It used to be customary in many parts of the English-speaking world to tell ghost stories at Christmas. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is today the most famous of these stories, and it was dramatized in 2021 by the surviving members of the Dark Shadows cast.
But there are many others. John Kendrick Bangs’ “Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” is one. Here is a recording of Jonathan Frid’s dramatic reading of it. He did it in the fall of 1969, and it was posted to YouTube by Frid’s close friend and longtime business partner Mary O’Leary in 2022.
The story echoes Dark Shadows at several points, most obviously when we hear about a ghost which, like that of Bill Malloy in #85, leaves pieces of the sea in its wake, and when we hear about a maiden who, like so many in the series, jumps off a seaside cliff and finds a watery grave at its foot.
When we listened to it, my reaction prompted my wife, Mrs Acilius, to say that I was “trying to ruin it, like you always do.” I’d pointed out that the Oglethorpes spend the whole story trying to build structures to contain the water that the ghost brings with her. Surely the logical thing would be to build a drain to sluice it all out of the house.
When Mrs A said that this would leave them without a story to tell, I protested that it should give them a more interesting story. Let them make a series of unsuccessful attempts to keep the water out, then an unsuccessful attempt to keep it in, and finally construct a means of draining it out. That would set you up for an ending where you see that the drainage, even though it might be mechanically successful, will still be an unsatisfactory response to the real problem, which is not the water at all but the curse of which the water is a symptom. That led her to agree that I was not “trying to ruin it,” which is about all I could hope for, I suppose.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 