Roald Dahl found the genre fiendishly difficult: “I am a short story writer myself, and although I have been doing it for 45 years and have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, I have never succeeded in bringing it off.” Yet James produced a whole clutch of haunting yarns. Not all are strictly stories about ghosts. There are witches, sorcerers, revenant counts and devils aplenty. Many are true classics. In Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, a traveler buys an ancient volume and finds that his purchase comes with an unwelcome freebie; Casting the Runes sees a cursed man try to outwit a practitioner of black magic; The Mezzotint allows an academic to watch a grisly crime unfold before his eyes.

How did he do it? An excellent new biography by Darryl Jones, For the Dead Remember: A Life of M. R. James, sensibly avoids tackling that question directly. There isn’t much about James that you can tackle directly, apart from the bare bones of his career. Born in 1862; prep school; Eton; King’s College, Cambridge (student, don, provost, vice chancellor); Eton again (provost); died in 1936.

He was a phenomenally hard worker, often publishing several books a year. James spent most of his life consumed by Biblical apocrypha and the cataloging of manuscripts. On the side, he became a noted authority on medieval stained glass and the occult. He enjoyed Charles Dickens and bicycling holidays in France. Politically, he was conservative, and deeply suspicious of change. Friendship was his chief pleasure. Colleagues at King’s wondered how he was able to sustain such a pitch of scholarly industry while hosting convivial gatherings in his rooms almost every evening. There was no romance. James was attracted to men, or at least loved them, but that’s as far as it went. As Jones writes, “If he had an inner life at all (and I have sometimes wondered), it stayed resolutely inner.”

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Inner lives are all very well, though they are rarely of interest to a stranger. It is the work that matters, and James’s stories still tick today. The world, always weird, is getting weirder. Familiar shapes dissolve, lights flicker, your cup isn’t quite where you set it down. Millionaires are pumping themselves full of their own children’s blood, vulnerable adults are falling in love with computer programs and drinkers are queueing in pubs. The life James knew is definitively gone, remote as Elmet, but that doesn’t matter to the stories. James’s strength lay in his ability to articulate weirdness and, occasionally, give a sense of how it might be weathered.

You don’t have to be conservative to write good ghost stories, but it probably helps. Most supernatural tales are about what happens when a debt goes unpaid, or a life is taken, or an ancient boundary marker moved. So much supernatural fiction hinges on an awareness of how fragile our little world of custom and convention really is. James was certainly a man of conservative instincts. As his choice of academic specialism suggests, he disliked abstraction, preferring the solid realities of manuscripts to grand theorizing. He was part of the 1897 campaign that prevented women from taking degrees at Cambridge, though it is only fair to note that his stance on that issue was not an unusual one for the time. Even his approach to stained glass was marked by a suspicion of change: he hated the thought of restoration; once a thing was gone, it was gone forever, and there was no point pretending otherwise. Jones observes that “the ghost story is a characteristic product of nineteenth-century forces. It is a reaction to the secular, materialist, industrial modernity that animated the dominant, progressivist Victorian utilitarian ideology.” It was the natural genre for a man like James.

Some biographers have a tendency to patronize their subjects, to strain a writer’s work through the DSM 5 and see what sticks. Jones is too good to fall for this guff, simply observing that James’s tales return to similar themes again and again. A horror of hair — luxuriant, invasive — is one such motif. Bedrooms are dangerous places, as are antiquarian booksellers and libraries. Curtains, bedsheets and other household objects are usually worth a second glance, just to be sure that they aren’t something more. But James’ great theme is that of curiosity punished.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” is perhaps his most famous story, in part due to the extraordinary 1968 television adaptation, which ranks among the best dramas the BBC has ever made. It goes like this. A Cambridge don travels to East Anglia for a golfing holiday. Naturally, he can’t stick to golf. Some amateur excavation in a ruined preceptory uncovers an ancient whistle engraved with Latin text. He takes it back to his hotel. Late that night, with supper over and the bedroom quiet about him, he picks the whistle up and blows.

That’s enough plot. Anyone unfamiliar with the story should discover the rest for themselves. Suffice to say that “Oh, Whistle…” deals with many of James’s deepest preoccupations. The don, disdainful of anything that smacks of the supernatural, is saved by another hotel guest, a retired colonel whose muscular Anglicanism and intellectual humility prove much more valuable than any amount of book-learnt skepticism. England’s countryside — Jones notes that James has been unfairly overlooked as a landscape writer — is alive and old. At one moment, the world is reduced to bands of black and grey, a cell of groynes and shingle and graphite sea. Above all, there is the warning to the curious. Do not interfere with things that you cannot understand. They are more than capable of interfering with you in turn.

