“Haunted Hall” by Donald Honig is from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1961. What could be better for Hallowe’en than a ghost story? Honig plays with the soup in which both the Horror tale and the Mystery tale was spawned: the Gothic. This story would fall under M. R. James’ Complaint of a supernatural tale that peters out into an explanation. But the quality of that explanation is the difference. Yes, true ghost story fans will sigh and say, “Here we go again….” but if the Mystery writer is truly clever, it’s almost as rewarding as a good monster. Has Honig done that? You decide.
The tale begins when a man buys Cannon Hall, an estate that has been untenanted for forty years. His description of the place occupies his first page or so with the usual Horror story atmospherics:
Cannon Hall (named for its previous owner, Horace Cannon, about whom I learned a great deal) was a rather forbidding place, three gloomy stories tall, with dormer windows along the top floor that looked like hooded eyes beneath their gables. The massive front door, appearing as sturdy and deathless as the oak from which it was made, was a setting of elaborate scrollwork. Cannon Hall was surrounded by considerable acreage of once elegant grounds, all of which had been left to neglect…
You get the idea. Good, solid atmospherics for a ghost story. But don’t forget. This is AHMM, not Weird Tales. The owner does improvements:
…Still the house retained a morose, almost Gothic look as though it were haunted and cared not who knew.
And like that, the author has pulled us back, and patted us on the head and said “Ghosts aren’t real.”
But this is just the set-up. The new owner, Howard, makes friends with a local octogenarian, a Dr. Morrison, who tells him the real story behind the story. The local gossips tell that Horace Cannon had been haunted by a ghost until he hung himself. Morrison agrees but says there is more…
The tale begins with Horace inheriting the house from his father. In a foul mood one day, he kills the son of his hired man, Keever. (Keever is a large, stern man with mysterious ways.) The butler/valet has two sons, Henry, 10, and Timothy, 12, both likeable boys. The servant takes away the body and nothing more is said. Keever returns later to take up his duties.
Soon after, Horace begins seeing Tim standing in rooms, at the foot of his bed. After a year of this, old Horace throws himself off the second floor balustrade with a rope around his neck. The house is closed down, the servants sent away, but Dr. Morrison is curious. He can’t get into the house because it is locked, but he does go into the barn next door. There he finds a secret hiding place for a child in the hay loft. Later he comes across a gravestone in the village that Keever called home. The name on the stone clinches it. The old doctor figures how it was done. Cannon had killed one of Keever’s children but it was Henry, not Tim. The man-servant (and Tim now in hiding) had arranged for Horace to see that specter, exacting a terrible revenge.
Well, did Don Honig succeed? My bald summary is far less effective but I wanted to note all the Gothic lumps and bumps. Just like Ann Radcliffe, the appearance of ghosts can not be allowed to stand. It must be explained. The first and most obvious Gothic goodie is the spectre that haunts its killer. Honig knows his readers have read all kinds of old stories. This is a familiar trope and part of the Gothic tool box. The American haunted house, best exemplified by The Amityvlle Horror years later, is also a stock prop, perhaps inherited from Hawthorne.
Honig knows this whole thing will be more believable if set in a time when people had servants, so the opening date is 1901. Forty years earlier makes this 1861 (the height of the Dickensian ghost story period). We can believe a ghost story when dressed up in the past. Don’t believe me? The very first Gothic, The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole, purported to be a Medieval manuscript. (Is that why Honig called his suicide Horace Cannon?) It’s an old dodge, for sure! Honig is writing in the early 1960s, the Pulps have only been laid in their grave for about six years in 1961. The old Weird Tales Pulps had plenty of haunted house, perhaps one of the most famous is Seabury Quinn’s “The Phantom Farmhouse” (Weird Tales, October 1923), that shares a very American feel, unlike M. R. James’s antiquarians.
Other Gothic goodies include: the story within a story, a man wracked with guilt (Poe style), a creepy butler (Honig is certainly familiar with The Addams Family’s Lurch from the cartoons) and finally, a haunted man killing himself. All of these are used but mostly to throw you off the scent of the crime. If you are looking for ghosts, will you see the human killer?
Conclusion
This tale reminds me of others I wrote about: Henry Kane’s “Ghost Story” and the Lucius Leffing stories by Joseph Payne Brennan (also from AHMM). All of these tales use Gothic tropes to set up a supernatural-appearing scenario that is actually a crime. And crime is the focus of Alfred Hitchcock’s magazine. (Unlike Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, AHMM delves more into crime as opposed to detection.) The fake ghosts are just trappings or red herrings, but they add a spice that John Dickson Carr used to find so attractive.
