“The Upper Berth” (1885)

If you read only one story by F. Marion Crawford it should be “The Screaming Skull,” of course. But why stop there? He was one of the better horror writers of his time and this seagoing tale is one of his best. It has some of the floridly overdetailed 19th-century approach, with a somewhat unnecessary frame story, but it also has the compressed and more straightforward approach of the 20th century too. The story involves a haunted stateroom in an oceangoing vessel crossing the Atlantic between Europe and North America. The storyteller is a tough bird and veteran sailor who likes the particular ship on which he travels, or did until these ghost incidents. He likes the stateroom he’s given and doesn’t want to give it up even with everyone he meets onboard telling him, with furrowed brow, that he should. On the first night he finds he is sharing the stateroom with a man who stays in the upper berth and later commits suicide by throwing himself off the boat. That makes four suicides on the last four sailings on this ship, all by people staying in that stateroom. There’s also a bad smell, strange noises, and worst of all someone (or something, oh brrr) keeps opening the porthole cover and letting in a terrible draft, not to mention seawater when the ship pitches, a notable safety hazard. So it goes—this is a ghost story and Crawford piles on with detail. He has more facility than many others for keeping things moving along. All the detail continually makes the point that it’s unpleasant more than anything to be troubled by a ghost. It’s also physically dangerous. In some ways, the teller is almost unbelievably heroic, insisting on staying in that stateroom a total of three nights, with others begging him to move to different quarters, before finally throwing it over for a loss. Among other incidents, an actual material corpse appears in the upper berth. All sensations are engaged, including tactile and olfactory. This thing is corporeal more than phantom, a nice touch. I might throw myself off a boat too if I woke up next to that. Definitely an old school tale but redeemed by Crawford’s skill.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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