“Browdean Farm” (1927)

This is the first story I’ve read by A.M. Burrage and it’s a pretty good one. Some is a bit unlikely, and some is dated, but the ghost effects are good and it’s always engaging, told well. A couple of young bachelors, one a writer about to be married soon, find a house in the country no one has lived in for years. They look at it, like it, and take it right away—it’s too good a deal to pass up. The rent is “astonishingly low.” The first-person narrator, by the way, is not the writer but the other guy. He goes fishing during the day a lot while the other writes. Of course the place is haunted. Later they learn the terrible history of it—a woman found hanged in the kitchen, her husband tried and executed for murder. He had a mistress, and the presumption is that he killed to be free of his wife. Actually, the wife committed suicide. But that’s because the husband is, as one of the townspeople tells it, “what we would call in common parlance a dirty dog.” So there’s an argument he drove his wife to suicide and deserved to be executed for it. Anyway, he’s a ghost now. And all the ghost wants is to get your attention and show you the scene in a way that convinces you it is innocent of the murder. The bachelors actually feel some sympathy for it at the end. This is an aspect that doesn’t make much sense and feels dated. In life the husband never wanted to marry the woman. He was forced into it because she was pregnant and he was responsible—the dirty dog. Right away he found a mistress and was “in love” with her. Why not? The way the ghost gets attention is by tapping its fingertips on the window while it peers in, which is scary as you read and another indication it’s creepy. It conjures the wife’s suicide only to speak for itself. It still has no regard for the wife’s suffering, which the husband caused in life. Its only concern is for its own suffering, which it brought on itself. I prefer to think the husband is now in some kind of hell, doomed to eternally pleading his innocence, which is hard to credit all things considered, even though, yes, the wife took her own life. God have mercy! Overall, “Browdean Farm” is a really good ghost story and I hope I run across some more of this Burrage, who M.R. James also liked.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.