It isn’t all doom and groyne. James blended the truly unnerving with moments of coziness and comedy. This is because most of his stories were not written for magazines. They were performance pieces, delivered at Christmastime to an audience in his rooms at King’s. Wry asides about donnish peccadillos were designed to elicit chuckles of recognition. James had a reputation as a mimic, and so most of his tales include a Worthy Cockney or Knowing Rustic, their over-long contributions a vehicle for the author’s talents. While James is worth reading and rereading, I sometimes wonder if it isn’t better to listen to his work instead. After all, these stories were meant to be heard, not read. How strange that a writer so mistrustful of innovation should prove such a natural fit for the audiobook.

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James doesn’t seem to have taken his ghost stories particularly seriously. They were an amusement, both to write and to perform. His main work was scholarly. Later, he found himself vice chancellor of Cambridge during the Great War, and was consumed by the construction of temporary hospitals and the settling of Belgian refugees. Perhaps this is part of his tales’ enduring appeal. They were not labored over. While Dahl struggled his whole life to write just one decent ghost story, James would appear before his audience with ink still wet on the page. When a story didn’t come off, he simply abandoned it and moved on to the next.

In 1931, James was asked to write a preface for his Collected Ghost Stories. The task clearly irritated him: “In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover…” Today’s fashion is to state why an author is worth reading now. It is no longer sufficient to say, “because they are a very good writer.” For reasons that do not seem clear to anyone in the publishing industry, an argument must be made for tongue-blistering relevance. This is how we end up with front covers claiming that a particular subspecies of mollusc “Made the Modern World”.

Thankfully, Jones has been allowed to write a very good book about a very interesting man. M. R. James, you will be relieved to hear, did not Make the Modern World. In fact, he did everything he could within his small sphere to keep it at bay. His relevance is linked purely to a chain of excellent supernatural yarns that have entertained and chilled readers for over a century. He influenced many other writers of the uncanny too, from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson to Susan Hill. Yet I happen to think that his tales still are worth reading now. Because they are very good, yes, but also because they are weird stories for weird times. They ask sensible questions. Does that mound need to be dug up? That whistle blown? There’s some excellent advice for daily life in there, too: “Be careful how you handle the packet you pick up in the carriage-drive, particularly if it contains nail-parings and hair. Do not, in any case, bring it into the house. It may not be alone…”

At first, Seymour wondered whether anyone would reply to his invitation. He needn’t have worried. “Within a fortnight I had sufficient material to make a book,” he recalled later; “within a month I had so much material that I could pick and choose.” Seymour’s True Irish Ghost Stories was published the following year. Reading the book on the last train home, my face doubling in the window during the black interludes between stations, I wondered what a more modest appeal for Irish ghost stories would produce today. So I began to ask around.

Claire, one of the people I heard from, used to work in the Old Library at Queen’s University Belfast. One evening, not long before closing time, a man strolled in through the door. Normally Claire would approach latecomers to remind them that the library would soon shut. But on this occasion, she decided to leave well alone. “I made a snap judgment”, she says, “that there was something a bit off about him, and actually I didn’t want to speak with him unless I had to”. He was dressed in an antiquated fawn raincoat, and there was something strange about the way he moved through the old building, first built in 1868 and subject to many changes since. “His path through the library,” Claire says, “just seemed somehow out of line with the entrances and archways.”

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He walked deeper into the library, towards an area dedicated to reference works, and disappeared from view. When the time came to close up, Claire realized that she hadn’t seen the man leave. Not wanting to lock him in for the night, she went looking for him in the reference section. He was nowhere to be found. She thought little of it at the time, despite his unsettling demeanor. He must have left without her noticing. It was only years later that she discovered two things. First, that a student once claimed to have seen a man walk through the wall of the reference section. Second, “there used to be an exit in that area, that had later been blocked off. It was behind the wall.”

A ghost in the workplace is unnerving enough. But while haunted libraries can be avoided if need be, there is no avoiding your own home — a place where, as Seymour noted, the “poor human being is placed at such a disadvantage”. Orla, another contributor, was three years old when she saw a ghost at her house in Portstewart. She doesn’t remember the experience herself, but the story has entered family legend. “My grandfather had died the week before,” she tells me. “Apparently I was looking out through the door into the hallway and saying ‘Poppa, Poppa, I want to see Poppa’.” Orla’s mother said that there was no one there. Orla insisted that there was. “My mother was genuinely spooked, I think because I was so earnest about it,” Orla recalls. “Things like that are scary enough to experience yourself, but it’s worse to see it through the eyes of your child.”

