The great writer of ghost stories, M.R. James, often spun his tales of phantoms and ghouls around inanimate objects. Sometimes it was a relict that an unwitting person dug up and took back to their hotel room. Sometimes it was a book that had a life of its own.

I only have vague memories of my father’s father. My father was the youngest in his family by quite a few years, so his father would have been old when I was a child. Although I struggle to recall him, I do remember him sitting in a chair by a glass fronted bookcase.

I guess my inheritance from him came from that bookcase. It consists of four books, all signed by him. They are an eclectic combination. An account of the ascent of Everest. A book about the archaeology of Yorkshire. A copy of Gilbert White’s ‘The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne’; and a beautiful leather-bound collection of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories compiled from original copies of the Strand Magazine.

I read the Sherlock Holmes stories as a teenager and treasured that they were from the late 19th century Strand Magazine carefully brought together and bound. Later in life I had vivid dreams about the book in which it took on an exaggerated importance. All my possessions were left behind when I escaped my marriage well over a decade ago now, and I didn’t get them back until several years and a court case later. 

In my dreams I fretted about that book. That I had lost it, someone else had taken it, that it had got damp and mouldy. Now that I have my own house deep in the Yorkshire Dales, I feel a sense of security and comfort that it is on the bookshelf next to my fireside chair, together with a set of Strand magazines from the era that I recently found in a second hand bookshop.

Now that I’m slowly unpicking the entanglements of my relationship with my father, trying to move to a place where I can let go and ease out from underneath the hold he had on me, I can step back and find it curious as to how and why this book has featured so prominently in my subconscious. Does it represent the ghost of my grandfather in the way that a book can hold spirits in an H.R. James story?

A twist to the tale was added recently when a cousin from Australia came to visit. Some of my father’s elder siblings migrated to Australia from Yorkshire in the 1950s and I have a lot of relatives there, about whom I know very little. This was my cousin’s first return to England since their parents had left and they wanted to connect with places they’d heard about.

I showed my cousin the leather-bound Sherlock Holmes book with my grandfather’s signature. They told me, “You might not know, but he wasn’t a very nice man”. Which might explain a lot.

Do you have objects that contain their own stories? Perhaps they are just memories when you hold the object, or perhaps the stories are revealed in dreams.

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member

In case you’d like to venture into the supernatural, here’s a list of H.R. James’s ghost stories with links to the plots of each of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Ghost_Stories_of_M._R._James