Ghost Stories on a Sunday Afternoon

I don't associate Christmas with ghost stories as is traditional; it is the fading light and short cold afternoons of this time of year that always remind me of them.  A shifting, ethereal white presence in the woods as the light fails, an uncertainty, a vagueness; the link between dying year and the spirits.  I love the stories of MR James, the cloistered academic background and harsh open spaces.

But it is two American stories that I always try and find at this time.  'The Blair Witch Project' has a richly imagined mythology and background to the three students disappearing in the Maryland woods, a time line stretching back to the 1770s.  I don't think that this depth of setting could have happened without MR James, with his imagined books and references, his footnotes in Latin for scholars of fictitious books.  And the film too struck me with its shots of leaves, running streams, bare trees - and the ghostly,  blurred white trees-as-bone shapes of the night time shots - as essentially autumnal; only later did I realise that there were no old trees in the film, that the doomed students stumble through a young landscape.  

The filmmakers were also influenced by Stephen King, who often has great historical depth to his best work.  He is fascinated by the passage of time, especially within lives, from the importance of childhood - and childhood events - to the sense of the day before yesterday town, the immediate and longer-view history of his small fictitious New England towns.  I quoted him once in interview; his description of local historians as people who had come into a movie half way through and wanted to know what had happened before they got there.  They leave before the end, of course, but that's another story...

King's short book 'The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon' seems essentially autumnal and it is a wrench to be reminded that it is set in June.  A nine-year-old girl loses the path on a walk and stumbles deeper and deeper into the woods, further and further from the path.  The woods are indifferent to her but she is stalked by a primeval ghost-bear-spirit made of wasps and rotting bear flesh; wonderful.  She is out for a week or so and the story is full of King's small skills of character-building, small things she does and comes to realise.  Nothing happens apart from her wanderings and berry-eatings and falls and scratches; eventually she finds a rotten fence and follows it to an overgrown track which leads to a backwoods lane and then the highway.  Like his best work ('Gerald's Game', for instance) there is no 'monster' - but there may be - and the action is largely psychological.  But the sense of a haunting, of a person coming into the realm of something beyond their understanding, marks the tale, like 'The Blair Witch Project', as a ghost story.