Seymour didn’t believe that Ireland was any more haunted than other parts of the world. Nor did he think that the Irish were any more given to superstition than the average Englishman. He did, however, suspect that religion had a role to play. As an Anglican cleric, he wondered whether Irish Catholicism had incorporated “certain elements which may be traced back to pre-Christian times” — resulting in a more richly supernatural cultural lexicon. This is rather amusing coming from a man who had written a book about witches and subsequently spent a year eagerly collecting ghost stories for publication, especially since a great many of his respondents were Protestants themselves.

Nevertheless, it’s certainly true that Ireland can draw on a wealth of ancient ghostly lore. One of the earliest Irish ghost stories appears in the Ulster Cycle, a series of linked epic tales preserved in medieval manuscripts, but certainly much older. The Adventures of Nera takes place on Samhain night, at the court of Queen Medb at Raíth Cruachan. When Nera is challenged to tie a supple twig around the ankle of a hanged man, the swinging corpse offers him helpful advice on how best to secure the binding. He then demands a drink, and Nera carries him from house to house until something is found to quench the cadaver’s thirst. Things go downhill from there, as Nera is subjected to horrifying visions of destruction and eventually finds himself in the Otherworld. This is a truly Irish tale, born of the island’s ancient literature. The complex of archaeological sites associated with Cruachan still lie in County Roscommon today, as does the so-called “Cave of Cats”  — a granite opening said to be one of the entrances to the Otherworld.

Other phantasmagorical traditions have emerged over the years. There’s an entire scholarly industry devoted to what you might call the “Irish Protestant weird”, exemplified in the fiction of Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell. And, of course, each townland will have its own stories, its own reservations about certain lanes or bridges after night has fallen.

If I have a misgiving about Seymour’s book, it’s that his tales don’t reflect the depth and complexity of Ireland’s ghostly cultures, whose antiquity and energetic cross-pollination resist summary. For the most part, they are ghost stories that happen in Ireland, not Irish ghost stories. You could transpose them to Caithness or Norfolk without losing much. This may have something to do with his method of collection. Ask the readers of The Irish Times for paranormal experiences and you are going to receive answers from a very particular stratum of society.

Yet there are certain threads that feel quite specific to Ireland, chiefly the matter-of-fact way in which the supernatural is discussed. So, when a visiting Major is shoved awake in the middle of the night and grasps a human hand, “warm, plump, and soft”, the servants inform him that this is merely old Aunt Betty, 50 years in the grave. And when a squireen is driven from his new country pile by phantom knocks at the front door, a local herdsman says not to worry — it’s just the specter of a former resident. Yes, it’s a bit of a nuisance, but the knocking will stop in time. If Seymour’s tales seem a bit dated, then consider the 2015 case of Jack McKee. A councilor in Larne, McKee objected to the installation of a plaque in memory of eight women and one man who were pilloried and jailed as witches in 1711. His grounds for complaint were simple: he “could not tell whether or not the women were rightly or wrongly convicted”.

Orla agrees there’s a frankness about ghostly matters in Ireland. Recently, sitting with her boyfriend’s family, she realized that everyone had a tale to tell, including one alarming experience of a headless rider on the Donegal backroads. When I ask whether she thinks that Ireland is a more haunted place than England, a country with its own proud ghostly traditions, she doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely. 100%. Perhaps because a lot of bad things happened here. Or whether we’re just more likely to take this stuff seriously… But it’s not a reach to say this is a much ghostlier country [than England]. There’s definitely truth in that.”

Naturally, Ireland has always had its skeptics too. A flick through the August 1812 edition of the Belfast Monthly Magazine uncovers a pseudonymous piece entitled “On Ghosts”. The author wonders why, given the marvelous advances of the age, so “many remnants of superstition still linger amongst us”. He concludes that stories learned in childhood are chiefly to blame, and admits that “in spite of skepticism, I am rather afraid to remain in a room without light, which I ascribe to the numerous hobgoblin stories I heard in infancy”. Even William Carleton, the great 19th-century collector of Irish folk tales, warned against “the popular nonsense of ghosts”. This would be a more forceful statement if it did not come at the end of “The Fate of Frank M’Kenna”, in which Carleton breathlessly relates the tale of a ghost who insists on the charitable donation of his best breeches.

