The Ghosts of Cambridge:

How a University Gave Birth to a Genre

Late in 1884, a rising scholar at King’s College, Cambridge—a man affectionately known as Monty—lodged a young scholarship candidate in his rooms. Next morning, over breakfast, the boy reported hearing a ghostly cry in the night. Monty, whose full name was Montague Rhodes James, had heard nothing himself, but others confirmed the sound. His redoubtable bedmaker later recalled that a former occupant, a Mr. Barnard, had once kept his coffin in those very rooms and died in it under mysterious circumstances—proving yet again that truth is stranger than fiction.

Though the young James expressed skepticism, he recorded the event. It remains the only ghostly incident he ever acknowledged in his own life. And yet, the moment is telling. Monty neither confirms nor dismisses the ghost: he folds it into a larger ambiguity, one that characterized both his scholarship and his fiction.

Cambridge, it seems, was already haunted.

Ghosts and the Rational Mind

In an age dominated by the tension between science and faith, Victorian universities stood at a strange crossroads. Cambridge, in particular, became an unlikely crucible for supernatural inquiry. The question of ghosts—once a matter of folklore or faith—had become a matter for scholarly investigation. Could ghost stories survive modern scrutiny? Could belief in phantoms coexist with rigorous, rational thought?

Two Trinity men believed so. A decade before Monty’s birth, in 1851, they founded the Cambridge Association for Spiritual Inquiry—also known as the Ghostlie Guild. Its membership included some of the most respected minds of the era: the Regius Professor of Divinity, Brooke Foss Westcott; Alfred Barry, Chaplain to Queen Victoria; Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy; and a young Arthur Balfour, future Prime Minister. Their goal? To investigate ghost sightings and haunted places, not to debunk them but to gather proof of life after death.

This was no occult circle. It was a serious academic society, the first of its kind in England. It predated the better-known Ghost Club of 1862 and the Society for Psychical Research of 1882. These men were believers in search of empirical confirmation.

The Chitchat Society and Holy Apparitions

By the time Monty entered King’s, the ghost-glamour of Cambridge had settled into the old stones. He moved among men who had been raised in this culture of inquiry. In 1884, one of his closest friends, H.F.W. Tatham, presented a paper on “Ghosts” to the Chitchat Society. The discussion that followed embraced the theological, the psychological, and the literary potential of spectral visitants.

Tatham, who later published Footprints in the Snow for his Eton boys, held to a Protestant vision of the supernatural: his ghosts were instructive rather than terrifying. Holy footprints led boys home. Haunted phonographs played moral lessons. Dreams intervened for the good of the soul. Yet his 1884 lecture—heard by Monty—clearly influenced what would become a new kind of ghost story: empirical in tone, archaeological in setting, and suggestive in moral force.

The Cambridge Style: Uncovering the Uncanny

Monty’s Cambridge was a place where antiquarian scholarship met speculative thought. Archaeology, philology, medieval studies—all these lent the ghost story a newfound weight. One need only look at the pseudoscientific language of the Phantasms of the Living (1886), produced by Edward Gurney, F.W.H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. The two-volume work, written by Trinity men, sought to demonstrate the reality of apparitions as more than chance. They coined terms like “phantasmogenetic centre,” proposing points in space where apparitions might be generated and perceived.

By modern standards, their methodology was badly flawed—largely anecdotal, deeply subjective—but it showed the shape of the age. Ghosts were no longer quaint tales of yore. They were phenomena to be mapped and measured.

Ghost Stories with a Scholar’s Touch

M.R. James would become the most celebrated literary result of this Cambridge convergence. Drawing upon antiquarian detail, scriptural ambiguity, and the dry wit of a rational mind confronted with the irrational, he forged a new kind of ghost story—one that felt disturbingly possible.

He was first but not alone. Cambridge soon gave us a coterie of supernatural writers: A.C. Benson, E.F. Benson, R.H. Benson, Arthur Gray, E.G. Swain, and Arthur Reed Ropes (writing as Adrian Ross). Together, they produced nearly two hundred stories. Their ghosts do not rant, rattle, or rave; they wait, or whisper, or reach out with a clawed hand from the folds of antiquity.

These authors balanced belief and disbelief with perfect poise. As Monty once remarked, “ghostly phenomena are rare in Colleges, and highly suspect”—only to follow that with: “yet there was a ghostly cry in the bedroom.” This tension—between the credible and the uncanny—is the mark of the Jamesian style.

A Legacy Far Beyond the Fens

The ghost story, once a relic of folklore, had found its most refined expression in the lecture halls and libraries of Cambridge. What began as spiritual inquiry became literature of the highest order. It influenced writers far beyond the university: D.K. Broster, H. Russell Wakefield, Amyas Northcote, A.N.L. Munby, Eleanor Scott—and even American pulp visionaries like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith—owed a debt to that Jamesian moment. Lovecraft, in fact, sent fan mail to Monty, who did not quite know what to make of the American’s pseudoscientific pretentions, neo-logoisms, and idiosyncratic literary-critical apparatus.

But none of them, however skilled, could recapture the magic of the original convergence: late-Victorian rationalism, deep classical knowledge, reformist religious ambivalence, and the cheerful fellowship of young men testing the line between learning and fear.

And so it was that the ghost, once banished by reason, found its most elegant resurrection in the very halls that had sought to explain it.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan