"The Phantom Coach" (1864)

This story by Amelia B. Edwards is plain old-fashioned ghost-storytelling and a clinic in one way to do it. There's a hunter, the first-person narrator, traipsing the moors by himself for game. He's on a long honeymoon or independently wealthy. His new wife is at home and he loves her dearly. He has spent the day hunting, but now darkness is falling and he is lost. He is sad that his wife will be worried about him. It's set in December (all the good ones are in December, aren't they?) but that's as close to Christmas as it gets beyond a lovely snowfall. He must seek shelter for the night. He finds himself in the isolated home of a sort of British Voltaire figure, an intellectual renaissance man of letters and science, with a telescope, a microscope, and books stacked everywhere in his study. At first, finding himself 20 miles from home, the hunter intends staying overnight, but when the snow lets up and his host tells him there's a way home to his wife (his motivation to return to her is believable, not weird, and one of the most grounding details here), he jumps at it. It involves walking to a point where he can meet up with a night mail coach. On the way there he learns of a terrible accident involving this coach. It's a little late and a little clumsy on the foreshadowing, but all right. Edwards has spun her web and we are well caught up in it by now. When the coach shows up, sure enough, it's full of ghosts, presumably from the accident. It's mechanical in some ways, but what Edwards is good at is the extraordinary experience itself—the way the ghosts look and behave (and smell), the way the hunter responds, unknowing at first. "The icy coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was affecting me with an intolerable nausea." The bad smell and some details about their appearance make it clear these ghosts are more like decomposing bodies than immaterial mist. The coach itself, on closer inspection, is about in the same condition as Miss Havisham's wedding dress. When the hunter comments on its deplorable state one of the ghosts is annoyed. "His eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural luster. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between." It only gets worse and then there's a calamity, the accident of the coach, but the narrator survives. He swears the whole thing is true but the doctor thinks he's cracked. At least he's back with his dear wife again. The clarity of some of these older stories can just be remarkable. They effectively describe an uncanny vision of horror, and we're all good. That's enough.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby
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