- Selected by Richard V. Hirst
This was the first known ghost story M.R. James wrote for his Christmas Eve gatherings and, for me, it remains the most affecting. Here we find Dennistoun, an English antiquarian on holiday with friends in southern France who, during a solo day trip to an obscure and decaying cathedral city falls in with some mysterious locals. Via them, Dennistoun encounters an obscure manuscript he discovers is in fact a collection of pages cut from illuminated medieval manuscripts.
All the James elements are there: the stately, slightly fussy erudition, the rare but cursed medieval artefact, the tourist whose curiosity gets the better of him, the shadowy ambivalence about the nature of the ‘ghost’, the “slight haze of distance” (the story is presented as a tale heard second- or perhaps third-hand).
First published in the National Review, 1895; collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Arnold, 1904 and subsequently in Collected Ghost Stories, Edward Arnold, 1931. Read it online at Project Gutenberg here
A Personal Anthology 