Still, even those who are unconvinced by ghostly phenomena can have uncanny things happen to them. At the age of seven, Stephen attended a family wedding at Glenavna House Hotel in Whiteabbey, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where he and his cousin spent the day playing in the grounds. “We were just running about, and the two of us saw…” He pauses for a slightly embarrassed laugh and continues: “When we saw what we immediately went and told people was a ghost of a young woman wearing blue.” She was moving through the trees. And then she wasn’t. Gone. “We both saw this independently. And it wasn’t as if either of us were prone to making shit up, basically. But whatever we saw, we saw something.”

Stephen doesn’t believe he saw a ghost that day, merely describing the experience, and what followed, as “a deeply weird coincidence.” Weird enough to remember — and weird enough to bear repeating long after that afternoon in Whiteabbey. Because, as with Claire, the conclusion came some time afterwards: “It must have been 15 years later that I found out about a particularly grisly murder that happened there, almost in the exact spot that we supposedly saw whatever we saw.”

Like Orla, Stephen thinks there’s something about Ireland. A small tremble where there should be stillness. In part, he attributes this to both geography and history, an island at the end of Europe that has seen centuries of turmoil. “The wound of the famine is surely in a collective residual memory in one way or another,” he says. “I can’t imagine that there isn’t something that’s left after that. So I think that there’s not a lot of…” He pauses, hunts for words. “English rationality kind of doesn’t exist in the same way.” He finishes with another laugh.

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I’m not sure I believe in English rationality — the oeuvre of M.R. James is dedicated to the slow sanding away of that particular veneer — but I take Stephen’s point. It seems to me that ghost stories are a good way of metabolizing time, change and pain. They may not be believed by the listener, or even by the teller. When Claire, Orla and Stephen speak to me, they all give caveats of one sort or another. None are convinced that they saw a ghost. And yet the unsettling moment is remembered. The story is told.

“On November eve,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “the dead are abroad, and dance with the fairies.” Halloween or Samhain, whichever you prefer, is a time for uncanny tales. Most of all, a time for tales that encourage us to pay attention. Stephen likens ghost stories to old customs around fairy thorns. “You don’t cut down hawthorn trees,” he says. “They serve a purpose in the places that they are. I’d wonder if seemingly irrational explanations for things are actually the result of however many hundreds of generations of received wisdom.” Perhaps strange stories and traditions, whether Irish or English, have this in common: they invite us to take care. To pay close attention to the world around us. They remind us of doors, long bricked-up, waiting patiently behind the wall.

We were in the belly of a Forties-era warship, USS Salem, nicknamed the “Sea Witch”. I had splashed out $53 to see a well-known ghost-hunting group, the Greater Boston Paranormal Associates, in action.

When the time came to initiate contact with the spirits of deceased sailors, we were herded through dark corridors towards the rear of the ship. GBPA cofounder Don DeCristofaro, who had a bushy white beard and walked with a limp, supervised as Lou and the others set up their numerous ghost-hunting gadgets — K2 meters, Paralights, a Static Dome, a cylindrical Rem Pod.

Don and Lou stood in the center of the room.

“Is there anyone here with us?” asked Don.

There was a pregnant pause. Then one of the devices exploded into a spectacular light show, cycling through a quick pattern of red, blue, and green, indicating different electromagnetic frequencies — and therefore, according to the modern ghost-hunting canon, the presence of a ghost.

“Is that you, Chief?” asked Don. Again, the device responded with a light show.

Beeeeeyeeeep.

This was my introduction to the world of paratourism — once, a fringe scene; now, a highly commercialized industry. Before TV shows popularized ghost hunting, the money was negligible. But things have changed, and quickly, according to Amelia Childs Schwartzman, who used to run a haunted vegan crepe restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts. (By which I mean the restaurant was haunted. The crepes were fine.) The ghost-hunting landscape is highly competitive, she tells me, with authors, TikTok influencers, tour hosts, hoteliers, and barkeepers all trying to build their audiences. “There’s a lot of ego involved. You want to be billed as a big name.”

“It’s not just something stoners in high school would do, breaking into an abandoned building to try to find a ghost,” Childs Schwartzman adds. “There’s high end, specialized equipment. The financial cost can get really high. You get really into it.”

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No one knows the true worth of the entire paranormal industry — mediums, ghost-hunting gadgets, books and all — though some suggest it’s a multibillion-dollar enterprise in America alone. What we do know is that tens of millions of Americans spend more than $300 million annually to visit haunted sites. There’s currently a waiting list for people to pay $380 to visit Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden murdered her parents with an axe in 1892. Tourists can even sleep in her room. “The money behind ghost hunting is growing,” explains Dr Michele Hanks, a New York University anthropologist.

