Ghost story for adults: The House of Lost Souls

Several things attracted me to The House of Lost Souls by F.G. Cottam. Its story spans from the the 1920s to the 1990s, partially centers around a beautiful flapper photographer, and involves a malevolently haunted house in the British Isles. So, creepy tales from the past, a mysterious woman, and a scary house full of secrets. Check! and I'm in.

In the 1980s, Paul helps his new girlfriend with her dissertation by researching Pandora Gibson-Hoare, an edgy fashion photographer of the 1920s who ran with a rich and decadent crowd. Ten years after her career peaked, she ended her life seemingly destitute, her body discovered in a scummy river. Paul sneakily procures her journal from an attic trunk and soon, learning more about Pandora becomes an obsession, leading him into a house of incredible evil and black magic from which he barely escapes.

Twelve years later, he has remade his life as best he can, when he learns that four college students and their professor have entered the house, with one girl already a suicide and the others mad and apparently headed in the same direction. A call from an old acquaintance encourages him to help those women and their families. And his haunting begins again, with music wafting from his aged and unplugged cassette player...

This is horror with a slow build and a careful back story, without a lot of gore and with some extremely shivery moments. I enjoyed Cottam's mentions of real people such as Aleister Crowley, Nick Drake and Sandy Denny from the band Fairport Convention. It was pleasant for me to do a little back up reading on each of these people, and learn how Cottam uses them to enrich his fiction.

If you like a subtle scare, give it a try!

Day 11: "The Girl in the Lavender Dress"

Here's a favorite Ghost story/Urban legend:

The Girl in the Lavender Dress

Two Hamilton College juniors, motoring to a dance at Tuxedo Park after sunset of a warm Indian-summer Saturday on the road that runs through the valley of the little Ramapo River, saw a girl waiting. She was wearing a party dress the color of the mist rising above the dark water of the stream and her hair was the color of ripe wheat. The boys stopped their car and asked the girl if they could take her in the direction she was going. She eagerly seated herself between them and asked if they were going to the square dance at Sterling Furnace. The thin, tanned face with high cheekbones, the yellow hair, the flashing smile, the quicksilver quality of her gestures, enchanted the boys and it was soon a matter of amused debate whether they would go along with her to Sterling Furnace or she would accompany them to the dance at the Tuxedo. The majority won and the boys were soon presenting their new friend to the young couple who were their hosts at the Park. "Call me Lavender," she said to them. "It's my nickname because I always wear that color."

After an evening in which the girl, quiet and smiling, made a most favorable impression by her dancing, drifting dreamily through the waltzes in a sparking cloud of lavender sequins, stepping more adeptly than any of the other dancers thought the complications of revived square dances, the boys took her out to their car for the ride home. She said that she was cold and one of them doffed his tweed topcoat and helped her into it. They were both shocked into clichés of courtesy when, after gaily directing the driver through dusty woodland roads, she finally bade him stop before a shack so dilapidated that it would have seemed deserted had it not been for a ragged lace curtain over the small window in the door. After promising to see them again soon, she waved good night, standing beside the road until they had turned around and rolled away. They were almost in Tuxedo before the chill air made the coatless one realize that he had forgotten to reclaim his property and they decided to return for it on their way back to college the next day.
The afternoon was clear and sunny when, after considerable difficulty in finding the shack, the boys knocked on the door with the ragged lace curtain over its window. A decrepit white-haired woman answered the door and peered at them out of piercing blue eyes when they asked for Lavender.

"Old friends of hers?" she asked, and the boys, fearing to get the girl into the bad graces of her family by telling the truth about their adventures of the day before, said, yes, they were old friends.
"Then ye couldn't a-heerd she'd dead," said the woman. "Been in the graveyard down the road fer near ten years."
Horrified, the boys protested that this was not the girl they meant -- that they were trying to find someone they had seen the previous evening.
"Nobody else o' that name ever lived round here," said the woman. "Twan't her real name anyway. Her paw named here Lily when she was born. Some folks used to call her Lavender on account o' the pretty dress she wore all the time. She was buried in it."

The boys once more turned about and started for the paved highway. A hundred yards down the road, the driver jammed on the brakes.
"There's the graveyard," he said, pointing to a few weathered stones standing in bright sunlight in an open field overgrown with weeds, "and just for the hell of it I'm going over there."
They found the stone -- a little one marked "Lily" -- and on the curving mound in front of it, neatly folded, the tweed topcoat.

From the book 'GREAT AMERICAN FOLKLORE'compiled by Kemp B. Battle (1986)