The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (2 page)

The Haunted House

By Elizabeth Albright and Ray Bradbury

Once there was a haunted house where ghosts and goblins lived.

Also The Headless Horseman – Ichabod’s ghost – and eerie Jack O’Lanterns.

On the night of Hallowe’en, five kids went to the house.

They had never seen it before.

One of the kids said, “Let’s go to the door.”

Another kid said, “No! It looks like it is haunted.”

The kid who wanted to go in said, “Whoever is with me, say ‘I’”

No-one
said “I” because they were all scared.

The brave kid said, “Fine.
I’ll
go by myself.”

So he went to the door.

It opened slowly, but no-one was there.

“I’m here” said a voice, “but you can’t
see
me!”

“Who are you?” the kids cried.

“I am the man from that famous poem,

‘
Last
,
night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn
’
t there

He wasn
’
t there again today,

My Gosh, I wish he’d go away.
’ ”

“So you were
never
here?” the kids cried.

“Never and never
will
be!” said the voice.

“Nice to meet you!” said the kids.

“Even if we really
didn’t!
” said the voice.

“Goodbye!” said the kids.

“Hello,” said the voice.

And the door shut.

Foreword

I Live In A Haunted House

Peyton House, where we live, is a sixteenth-century, three-storey timber-frame building which stands in the middle of the picturesque little village of Boxford in Suffolk. It was once the grace-and-favour home of the chief stewards to the Peyton family, the local landowners who lived about a mile away in their Elizabethan manor house, Peyton Hall. For the last twenty years, though, Peyton House has been home to me, my wife Philippa and our three children, Richard, Sean and Gemma. What has happened to us there would seem to have no other explanation than yet another instance of the supernatural at work.

We had been living in the house for a while before we became fully aware of the manifestation that is repeated each year. This realisation came about because of what occurred late one spring evening. It was on a night during the first week of June and Philippa was sitting reading in our bedroom, a high-ceilinged room at the front of the house. On the rear wall of this room there is an interior window which looks out on to the landing. Philippa was engrossed in her book when she was suddenly aware out of the corner of her eye of someone going past the window. She looked up and caught sight of a figure with long hair passing by. A moment later and it was gone.

Philippa’s first reaction was that it must have been Gemma going along the landing to the bathroom. Then she realised that our daughter was not in the house. Indeed, the whole place was deserted because everyone
else
had gone out, too. Curiously, though, this realisation did not make her feel afraid. Only the strong conviction that the figure – whoever or whatever it was – was quite benign.

It was to be some months later, and as a result of making a number of enquiries in Boxford, that an explanation for my wife’s experience was forthcoming. Tales of a strange visitant in Peyton House were, it seemed, known to a number of the older residents in the village whose parents and grandparents had once worked as servants in the house. Several of these men and women had even lived for a time in the attic rooms. All told of experiencing the ethereal smell, and a few had even seen the long-haired wraith. And all at precisely the same time of year. Even stranger, not one of them had felt there was anything of which to be afraid.

The old house, we were informed, had years ago been surrounded by several acres of land – later sold off for farming and a small housing development long before we arrived – but during the early years of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Napoleonic wars with France, something terrible and tragic had occurred there. A group of French soldiers who had been taken prisoner during the conflict had been billeted at Peyton House, where they were kept in the outbuildings and set to earn their keep by working on the land. This was a common practice during this particular war, and a number of property owners in East Anglia benefited from these gangs of enforced labourers – although there is no evidence that they treated the Frenchmen with anything other than kindness, as long as they worked conscientiously and did not cause any trouble.

Then, one June day, a fire broke out at Peyton House. Fortunately, the blaze was put out before it could do any serious damage to the building, but one of the PoWs was trapped by the flames and perished in a smoke-filled room. There is no record as to whether the man was buried locally or his body returned to France. Each June thereafter, we were told, a distinct aroma of smoke was evident in the house, growing in intensity until the same specific day when it stopped as dramatically as it had begun.

That day was 6 June – the very day on which Philippa had seen the figure on the landing . . .

I knew at the same time, too, that the theme of haunted houses had been a popular one with authors for the past century and more. Yet amidst the veritable library of collections of ghost stories, very few were solely devoted to this topic. A few day’s research confirmed the fact that there was indeed a wealth of material available – and the result is the book now in your hands. Making a selection of tales from so many has not been easy, I must admit, but I do believe that here you will find a
representative
collection covering all the important elements of haunted houses.

An ideal way of setting the mood seemed to me to be with a group of stories – like that of my wife – based on
actual
hauntings. The first of these, “The Haunted and the Haunters” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton may well be the most famous story of its kind and certainly its influence will be evident in all the subsequent tales in the section right up to William F. Nolan’s contemporary thriller, “Dark Winner.” Nolan’s dangerous little protagonist leads neatly into the second section featuring ghosts with a vengeance where again the spirit in Charlotte Riddell’s house in Vauxhall Walk is every bit as ancient and malevolent as the evil which haunts the customers in Ian Watson’s tale of the Roebuck Public House enjoying a “Happy Hour.”

The third section deals with a variety of restless phantoms caught half-way between their world and ours, their stories chillingly recounted by at least two writers, Richard Hughes and Fay Weldon, not generally associated with the supernatural. Whether the spirit world is as obsessed with sex as our own provides the theme for the Phantom Lovers section with Richard Dehan’s century-old story indicating that the undead have been interfering with the affairs (if you’ll excuse the pun) of men and women for a great many years – and are still doing so according to those excellent modern horror masters, Robert Bloch and Ramsey Campbell.

People begin their love of ghost stories in childhood and it should come as no surprise when considering the number of children who die tragically young that they have featured in a number of haunted house stories. M. R. James, Nigel Kneale and Penelope Lively demonstrate how little darlings can also become little terrors after death. The uncertainty of what lies beyond death has, of course, promoted a continuing interest in the “Other Side” and the penultimate group of stories take the reader through the shadow lands under the guidance of several knowledgeable writers including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joan Aiken and James Herbert.

The final section, “Houses of Horror” has been added to this new edition of the book at the invitation of my publishers. During the almost half a century that I have been editing anthologies of supernatural stories, I have worked on three collections with famous horror film stars – namely Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing – and researched and written about four other top names, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Robert Englund. All of them proved to be lovers of ghost stories as well as being familiar with supernatural fiction. Amongst these actors’ favourite stories, each had one about a haunted house and it is their choices that bring the book to a chilling finale.

For myself, I have continued to live contentedly in my own haunted home, ghost notwithstanding, for over a quarter of a century. I wish you the same enjoyment – and safety – in the ill-omened and often dangerous properties that now await your visit.

February, 2005

1

HAUNTED PLACES

Stories of Fact and Fiction

No.50, Berkeley Square, London

The Haunted and the Haunters

Edward Bulwer-Lytton