Heaven help them

摘要

Winter is the time for ghost stories, for "fire and fleet and candlelight" and the terror of shadows; it is also a good season for Carl Watkins's book. For this is only partly an historical study of attitudes to the dead. More enthusiastically, it is a gazetteer of weird goings-on in remote corners of England. Here is the delightfully named Mr Snowball, who on a ride to Am-pleforth in North Yorkshire around 1400 encountered a fiery raven that became a dog, the ghost of an excommunicated man; James Tankerlay, a wicked priest who, after death, "blew out" the eye of his concubine; and Major George Sydenham, who in the 1660s returned from the dead to tell his captain that there was indeed immortal life, seized the captain's sword, and vanished away. Spirits knock on walls, poltergeists throw chairs, and through the chill night air floats the howling of "Gabble Ratchets", or phantom dogs.