Why do we love ghost stories of rattling bones, icy hands and sheer terror, asks Anna Carey
ICY FINGERS on the back of the neck, mysterious scratching sounds at the door, the sound of tapping at the second-storey window . . . There’s no better time to be wilfully terrified than Halloween, and no better way to do it than by gathering together some kindred spirits and telling ghost stories.
So if you want to tell some tales and scare your friends and family, what’s the best way to set the scene? These days, Halloween seems to involve as much elaborate decoration as Christmas. But you don’t need paper skeletons or orange fairy lights to create the right atmosphere for a ghost story session.
“You just need a little bit of light,” says storyteller Niall de Burca, who has told tales all over the world to audiences of all ages. “A little bit of light makes for a whole lot of shadow, and that shadow makes the things that lurk in the dark loom large in our imagination.” Human beings have been sitting around a flickering fire and listening to stories for millennia.
"Ghost stories go into our collective fears of the thing that lurks beyond the firelight, beyond the palisade," says de Burca. "And you make sure you're in an environment where everyone can listen. You don't want any interference – except maybe an open window with a blind rattling away!" There's something special about gathering together and being scared, en masse. Of course, we can all read ghost stories on our own, and doing so brings its own distinctive brand of unease (even going to bed feels scary after reading MR James's brilliant Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad, which turns the humble bed sheet into an object of terror).
But enjoying a scary story together makes people feel less alone. “When you’re in the middle of a good, delicious spooky story, a rip snorter of a hair-raiser, there’s a palpable sense of people coming closer together,” says de Burca.
“Everyone in the audience is in the same place, with the hair standing up on the back of the neck – and when you feel like that you want to be with other people. You’re never more together than when you’re most terrified by a story.”
In real life, of course, there’s nothing fun about being terrified, together or alone. So why do we enjoy being scared by ghost stories? Perhaps it’s because they allow us to face our fears – of death, of the unknown, of the dark – safe in the knowledge that nothing has really happened. “We can role-play those dreadful fears – they can be played out in safety, in the narrative,” says de Burca.
“It’s a great dance with the audience – they know the jump or the knock at the door is going to come.” We get the adrenalin rush without the real danger.
Traditional storytellers make up their own ghost stories, or draw on old local tales. But if you’re neither creative nor lucky enough to have been passed down an ancient legend, you can turn to someone else’s words.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of classics. The 19th century saw a boom in literary ghost stories, and since then, everyone from Dickens and Henry James to Sarah Waters and AS Byatt has turned their hand to tales of things that go bump in the night.
And while the Victorian era was a great time for the genre, ghost stories don’t have to be set in the days of candlelight. Storytellers have adapted the archetypes – the ghostly carriage, warnings of death – to their own age.
Elizabeth Bowen's most chilling ghost story, The Demon Lover,turns an ordinary London taxi into a vehicle of doom, and one of Niall de Burca's most popular stories is the tale of a banshee set during the boom years.
“It never ceases to amaze me that I can tell a tale about a banshee set in an age like this and the response is exactly the same,” he says. “The same things still scare us.”
Niall de Burca will be telling stories on Halloween at Airfield House, Dundrum, Dublin 14. See storyteller.ie or tel: 01-2984301
How to tell a great ghost story
Set the sceneDim the lights and play some spooky music (Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountainis good) to drown out external noise.
Make sure you know exactly what you're going to say.The atmosphere will be ruined if, at the terrifying climax, you realise you've forgotten to mention a crucial element.
Don't be afraid to read a classic tale. WW Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw, the story of three wishes going horribly wrong, is still deliciously unsettling, a century after it was written.
Get an accomplice to lurk unseen in the shadows to provide some sound effects– just a simple knock on the door at the right moment will be enough.
