whilst a prisoner-of-war from 1943-45, appeared as The Alabaster Hand (1949).

Utilising their specialist knowledge in their own individual ways were M.P. Dare and L.T.C. Rolt. Dare was a noted local historian around Nottingham and Leicester, and his stories were published as Unholy Relics (1947). Rolt had a formidable knowledge of the byways, waterways and railways of Britain which made Sleep No More (1948) a most unique volume of the supernatural.

Montague Summers could arguably be included in the list even though he wrote only one piece of fiction, "The Grimoire" (1936). Summers spent his life collecting anything factual or fictional associated with the supernatural and compiling a number of worthy anthologies.

I've never been too sure whether J. Meade Falkner could be classed as a disciple of James. His background was not dissimilar to that of James, and living from 1858 to 1932 he actually pre-dates James. He was also a devoted antiquarian, living within the precincts of Durham Cathedral where he served as a librarian. His powerful novel of demonic possession, The Lost Stradivarius, was published in 1895, possibly as a result of hearing James's stories, although I'm inclined to believe the similarity in style owes more to the common background of both men.

It is known that E.F. Benson was present at James's first reading. He was then just becoming accustomed to the success being accorded to his novel Dodo. Benson clearly uses many of James's elements in his stories, but adds equally as many of his own, and I would not immediately equate E.F. Benson and M.R. James. On the other hand, Benson's brothers, especially A.C. Benson, do have a closer affinity. A.C. Benson, the author of the famous words to Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory", was a very close friend of M.R. James. He was resident housemaster at Cambridge from 1903 in which year his first collection, The Hill of Dreams, appeared.

Of this handful of imitators, Malden, Munby and Rolt achieve the most success in blending James's techniques with their own narratives. Let me hasten to add that I have yet to discover one imitator who manages to improve upon James. The majority fall foul in overdoing his methods, and this is most irritating when it comes to failing to describe the evil phantoms. James knew just what to leave in and leave out, but his imitators fumble.

Malden's Nine Ghosts is a neat, slim book with a brief introduction that acknowledges the debt to James - "They are in some sort a tribute to his memory, if not comparable with his work." A number of the stories are too obvious and contrived, with the ending being apparent from the start, and the story becoming nothing more than a pleasant narrative. Unlike James, Malden allows too much space to supplying background details. Thus in "The Dining-room Fireplace" he succeeds in creating a fine chill with one brief episode only to spoil it with several pages of boring research. Nevertheless the following shows what Malden can do:

"...next moment we were even more startled by seeing the fire beginning to disappear. I remembered a story which I had once read - by H.G. Wells, I think. In it the lights in a haunted room go out one by one and as the occupant rushes to the fire to rekindle them that too dies away into absolute blackness.

"But we soon saw that our fire was not going out like that. It was being obscured by some large dark object which was rising from the ground between ourselves and it. It was as if the hearthrug were slowly humping itself into the form of an animal of some kind. It rose and rose without a sound. Soon it was larger than any dog and its movement had somehow an uncanny suggestion of deliberate and malign purpose. Its bulk and outline, so far as we could make them out, suggested a bear more than anything else. But the head was not shaped like that of a bear. There was something more than half-human about the outline which made it peculiarly horrible..."

Malden then breaks this spectral spell by having the phantasm vanish up the chimney, but it serves to show his capabilities. No points for identifying the Wells story referred to - "The Red Room" - which had appeared in The Idler in March 1896 with the purpose of deliberately spoofing the 1890s trend to haunted houses.

To my mind Malden's best story in the James vein is "The Sundial", which includes a most chilling scene wherein the protagonist sets out to chase a ghost around a hedge only to realise that he has suddenly become the pursued, and the 'creature' is rapidly closing.

A.N.L. Munby (interesting how all these writers are known by their initials) dutifully dedicated his book to M.R. James in Latin. Some of his stories are most un-Jamesian, merely relating episodes of non-supernatural terror. When he does turn to phantoms, he does so masterfully; though, as the following extract from "The Tudor Chimney" shows, he goes much further in his description than would have James:

"As I sat there, holding my breath, I was aware that I was not alone in the room. Something else was present, immediately behind me. How I detected this I do not know, but I was none the less certain of it. With an effort of will power I slowly turned my head, for I was intensely curious. I wish to God now that I had not given way to my curiosity. For what I saw still haunts me. Just on the outer edge of the lamplight a figure was standing - and I hope I never see anything again so monstrous and so repellent. It was a man, but it had the aspect of no living man. Its form was covered with the charred remains of clothing, the bare legs were horribly thin; they were nothing but burnt skin and blackened bone. But it was the head that made my very blood run cold: it was hairless and scorched, and the face was nothing more than a featureless, seared, leathery mask. It was the face of a man long dead, but the eyes were alive. They glowed behind the mask with a baleful, infernal light that radiated malevolence."

