You may have seen that I am making all the 400 or so episodes of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast available on this website. Some will still be members only, as that gives people something for offering me paid support so I can continue to do what I do. I am very grateful always to you who choose to support me this way. I don't say this enough, but I think it.

Anyway, you may get more emails than normal for a while. Some have already unsubbed. I get it. I may love a certain creator but I don't love them four times a day and if they try to love me four times a day, I unsubscribe too.

So, sorry if I am loving you too much.

Reminds me of that Cure song: Lullaby.

And below is my occasional essay. This time entitled:

Folktales or Fiction?

This week, a nice chap called Freddy contacted me on Instagram to suggest a book for the podcast. He thought I might enjoy The Compleat Wizzard, an eighteenth-century — 1770 — collection of accounts of spirits, witches, omens and conjuring.

I have read books like this before. It is old, strange, and drawn from a world that took ghosts, prophecy and unexplained appearances a good deal more seriously than we do. Apparently.

But of course, though this is eighteenth-century content, it's still 'content'. We shouldn't be too po-faced about the purity of our ancestors. They weren't purer or better than we are. They were pretty similar. They liked scandal, violence, dirty pictures and gossipy stories.

True crime for them was witch trials and highwaymen. Look at how Mr Evans marketed his Compleat Wizzard:

The compleat wizzard; being a collection of authentic and entertaining narratives of the real existence and appearance of ghosts, demons, and … instances of the effects of witchcraft.

If that isn't clickbait, I don't know what is.

That doesn't mean it wouldn't be fun. It wasn't the reason I didn't think it would work for The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.

My schtick is fiction. I've always pitched my stall as a reader of stories by named authors: M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton, Wilkie Collins and the others who shaped the ghost story into a literary form. The Compleat Wizzard is a compendium of folklore, made up of anonymous reports, traditional accounts, anecdotes and fragments of belief.

Freddy pointed out, fairly, that the literary ghost story grew from precisely this material. He was right. Before it had an author, the ghost story was told around the fireplace by your drunk uncle — or, more professionally, by a seanachaidh. I prefer the older spelling with the -idh, preserved in Scots; Irish has modernised it to seanchaí. I'm not a fan. And don't let's start on the Manx spelling.

In origin, then, the supernatural story was a folktale: without a particular author, passed by word of mouth, continually altered in the telling, and detached from any individual creator.

Collecting haunted places

In my thirties, I spent a good deal of time collecting stories about hauntings, with a particular interest in haunted hotels. In 1998, I published The Ghostly Guide to the Lake District, which combined traditional stories with new reports from people who told me they'd experienced something unusual.

Like Fox Mulder, on the telly about the same time, I longed to believe.

I placed notices in newspapers inviting readers to write to me, and they did. They sent accounts of apparitions on roads, figures at windows, presences in old houses, strange sounds, and tales attached to inns, castles, lakes and remote corners.

These new reports clustered around established accounts of what haunted where only sometimes — and often not at all. I still wrote about them. It wasn't for me to say they weren't true. I didn't know that they weren't true, and many of my correspondents were sure they were. They might have been.

Then I would arrange paid stays at a castle or haunted hotel — dinner, overnight stay, breakfast: very reasonable, — and the guests would walk round claiming to be getting vibes and psychic impressions but they mainly produced material that was wholly new and that didn't track the historical hauntings in the places. As if a ghost had been waiting for four hundred years for Drunk Doreen to come along and only now shown itself (and never more to do so). I became less convinced.

I suspected after many tours, that their psychic vibes were the product of imagination, suggestion, atmosphere, or perhaps the fine French wine they'd been drinking. After saying that, some of them sometimes did produce some weird stuff which was more convincing. I've talked about this elsewhere.

Unlike Fox, the more I heard, the less I believed.

Perhaps that disillusionment has turned me against the million true-paranormal channels on YouTube, and four hundred the true-paranormal books that publicity agents try to get me to promote because they haven't bothered to check I don't run a paranormal channel...

Folk Tales though.

But there is a distinction to be made between folktales and 'true paranormal accounts'.

To me, folktales are better because they're still tales, and tales have shape and purpose. 'True paranormal' stories, however, are often merely jump scares or empty spectacle. Like Marvel films.

