Ghost Stories From The North Of England
Edited by George White
£12.00 (Paperback)
366 pages

The basis for this volume are the five pamphlets written by Rebecca Dane and Craig MacNeil between
1972 and 1982 and now long out of print; all are scarce and therefore this book, edited by George White, is a welcome return of the slender tomes. As a former resident of the North East of England, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the majority of the 80-odd stories were previously unknown to me; a large portion have obviously been rewritten in a first person narrative, and these “new” stories, I suspect, must have come from friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) legends and so assessing their truthfulness is now probably impossible.
While the ghosts of Raby Castle, the cursed Busby Stoop Inn chair, Stainmore’s Hand of Glory and other familiar tales are now accepted parts of North-Eastern Lore, one wonders why the more spectacular tales have never been referred to before – or
indeed, since. This does not detract from the stories on offer; some are genuinely terrifying, and hopefully research may verify and enhance these tales, perhaps even giving us postscripts or debunking the fraudulent ones.

Many of the stories fall into the category of “revenge from beyond the grave” and only one seems patently unbelievable (namely “The Astrogeists,” about space-faring ghosts). This reviewer’s favourite tale is “The Cats of Keld,” where an aspiring writer seeks solitude in an abandoned cottage but instead only seeks to kindle the wrath of the previous owner and her numerous feral pets. It is a matter of some embarrassment that this reviewer did not even know where Keld was!

The remainder of the stories range in date from the Viking era onwards and most of them paint excellent depictions of life in the North (complete with appropriate verbiage in places!) that have been touched upon by the supernatural.