Christmas ghost stories

One of the ways people used to spend time during the holidays was to tell ghost stories. (As near as I can tell, this seems to have been primarily a Victorian British custom - both because they seem to have been mad for ghost stories, but also because the magazines published at that time always had "Christmas numbers" and always ran short stories). Telling stories - except perhaps to small children - seems to be, if not exactly a lost art, one that's not widely practiced any more.

I have a couple books of ghost stories, including a nice Folio Press volume that's specifically Christmas ghost stories. Some of them are sad, some of them are kind of scary, some are comic (Joan Aiken's "Sonata for Bicycle and Harp").

One of my favorites, though, is a fairly recent (well, published in my lifetime, I count that as "recent" for a ghost story) is called "Saviourgate" by Russell Kirk. It's kind of hard to classify the story (some of Kirk's work is considered science fiction; I suppose in a way ghost stories have some science-fiction elements). But it also makes what I might call a theological point. I can't really say too much without spoiling the plot - though I think most astute readers will figure it out a few pages in -But I'm going to put the rest of this behind a jump. (I hope this works):

In Saviourgate, the "doomed man" (we later learn he's planning on killing himself: a number of pills are stashed in his luggage - he has traveled down to London to try to make one last desperate deal, in the hopes of saving his family from financial ruin, but he feels it's hopeless. He gets lost, winds up in a strange, archaic-feeling neighborhood. He's racked with coughing and cannot go on - so he stumbles into a small old hotel called "The Crosskeys." There, he's welcomed by Bain, who seems to be an old friend of his, sat down, given a whisky. He notices his cough has gone....but then he begins to notice surpassingly strange things - Bain has not aged from a 1939 photograph (and this is some, much later, date). The newspapers - which are hung on those old sticks that newspapers used to be hung on - date from 1939. He begins to wonder if he's gone mad, or if an elaborate joke is being played on him.

Finally, Bain begins to explain: they are in an Afterlife. Bain, at least, is actually dead - he died defending a woman he loved from a brute. The protagonist of the story may or may not be dead - he is apparently in some liminal state and can choose to go back to the world of what-we-call the living. But Bain describes the Afterlife as another life, a better life:

“We’re not dead, none of us.  We’ve come fully alive.  And we’re not locked up here; it just that we’ve chosen, or fallen into, this one timeless moment.  It’s a good particular timeless moment, isn’t it?” The idea is, the Afterlife, or Heaven, or whatever you want to call it, is made up of being able to go back and re-experience, as much as you like, all the good and joyful and pleasant moments of your life - your wedding day, or a good day out walking on the moors, or a pleasant conversation by the fire. And apparently, these re-experienced moments are not just slavish re-creations of past times, but they are NEW experiences - new conversations, new walks - but with the same sense of joy. Anyone you loved during your life, provided they have made it to Heaven, you can spend time with them.

(I admit that made me well up a bit, thinking of things like being able to bake cookies with my grandmother or have a conversation with Dorothy again...)

You don't get the chance to experience things or times or people you didn't know in your life - so there would be no being able to shake J.S. Bach's (incorporeal) hand, but if it were as Kirk described it, it would probably be OK.

In Kirk's imagining, there is a Hell - Canon Hoodman describes it:: “The damned, as I understand it, have no past and no future; no memories, no expectations.”  The evil exists only in themselves, trapped in their own subjective miseries." Ugh. That does seem like quite a Hell...think of all the times you laid in bed and thought over some wrong thing you said, or recollecting mistakes or awkwardnesses or times when you did not do what you really should have done, or when you did something that was cruel...having to face that for an eternity would indeed be a Hell. (Apparently, in Heaven, all those times are either forgotten, or they no longer matter.)

Interestingly, doing a bit of background looking-up on this, I find that Kirk is an American and is better known as a conservative political thinker. While I wouldn't immediately have guessed that from his story (and if you're not conservative in your views, don't necessarily let that put you off reading the story), it doesn't seem totally surprising. (His religious views seem pretty traditional, if his portrayal of Heaven is not exactly so). 

At the end of the story, the protagonist is given the choice - take a bed in Crosskeys and stay in the afterlife forever, from that moment on - or go back out into the world of what-we-call the living, and keep fighting. He decides to keep fighting, and what's more - he's given the strength to go on. You know as the story ends that those capsules he was planning to take to end his life will not be used, that he will keep trying, largely for the sake of his family. 

It's not a ghost story in the traditional sense, in that it's not scary - not even really sad. But there's a bittersweet quality to it, and I also found it very interesting.

Spoiler ends here.