When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus

From Dry Salvages by T S Eliot

For sure we know what a haunted house ought to look like. It is old and rather neglected, and it stands at the end of a drive behind overgrown trees. It’s at least a hundred years old, and even if it isn’t it’s built on another house that was. There may be a locked room, a family portrait, or some event in its past which the inhabitants choose not to discuss. The house has accumulated history, and the ghost is a consequence of that accumulation: something happened here, and the place has not forgotten. There has been a sin, and that sin will let the monster in. I love them, haunted houses, yet there is another kind of place I love too.

Some of the most unsettling supernatural fiction is set in surroundings that seem the opposite of the ancestral home. A railway waiting room, a hotel corridor or an anonymous boarding house has none of the grandeur or the obvious associations of the Gothic setting.

What makes such places frightening is that they are inhabited by transient souls. They are designed for temporary occupation, and we pass through them, perhaps for a few hours or a single night, without expecting to become part of their histories or expecting their histories to become part of us. Mostly, of course, they don’t, since if such places haunted everyone who passed through them they would not be so very scary.

But there we are, a guest, and voices are heard through thin walls, and snatches of conversation are caught in the corridor (“die falsche Tür”). It is worst when the place is not busy (Charnock Richard at two in the morning, and foggy), and worse again when you only glimpse your fellow travellers and never see them clearly. They may be clearly there, but you never take the time, or are perhaps not brave enough, to clearly look.

The Places Between Places

In 1992 the French anthropologist Marc Augé published Non-Lieux, translated into English as Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Augé was interested in the environments created by modern life, among them airports, motorways, supermarkets and hotel chains, which are designed for movement, commerce and temporary occupation. A village square, an old street or a family home acquires meaning through the relationships and events associated with it, whereas a non-place is experienced mainly through its function. We use it to travel, to buy something, to spend a single night and never return.

Consider the experience of staying in a modern hotel. You are assigned a room number, issued with a key card that may work, and directed along a corridor. Your relationship with the building is temporary and contractual, and the receptionist need know little about you beyond your name and booking details. The room could be in Manchester, Paris or Singapore and would look much the same in any of them. Such places have histories of their own, since a railway station may have witnessed a century of departures, reunions, accidents and private tragedies, and they have staff who go there day after day. But we don’t. We are merely transients, who may as well be merely ghosts.

Such places haunt me. I remember a quiet Communist Era hotel in Budapest. The room hadn’t been used in days, it seemed. Up on the fifth or sixth floor, sun came in through a window that wouldn’t open. No one was in the neighbouring rooms. I did not see or hear a soul. I was on my own. I never went back. I couldn’t find that hotel now, even if I looked.

Most of us meet these places as somewhere to change trains, refuel, have a coffee and move on, and the accumulated experience of the building passes unnoticed. You may never speak to anyone, and you will probably never tell them your name even if you did comment on the weather, the sandwich or the petrol prices. There is something reassuring in this anonymity, but it may also produce a faint unease, because away from home many of the relationships and routines through which we understand ourselves have temporarily fallen away. We become strangers occupying somebody else’s space, and the peculiar intimacy of a hotel room does little to disguise the fact that it is not our own.

The Stranger at the Threshold

Another anthropologist, Victor Turner, approached a related idea through his study of ritual and social transformation. Building on Arnold van Gennep’s work on rites of passage, he developed the concept of liminality, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. During a rite of passage a person has left one social condition without yet entering another, and Turner described the initiate as betwixt and between, no longer what they were and not yet what they will become. A passenger changing trains is not undergoing a ritual initiation, and an airport lounge is not the threshold experienced by a participant in a traditional rite. Turner’s work nonetheless offers a useful way of thinking about the moments when ordinary life is interrupted and we find ourselves outside our familiar arrangements.

When we travel we leave home, entrust ourselves to strangers and enter places governed by rules that are not entirely our own. We do so with confidence because we expect the interruption to be brief: the train will arrive, the hotel will provide a room, and tomorrow we shall continue our journey. The supernatural imagination begins where that confidence fails, and it asks what happens when the passage leads nowhere, or when the temporary arrangement becomes something from which we cannot escape.

Waiting at Crewe

Walter de la Mare’s Crewe, published in 1926, offers a particularly fine example. The setting is hardly Gothic, for we find ourselves in the first-class waiting room of Crewe railway station, where a stranger named Blake begins to tell a disturbing story involving greed, guilt, a will and a sinister scarecrow. Very little happens in the waiting room itself, and the drama unfolds almost entirely through Blake’s peculiar and obsessive narration. A railway station ought to be a place of movement, where people arrive, wait for their connections and depart, yet de la Mare creates an atmosphere of stagnation in which ordinary time seems to have been suspended. Blake cannot move forward. He circles his story and returns repeatedly to events whose consequences he cannot escape, so that the waiting room comes to resemble a kind of secular purgatory.

