The Hair, the Spider, and the Shudder:

The Phobias of M.R. James

No reader of M.R. James can escape the creeping realization that certain motifs return again and again—not as literary flourishes but as deep-seated fears. James’s ghost stories are masterpieces of restraint and implication, but beneath their cultivated surface lies a world of apparent personal phobia: hair, spiders, creeping motion, clawed or faceless things. These are persistent, recurring images. They mark the psychological seams of a man who, despite his scholarly calm, lived with a potent and particular dread.

The evidence begins early in the tales. In “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book,” the haunting arises from a grotesque image of a demon, and when the spectral moment comes, it is the tactile detail that arrests: “a hand of dreadful strength"—hairy, clawed, repulsive—grips the protagonist. In “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” the horror takes on a more ambiguous but no less visceral form: “a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined, which moved with a fluttering sound.” The figure is wrapped in bedsheets—the ‘ghost in a bedsheet’ was likely a wink to his audience—and yet, within, something animates it that isn’t looking for trick-or-treat candy. The creature’s motion, texture, and presence suggest not only otherness but a specific kind of physical revulsion.

James abjures gory monsters. Rather, he gives us feelings of contact: breath on the cheek, dry hair on the pillow, a rustle in the wall. As I explore in my biography of James, The Chance of a Ghost, the recurring motif of hair appears across the corpus with increasing specificity. In “The Diary of Mr. Poynter,” a man decorates a room with a curtain fabric copied from an old diary. The fabric reproduces a design—“a mass of curling tendrils, hairy and animate"—which, it turns out, is not merely artistic. The room becomes haunted by a shape whose presence is signaled by masses of fine, dry, human hair. It is one of James’s most tactile hauntings, and its terror, far from symbolic, is sensuous. The hair is on the pillow, on the desk, rising from the floorboards, billowing from an open coffin—an invasive, pervasive haunt (yet, as a fellow cat lover, I do sometimes wonder whether MRJ is having a private laugh about how cat fur does seem to get into everything, but I digress . . .)

From there, the motif deepens in “The Ash-tree,” where the grotesque is depicted as not only animated, but venomous. Once again, hair appears. The tale closes with a powerful image: the mummified corpse of the witch, uncovered at the story's climax, is still draped in long black hair. It is the final detail that James gives us—a lingering visual echo that ties the supernatural to the bodily, the sensual, the uncanny. The spiders in this tale are themselves described as hairy, silent, and secretive. They crawl, nest, and descend from the ash tree in which the witch was concealed, and it is not too much to imagine that they may have been conjured from the very hair of the witch’s rotting cadaver. Their victims are found bloated, blackened, and hideously marked. When touched, the bodies have a caustic effect, burning the skin of those who come into contact. James does not dwell upon the physiology of the spiders—he lets their terror accrue through effect, through aftermath. They are things that move, and leave marks, not only on the flesh but also, importantly, on the imagination. (and, forgive me, but MRJ likens the spiders at one point to kittens! I suspect there is an article in all this for Cat Fancy magazine, but I’m off topic again . . .)

We see this image of movement-terror clearly again in “The Haunted Dolls’ House,” where the ghastly revelation is experienced indirectly through eerie simulation. A man purchases a model house, only to find that, at night, it reenacts a silent, ghostly tragedy visible only to him. The dolls are not frightening because they are alive but because they perform death—over and over—with mute inevitability. A child dies in the nursery. A hearse waits outside. The tiny world moves on a loop, indifferent to the viewer. The fear is not of animation but of repetition: of trauma preserved in miniature, mechanical and unalterable. It is the fear of witnessing a terrible incident that cannot be stopped, and the unease of seeing it play out again, regardless of intervention.

This fear of uncontrolled motion or what might be called animatic intrusion—of things moving that should not—is one of James’s signature dreads. In “A View from a Hill,” a man looks through cursed, enchanted binoculars and sees a ruined abbey that is no longer there. When he examines the glasses, he finds it filled with a distillation of bone, blood, and the boiled offal of criminals. It is an instrument steeped in filth dredged from a necromantic rite. Here again, the past moves through the present with silent force and unspoken resolve.

It is not only the stories that give us these insights. Biographical evidence confirms the presence of these fears in James’s own experience. In The Chance of a Ghost, I describe how James, at age seven, lay in bed poring happily over a seventeenth-century Dutch Bible while convalescing from bronchitis. The boy we see here is studious, curious, and calm, but, in his adult writings, the image of the sickbed often returns as a site of visitation. James’s own accounts, including “A Vignette,” suggest that the moments when he was most vulnerable, alone, at night, recovering, were also the moments when he first felt the presence of the uncanny.

In that story, James describes seeing a figure standing at a gate: “I do not know whether it was a man. I think it was not.” The figure does not move this time. It only stands, reversing the usual dread of inanimate things in motion. And its presence, like the figures in “The Mezzotint” or “Casting the Runes,” becomes an intolerable pressure. Rather than creatures of nightmare logic, they are the fulfillment of James’s own sense that something may be watching, and may, at any moment, move.

James was not a neurotic man. Those who knew him found him kind, composed, well-adjusted, and amusing. But, according to his Eton tutor and friend, H.E. Luxmoore, he lived a life of intense interiority. He was unmarried, close to his family, publicly reserved. He delighted in church music, Latin hagiography, and cataloguing manuscripts. He wrote letters filled with warmth and wit. Yet, as I note in the biography, he was haunted from an early age by images. As a child, he saw a Punch-and-Judy toy theatre with a figure labeled "The Ghost": a tall white shape with a long head and dismal expression. That, he later said, “permeated my dreams for years” and informed his picture of the supernatural.

It never quite left him, that Ghost.

The fears expressed in his fiction are not, as one would expect, the invented fears of a wild imagination. They are, instead, the distilled anxieties of a man who encountered the uncanny early, and who then built a life of control, intellect, and order around it. But fiction gave him another space, a place where what terrified him could emerge, safely, in the company of friends.

He read his ghost stories aloud at Christmas. He took pleasure in their effect. But that pleasure was never mean-spirited. He wanted to create not screams but shivers. And he knew how to conjure them.

It is tempting to read James’s stories as warnings against curiosity. But what they really warn against is the illusion of safety. We think hair is just hair. We think spiders are only spiders. We think a whistle is a toy, a bed a place of rest, a dollhouse a whimsey, and the search for a buried artifact is merely a quest. James knew better. These things, like our own creeping memories, may move when we least expect them.

And when they do, at least in Monty’s imaginings, they move towards us when we would prefer they not move at all.

Next month will be Monty’s birthday, and we will take a look at the important influence his family had upon his ghost stories.

And this month, after eighteen years of research and writing, I will be submitting that biography of MRJ for publication consideration. More on that to come.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan