Exhumed again, the ‘hauntography’ series, exploring the stories of M.R.James one by one! Read the original story, or read more about the series.
“All magic — I repeat, ALL magic, with no exceptions whatsoever — depends on the control of dem[…]

Part of the freshly exhumed ‘hauntography’ series. Read the original story, or read more about the series.
Anyone reading these stories in canonical order should by now have a good idea of how they tend to play out. An aged antiquary finds or hea[…]

To read the story, click here; to read about our ‘hauntography’ project, click here.
There are female visitations aplenty, of course, and female servants and relatives and bystanders, and a wife or two, and of course the witch in The Ash Tree: bu[…]

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Here is a link to the story, which you might want to read instead of the first 900 words of this and here is a link to a word about our Hauntography project.
Firstly, mostly to get them out of the way, two boring anecdotes.
Semi-irrelevant anecdote #[…]

You probably want to read The Treasure of Abbot Thomas before you read this.
In M R James’s universe everyone who matters is fluent in Latin. It’s not so for the modern reader – or at least this modern reader – and there&#8217[…]

Another in our series of posts about the ghost stories of MR James. You can find this story here.
“Oh Whistle” has the reputation of being one of MR James’ most chilling and effective stories. It’s also – not coincidentally – one of his […]

My first M R James story was Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, which is also the first in the book. I talk about it at some length here, and most of the way through it I have to confront the issue that I did not find it very scary as a ghost story. So now[…]

(This is a series in which FT contributors read the ghost stories of M. R. James. Hey! It is not going as slowly as some FT series! But er yes, it has taken me quite a time to get round to this one. If you want to read it first — and do, bcz t[…]

ie two books by james that aren’t ghost stories, and another book that isn’t by james
i: Old Testament Legends:being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal books of the old testament, by montague rhodes james, which i bought a […]