THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories Read Free Page A

inspiring travel books in the language’. The same excellent writing imbues the sixteen ghost stories and supernatural tales in the present volume.
    In addition to her complete ghost stories, I have selected two further tales with supernatural content. ‘The Recollections of Professor Henneberg’ involves an uncanny scene of déjà vû, found to be caused by reincarnation. A favourite Victorian device was a clairvoyant vision preventing disaster or imminent murder, the theme of both ‘The Professor’s Story’ and ‘A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest’—the latter is included here.
     

    I have added three appendixes to this collection. The first, an anonymous essay entitled ‘Four Stories’, comprising a group of supposedly true stories, published in All the Year Round on 14 September 1861, is now known to be by Amelia Edwards, thanks to a reference on page 451 of the recently published definitive edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens , Volume IX. On 31 August 1861 Dickens wrote to his colleague and assistant-editor W.H. Wills: ‘In last Wednesday’s make up, is a paper which I have called “Four Stories” by Gleig’s fair friend. They are Ghost Stories. The first (by far the best) is a remarkably good and original one. I nearly rewrote them all.’ Gleig was Amelia’s friend, the Revd George Robert Gleig (1796–1888). Dickens was always very active as a sub-editor, and may have rewritten parts of stories by Amelia (and most other contributors), including ‘The Phantom Coach’; but Edwards always carefully revised all her own work before it reappeared in book form. (I am very grateful to Michael Flowers for bringing these items and correspondence to my attention.)
    The second appendix contains a poem by Edwards. She was a prolific poet, with two clothbound collections to her credit, both published by Tinsley: Ballads (1865) and The Conventiad (1880; previously unrecorded in any of her bibliographies). These both contain a good variety of ghosts and hauntings, and one of her best ballads, ‘A Legend of Boisguilbert’, is reprinted here.
    Finally, I am including an enchanting and captivating essay on ‘My Home Life’, in which Amelia gives a detailed description of her house, The Larches, in Westbury-on-Trym, and her incredible personal collection of antiquities. These included a baby’s foot in the Japanese cabinet; three mummified hands hidden behind some books on a shelf in the library; two arms with hands complete—‘the one almost black, the other singularly fair’—in her dressing-room drawer; and the heads of two ancient Egyptians in her bedroom wardrobe—‘who, perhaps, talk to each other in the watches of the night, when I am sound asleep’.
    Richard Dalby
    December 1998

 
     
     
    My Brother’s Ghost Story
     
     

    THE EVENTS WHICH I am about to relate happened to my only brother. I have heard him tell the story many and many a time, never varying in the minutest particular. It happened about thirty years ago, more or less, while he was wandering, sketch-book in hand, among the High Alps, picking up subjects for an illustrated work on Switzerland. Having entered the Oberland by the Brunig Pass, and filled his portfolio with what he used to call ‘bits’ from the neighbourhood of Meyringen, he went over the great Scheideck to Grindelwald, where he arrived one dusky September evening, about three-quarters of an hour after sunset. There had been a fair that day, and the place was crowded. In the best inn there was not an inch of space to spare—there were only two inns at Grindelwald, thirty years ago—so my brother went to the one other, at the end of the covered bridge next the church, and there, with some difficulty, obtained the promise of a pile of rugs and a mattress, in a room which was already occupied by three other travellers.
    The Adler was a primitive hostelry, half farm, half inn, with great rambling galleries outside, and a huge general room, like a barn.