Dark Tales from a Dorset Rectory

Before the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution turned the world upside down, the Dorset countryside was remote, steeped in tradition and superstition, a fitting setting for strange and otherworldly events.

These tales recount the experiences of the Reverend Theophilus Hale, rector of Stoke Armitage, party to or witness of some of them. Spectres, witches and demons intrude into or lurk at the edges of his world, or at least of his imagination, in these old-school ghost stories.

As aficionados of the ghost story will soon realise, this volume owes much to Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and its sequels, the writings in this genre of the scholar Montague Rhodes James, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and then Eton College between 1905 and 1936, and briefly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. They follow James' advice that such stories are most effective when set in the not too distant past (though a century earlier than most of his), and like his they tend to focus on the world of the lone seeker after academic or religious knowledge - with the ultimate message that some things are best left undisturbed. Incidentally, I originally called this collection Ghost Stories, but changed it to Dark Tales, in recognition of the fact that only a minority of the pieces actually feature conventional "ghosts". It is the case that many of James' stories contain revenants, demons and other spirits rather than actual ghosts, including the best "ghost story" in the language, "'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad'". The earliest of these pieces is the one entitled "Waste Ground", which took its geographical setting from the fact that I had been living in Dorset for some years. Towards the end of the writing, the Reverend Theophilus Hale, MA (Oxon), Rector of St. Mark's, Stoke Armitage, literally rode into the story, unexpectedly, and took charge of it, a state of affairs which continued as he stayed on to be the common point of reference, and often the subject matter, for the rest of the collection. My thanks go to him.