In a vast unregulated landscape, any ghost-hunting yahoo can claim that a site is haunted, which means it’s a great money-spinner for struggling towns. Civic leaders in Waco, Texas, crafted an economic development plan to breathe new life into a sagging neighborhood. The centerpiece of the plan was turning an old bottling plant into the Dr Pepper Museum, which would allow visitors to interact with the spirits of bottlers past. And soon enough, to boost its value, it declared itself officially haunted.

But there’s a dark side: not the ghouls, but the sensationalism of local history. One particularly troubling example of this can be found in the former slaver states of the American South, where financially struggling plantations increasingly rely on funds from ghost tours. In order to attract tourists, the plantations spin lurid tales that hinge on the misery of enslaved people. However, as MacArthur Fellow Tiya Miles found in researching her book, Tales from the Haunted South, many of the stories told are either grossly inaccurate, or wholly made up, often portraying the slave owners in far too sympathetic a light. In thousands of tourist spots all over America, history is being rewritten — for profit.

Yet for many, ghosts are more than just valuable assets. Surveys suggest that nearly two thirds of Americans hold supernatural beliefs, and my fellow tourists on the USS Salem seemed to run the gamut, ranging from the secretly skeptical, to the open-minded and curious, to the heavily attuned. I overheard one young woman talking to her boyfriend about a tightness in her chest. “I love this stuff, but at the same time, sometimes I hate what it does to me,” she told him. I struck up a conversation with her. She was 22, and had been in a nine-year relationship with a child ghost who was perpetually five years old. She told me that her boyfriend was fine with her spiritual sensitivity. “He knew that I could see dead people when we started going out, and he said it didn’t matter.” Her boyfriend didn’t respond.

Then there were the ghost-hunters themselves, members of the GBPA, who I became convinced were acting in good faith. When it came to interacting with the spirits aboard the ship — a soap-opera-style conversation about which spirit had previously scratched Zach, a young paratourist — things were too disorganized and too spontaneous to be carefully choreographed. If they were playacting, it was world class.

Besides, the rise of paratourism is part of a wider nationwide trend. Homegrown experts in ghost hunting and other paranormal pursuits — mediums, energy healers, cryptozoologists and UFOlogists, among others — have attained new levels of prominence and power in the United States over the last 20 years, buoyed by a surge in public interest in supernatural phenomena.

There are several reasons for this development. The emergence of bias-affirming digital information bubbles is one; another is the rise of political instability. The annual Chapman University survey of American fears found that paranormal beliefs of all sorts spiked in the years following Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Between 2016 and 2018, Americans became approximately 10 percentage points more likely to believe that aliens have visited the Earth in modern times; 7 percentage points more likely to believe in Bigfoot; and 11 percentage points more likely to believe in haunted houses. Christopher Bader, the author of the study, put this down to a shift in the nature of trust, with faith in individual experience replacing faith in institutions.

This heralds a dramatic sea change in the way Americans think about traditional power structures. Already distrust is corroding institutions: the underutilization of science-based medicine in America’s rural areas, for instance, contributed to the closure of 136 hospitals between 2010 and 2021. And a devaluing of higher education has contributed to the closure of thousands of campuses. Now, a distrustful public has re-elected Donald Trump, a man who in 2017 attempted to appoint a ghost hunter as a federal judge. The President has since escalated his war on science and expertise by pledging a wholesale dismantling of government agencies, as well as academic and science research institutions and journals. He has purged scientists from the Federal payroll, cut the budgets of science-directed agencies, and throttled the funding from vital research projects. And he’s being cheered on by Americans who have completely rejected the value of science and see Trump as the heroic disruptor of a corrupt system.

The role that the paranormal plays in this is under-appreciated. Those who believe they have encountered a spirit are faced with a mystery: why does the scientific establishment dismiss the existence of something that seems self-evident to a majority of Americans? The common assumption is that science is either a poor tool to understand the universe, or that mainstream scientists are engaged in a massive cover-up. This sets the stage for various conspiracy theories; one poll showed that the percentage of New Hampshire residents who trust the Federal government is slightly less than the percentage of Americans who think their government is run by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

The danger is that American institutions cannot survive this era of widespread disbelief. They’ve kicked too many people out of the tent. And they can’t simply debunk their way out of this crisis. Unless they take imaginative steps to rebuild public trust, science may become just another disembodied voice haunting the minds of a credulous public.

***

This is an edited excerpt from Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s latest book, The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science.