The strange events Blake describes did not originate in the railway station; he has brought their history with him. This makes the anonymity of the setting especially interesting. The stranger in the waiting room is someone Blake can address without the obligations of his ordinary social relationships, and perhaps the very impersonality of their meeting allows him to speak so freely. We have all known the intimacy that sometimes develops between strangers who are travelling together, when someone will disclose to a fellow passenger what they would hesitate to tell a neighbour, because they are unlikely ever to meet again. In Crewe that freedom turns oppressive. Blake’s story takes possession of the encounter, and the listener finds himself caught in another man’s private history. The station needs no terrible secret of its own, since it becomes uncanny through the presence of a traveller who has carried something unresolved into it. The railway promises movement, and Blake’s story concerns an inability to escape.

The Dead Man on the Train

The railway was already providing ghost-story writers with opportunities in the Victorian period. Amelia B. Edwards’s The Four-Fifteen Express, published in 1866, places its supernatural encounter inside a railway compartment. The narrator, William Langford, meets John Dwerrihouse, a railway official whom he already knows. The meeting is ordinary enough to excite no immediate suspicion, although Langford afterwards discovers that it cannot be reconciled with what other people know of Dwerrihouse’s fate. Blake tells his story to a stranger, whereas Langford believes he knows the man sitting opposite him.

The railway setting is essential to the effect. The railway belongs to the modern world of timetables, tickets, commercial transactions and precise destinations, and it is a system designed to make movement predictable. Within this orderly machinery the impossible has taken a seat opposite an unsuspecting traveller. Edwards handles the contradiction with some ingenuity. She uses the organisation of railway travel to investigate the mystery, so that the guard’s testimony, the timing of the journey and the details of the route become evidence. The dead man has entered a world of schedules and procedures that cannot account for him, and although the story eventually uncovers a crime and its consequences, the extraordinary fact of the encounter remains unexplained. The train completes its journey, and the mystery of the passenger survives it.

Hospitality Without Reassurance

Hotels and boarding houses offer another variation on this uncertainty. In Robert Aickman’s The Hospice, a traveller looking for somewhere to spend the night finds himself in an establishment governed by peculiar customs and expectations. Hospitality, which ought to offer reassurance, becomes increasingly oppressive, and the guest discovers that he does not understand the rules of the place or even the nature of his predicament. Aickman’s genius lies partly in his ability to make ordinary social arrangements feel inexplicably threatening, so that meals, sleeping arrangements and the behaviour of fellow guests take on the quality of obscure rituals. The traveller has given up the familiar authority he holds in his own home and must accept the conditions imposed by strangers.

Unlike Crewe or The Four-Fifteen Express, this is not chiefly a story in which an unresolved past breaks into an otherwise ordinary journey. The anxiety arises from the present situation itself. The traveller has entered somewhere that appears to offer the customary arrangements of accommodation, and those arrangements no longer behave as expected. Aickman seldom provides the reassurance of a fully explained supernatural mechanism, and we cannot always tell whether a character has encountered another world, misunderstood the ordinary one, or become subject to rules whose meaning remains concealed. In a conventional hotel we understand the essential bargain: we arrive, occupy a room, pay our bill and depart. Aickman makes even that modest expectation uncertain, and the temporary lodging ceases to feel temporary as the familiar rituals of hospitality develop an almost unbearable strangeness.

The key thing for me is that in these liminal spaces we are outside our normal lives. We meet people we will never meet again, or glimpse them once and never see them clearly, and we do not know what they will do. They make us uneasy because we cannot predict what they will do, only hope they adhere to rules of common, respectful anonymity.

And if harm should come to us in such a place, what help will come? Who there loves us and will run to our aid? This is the germ of the terror here, in this story, I think. No one knows where you are, and no one is coming to help you.

The Ghosts of Nowhere

Perhaps this is why places of transit and temporary accommodation have proved so attractive to supernatural writers. In the old haunted house the past belongs to the building, and we enter knowing, or at least suspecting, that something has happened there. It is a question of a sin that someone, perhaps we ourselves, has committed and that must be expiated. The railway station and the hotel make no such announcement. They promise only a brief interruption to our lives, and yet the haunting works just as well, and perhaps better, when they have been closed down.

In 1979 Sapphire & Steel sent its two operatives to Dewerton Station in the second of their assignments. Dewerton is a platform from which nobody departs and at which nobody is expected, and its waiting rooms and empty tracks hold the ghost of the soldier Sam Pearce. Anyone who remembers those episodes will remember how little the setting needed in the way of cobwebs or thunder, since the stillness of a station that has stopped serving the living was disturbing enough.

In fact, Dewerton was never a real station and was built as a studio set, so that the most haunting railway platform in British television exists only as a place assembled for the purpose and kept alive in the memory of those who watched it. The haunted house reminds us that places may retain the emotions of those who once lived within them, and Joanna Lumley and David McCallum’s disused station at Dewerton suggests something stranger, that a place built for passing through may go on waiting for the travellers who never arrive and holding the ghostst of those who never left.

References

• Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (French original, 1992; English translation, 1995).
• Robert Aickman, “The Hospice”, in Cold Hand in Mine (1975).
• Walter de la Mare, “Crewe”, in The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926).
• Amelia B. Edwards, “The Four-Fifteen Express” (1866).
• T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”, in Four Quartets (1941).
• P. J. Hammond, Sapphire & Steel, Assignment Two, ITV (1979).
• Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969).