Let's take a typical 'true story'. This kind of account has someone driving on a foggy night near a cemetery or an old crossroads who, rounding a bend, meets a horse and carriage lit as though it belonged two centuries earlier. It passes, vanishes, or is gone when they look again.

The image is cool and exactly what one expects from a supernatural story. But when I asked what happened next, the answer was usually: "Nothing."

I would ask whether they'd been cursed. They didn't think so.

Perhaps blessed? No.

Did their life change afterwards? Nope.

Did it portend some event in their lives? A death? A lottery win? Again, no. Just nothing.

Pointless.

The witnesses weren't changed by the encounter. They discovered no family secret, crime or revelation. So the incident remained an isolated fragment: striking, but incomplete. Spectacle without substance.

A 'true paranormal' account is like a half-baked folktale. It has an image but no plot. It has a moment but no meaning. It sucks.

What stories are for

Folktales, by contrast, might be anonymous, but they have a shape. They have rules. Something is forbidden; somebody breaks the rule; something follows. They still have the machinery of a tale.

I've said many times that stories are moral devices. This isn't original thinking by me. A good story tells us how people ought to behave and how the world ought to work, even when life plainly doesn't work like that.

In a story, good and moral people are rewarded — very common in Gothic tales — and the wicked are punished — very common in modern supernatural stories. The rules, whether religious, social, familial, or the unspoken rules of a community, are upheld in the end.

Folktales make this especially plain. They're often blunt, even cruel, in their moral logic. Breaking a taboo brings disaster. Cruelty to a stranger usually proves to have been cruelty to a saint, fairy or witch.

And the morals change. Stories deal with the moral concerns of their time.

Wilkie Collins's "Mrs. Zant and the Ghost", for example, charged up Victorian readers with the possibility of a man marrying his dead brother's widow. It was a big deal then; it's rather so-what to us now.

Similarly, modern stories often deal with childhood trauma in a vaguely therapeutic manner, or touch on colonialism and racism as being bad things in ways that Victorian writers do not find in the slightest problematic.

And older Gothic stories are obsessed with illegitimacy, inheritance, forbidden relationships, class, service and family duty. Big deals to them ,but for us concerns that have changed or disappeared.

From anonymous tale to author

The movement from folktale to authored fiction was gradual. Long before the eighteenth century, some stories had named writers. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France and Sir Thomas Malory are authors whose work survives, and they drew on oral tradition, earlier sources.

Even so, the gradual emergence of the author as the recognised maker and owner of a story changed something important. The anonymous folktale belongs, in some sense, to a community. It varies with place and teller. It carries motifs: the haunted road, the fairy bride, the revenant, the black dog and the cursed treasure.

The authored story is more particular. It has a chosen voice, deliberate arrangement, individual language and an intended effect.

And that is where I ended up. I came to love M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton, Wilkie Collins and the others because their stories have shape, character, voice and writing.

Fiction supplies a beginning, a middle and an end. A story by M. R. James may withhold information and leave us uncertain about what exactly has occurred, but it's shaped. It has consequences and an ending. Its supernatural intrusion speaks to character, curiosity, greed, guilt, inheritance or sin.

In Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, the horror lies in far more than something uncanny seen on a beach. Professor Parkins's casual curiosity, his complacent rationalism, the object he unearths, and the entity that follows him all belong to a designed structure. The ghost has a dramatic function.

A spectral carriage on a country road, followed by a return home for tea, has no such function. It's dumb.

That is why I feel more at home with literary ghost stories, though folklore still fascinates me. Folklore supplies the raw material: old fears, customs, taboos and local memory, from which so much supernatural writing grew. Fiction shapes that material into an experience designed to mean something. It gives the ghost a place in a pattern.

So, The Compleat Wizzard was not for me

I felt a bit churlish turning Freddy down. He was polite, engaged, enthusiastic, thoughtful, and seemed a very nice bloke.

But The Compleat Wizzard, and 'true paranormal' more generally — even in its eighteenth-century clickbait form — isn't really for me. Like twenty-first-century true crime. I want shape. I want character. I want nice writing.

I pointed Freddy instead towards my friends at Three Ravens, who may be interested in these tales of folklore, local tradition and popular belief.

Also the book cost £16.