Because of his ability to utilise original surroundings, L.T.C. Rolt's stories are perhaps the most refreshing. Imagine a cage being winched up from a mine-shaft and, crouching on top of it, something human in shape, "even if it did seem terrible tall and thin, and...a kind of dirty white all over, like summat that's grown up in the dark and never had no light", as he details in "The Mine"; or imagine spending a night on a canal boat and witnessing emerging from the dark hole of a canal tunnel "a figure, more shade than substance".

Grand stuff! Rolt however does not ignore the possibilities of a haunted house, and in "A Visitor at Ashcombe" comes up with his own blend of Jamesian chills. One of the rooms at Ashcombe contains a boarded window which acts as a mirror and reflects more than one would wish to see:

"The form in the mirror did not move, and there dawned upon her with dreadful certainty the conviction that the mirror was no longer a mirror but a window; that the fire which glowed there was not the fire which burned in the room; that the shadow she saw there was not her shadow. The tables were now turned upon her for, while terror held her motionless, the shadow began to move. Though the light was too dim to distinguish detail of form or movement, yet both contrived to convey an intensity of purpose which was horribly confirmed by faint scratchings and pattering sounds, as if nails scratched upon the glass of a window and clawed the putty from the panes."

It's a pity that the rest of the story does not live up to expectations as the remainder of the action takes place off-stage, cheating the reader.

Such could never be said of A.C. Benson. Of all the James imitators, he goes full swing for ghoulish descriptions, as in "The Hill of Dreams" with its bodies writhing with worms. In his later stories Benson began to exercise some restraint, and thereby made the impact greater. This is most evident in the long story "The Uttermost Farthing" (1926) which Hugh Lamb recently resurrected for his anthology The Taste of Fear. The following scene takes place in the attic of an old house just after the two lead characters have retrieved a lost box:

"The icy air beat upon us and turning my head I saw, standing behind us, stiff and upright, a corpse, swathed in graveclothes, with pale leaden-coloured hands hanging down; the face was of the same hue, with a fringe of ragged-looking grey hair straggling over the forehead. It had a faint smile, it seemed, on its lips, and its dull eyes, grey like chalcedony, looked fixedly at the opening in the floor; and then a heavy odour of corruption began to spread around us."

At the other extreme from A.C. Benson is Sir Andrew Caldecott who is frequently grouped in with the James clan. But apart from the occasional similarity of setting, only a few of Caldecott's stories come within a mile of comparison. This is a deliberate choice by the writer as a quote in the preface to Not Exactly Ghosts (1946) betrays. He shows he merely intends to relate an interesting if bizarre tale and not to chill the reader's marrow. He thereby breaks James's first law.

Having said that, several of Caldecott's stories are good: "Branch Line to Benceston" is classifiably science fiction, as it deals with an alternate time-stream. Yet, ironically, of all the 'imitators' it is Caldecott who took up a thread of James' as suggested by him in the epilogue to his Collected Ghost Stories, "Stories I Have Tried to Write". It concerns a message in a Christmas cracker which strikes fear into the heart of its reader; and in "Christmas Reunion" Caldecott turns it into an episode of revenge by a man thought dead.

There then are the immediate circle of James's disciples. To pursue the detection and reveal the James influence in the writings of people like Oliver Onions, W.F. Harvey, H.R. Wakefield, Shane Leslie, R.Thurston Hopkins and Walter de la Mare is something that would fill up the rest of this volume - and more.

Suffice it to say that the James tradition is far from dead, and it is alive and well in one of Britain's most gifted writers of the supernatural: Ramsey Campbell. You may raise your eyebrows at the mention of this spawn of Lovecraft, but Ramsey has long-since cast away the Lovecraft mantle and there is far more of James in his recent stories such as the award-winning "In the Bag", and the very excellent "Call First". It is a quotation from the latter tale with which I shall close, as I feel it cannot be followed. I will reveal none of the plot as I urge you to seek this story out:

"She was only an old woman, her body beneath the long white dress was sure to be thin as her hands, she could only shout when she saw him, she couldn't stop him leaving...

"As she unbent from stooping to the phone she grasped two uprights of the banisters to support herself. They gave a loud splintering creak and bent together. Ned halted, confused. He was still struggling to react when she turned toward him, and he saw her face. Part of it was still on the bone."