I’ve read a couple of Erik Larson’s nonfiction books, and I’m always a sucker for a good ghost story, so when I heard he had come out with this novella, I lost no time in downloading it. It’s only available as an audiobook because Larson believes ghost stories should be told out loud. He’s right that there’s definitely a very long tradition of people telling each other ghost stories out loud, so it’s hard to argue with him on that. Also, the narrator does a fabulous job.
I also loved the concept of the book. It takes place in 1905 when the Spiritualism movement is in full swing. The Society for Psychical Research was a real organization in Victorian England and in America. The more we learned about science and how the world works, the more people seemed to be drawn to phenomena with no scientific explanation.
The concept for this book is that the Society for Psychical Research decides to bring a group of people to a supposedly haunted house on a supposedly deserted island to investigate whether the house is really haunted. The group is led by Professor William James, who was supposedly the real-life brother of Henry James, and William really was a prominent member of the Society for Psychical Research. He also supposedly told Henry that he would make contact after his death.
In this novel, James brings together a group of people made up of those who claim to have some sort of experience with the paranormal and skeptics who have worked to disprove the idea that there is any life after death or any other sort of paranormal phenomena. Every time something weird happens, they all try to find a logical explanation for it rather than jumping straight to “It’s haunted!”
The book is told from the perspective of Josiah Frost, a young operator. I’m not sure which side of the aisle he was supposed to fall on. He seems to be mostly open minded throughout the book, neither denying or insisting on the existence of paranormal phenomena.
Other members of the group include Adam Winter, an illusionist and amateur physicist who is vehemently opposed to the idea of anything that can not be explained by science or logic; Nathaniel Hume, the fictional son of the real-life psychic Daniel Dunglas Hume (unfortunately, Nathaniel has not as yet shown any sign of his father’s supposed talents); Katherine Holbrook, a widow who claims to have seen a ghost as a child; Mrs. Northrup, an author writing under a male name who was supposedly there to chronical their experiences (she was given free reign to write all about their experiences, including the option to write nothing at all); Madeleine Nash, a forensic pathologist who had studied under Madame Curie; Nicholas Penridge was the Society’s staff representative, charged with certifying the venture and its proceedings and findings. he was also the chair of the Committee of Haunted Houses, charged with debunking claims of haunted houses, and successful in disproving almost all of them.
The goal of the Society is “to examine without prejudice or preposession, and in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, which appeared to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis,” and that’s the spirit with which they approach their stay at a supposedly haunted house.
The group is not told until after they’ve arrived at the house that a family staying there many years ago appears to have simply vanished, leaving behind food and dishes set on the table and a coach waiting for them at the door. The group easily comes up with explanations for this, including an example of another family that appeared to have disappeared until the father reappeared some years later and confessed to having murdered his family and taken off. He even showed investigators where the bones were buried.
It doesn’t take long for weird things to start happening. On the first night, as the group is assembled around the fire after dinner, Frost is tending the fire when it suddenly goes out, then flares back to life without any apparent explanation. Winter had drunk himself into unconsciousness, and so did not witness the event, but upon waking and being questioned about whether there is a way for such an event to be an illusion, he says yes, but fails to explain exactly how it could be done.
The next morning, Frost and some of the others are in the kitchen when someone says she’ll go check on Katherine. While she’s gone, Katherine walks in through the back door and reports that the boat they took to get to the island has come loose from its mooring and sailed off without them, leaving them stranded, then heads back up to her room to change. As soon as she leaves, the woman who went to check on her reappears and reports that Katherine is sleeping soundly in her bed. When everyone in the kitchen reports otherwise, they go up to Katherine’s bedroom so they can all see for themselves.
Sure enough, not only is Katherine still in bed (they wake her up), but she is clearly dressed for bed, whereas moments before she had been dressed for walking around outside. She assures the group she had been sound asleep, although no one actually tells her about the fact that they just saw her downstairs and spoke to her.
Everyone else in the group is so busy trying to come up with a rational explanation for the strange event that I can’t believe they didn’t think to just ask Katherine if she had been out for a walk that morning. They also fail to mention the change in her clothing, which at that point in time took much longer than a few minutes. Instead, they seem more intent on gaslighting the woman who checked on Katherine into believing she didn’t really see Katherine in her bed, but that the wind made it appear as though the bedding was being moved by someone breathing.
They do, however, find that the boat has sailed off and they are indeed stranded.
I don’t want to spoil the ending for you if you decide to read it, but I will say that I found it a satisfying ghost story, and I did appreciate the idea of approaching a ghost story from the perspective of a group of characters who are all trying to disprove the existence of ghosts using their newly acquired scientific knowledge. I also appreciate that, although this is fiction, Larson stuck to his strengths and imbued a fair amount of real history into this novella.
My only complaint was that he tried to imbue a bit of romance into the story and that is definitely not his strong suit. I also did not appreciate how much emphasis was put on the physical attractiveness of each female character as she was introduced. The story would have been better off without any of that, but I get the feeling Larson was struggling to flesh out a short story into a novella.
I also didn’t see a point in having the story told as Frost’s recollections of these events almost four decades later as he’s being held prisoner by the Nazi’s in WWII. Maybe Larson, being a WWII fan, just couldn’t help himself, even if it wasn’t relevant to the story.