“The Haunted Island” is a different kind of Northern by Algernon Blackwood. It’s not set in the far north or in a fishing vessel off the Grand Banks. This one takes place in one of the nicest locations possible, a vacationing island in the Muskoka region of Ontario. During Blackwood’s time in 1898, he visited an island in this region for a summer holiday and was enchanted. The story actually takes place in September after all the tourists have left. Autumn is coming in and the island holds another kind of rustic beauty with red, gold and yellow leaves, good fishing and time for reading. The narrator is on the island to get caught up on his reading for a legal degree.
The first quarter of the story is spent on describing this wonderful holiday, with its eerie moments of occupation, when the narrator could swear he heard voices or felt others in the lonely abode. He has chosen for his bedroom the best in the house, with a large comfortable bed. He keeps it until one day he gets a weird feeling of disgust and alarm. He vacates the room, not so much out of supernatural fear, as not wishing to sleep poorly and lose a day’s reading progress. He takes the parlour just below the room as his new sleeping spot.
One dark night, for unlike the city there is no twilight on the island–nighttime is sudden and dark– he sees two native men in a canoe circling the island. They go around three four times before landing. The man at the back of the canoe is large and frightening looking. The narrator runs off to his study, turns off the lamps and clutches his rifle. The two Indians come into the house dragging something behind them. They circle the parlour but don’t take any notice of the man. The narrator is frozen,unable to raise his gun. The large man points to the room above and they leave.
The narrator still can’t move and listens to the commotion above. The large Indian enters the bedroom. There is a scream and a thump. The smaller one enters two then they leave dragging their mysterious burden with them. The narrator finds he can move now and creeps to the doorway. The storm that has been building all evening finally breaks and lightning lights up the hall. He can see that the two invaders are dragging a cedar bough and on it is a dead body. The face of the dead man is the narrator’s. He passes out.
He wakes the next morning when the farmer from a nearby island, on time for his bread and egg deliver, finds him. The narrator can’t stay so he moves over to the farmer’s and finishes his ten days of reading there. Once done, the man takes his canoe back to the island one last time. He sees the two men in the canoe again, turns and paddles away, never to return.
This story was an early Blackwood tale so it isn’t fair to compare it to “The Wendigo” or “The Willows”. It is the second tale in The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906). So it is fair to compare it to “The Empty House” which is a must more successful piece. Even “Skeleton Lake: An Episode in camp” at the end of the book is a better Northern and weird tale. There are three reasons for that. One, Blackwood builds an atmosphere but one of autumnal enchantment more than impending terror. Atmosphere is a key element and he will improve in its use as time goes by. Two, he offers no explanation, no hint as to why these phantom natives commit this act. There is only a kind of racist expectation that fails horribly in 2020. (This is unusual. Blackwood does not usually write of First nations people with gross racist. Remember this is 1906 and many books do. They are often subservient as guides or servants or in the case of “Running Wolf” the spirit that is trapped inside the wolf.) Third, while in the throws of the supernatural dream-state, he tells us using psychical research terminology that he doesn’t feel he can actually be harmed. The tension is only half-baked:
More than once I seemed to feel most curiously that I was in no real sense a part of the proceedings, nor actually involved in them, but that I was playing the part of a spectator—a spectator, moreover, on a psychic rather than on a material plane. Many of my sensations that night were too vague for definite description and analysis, but the main feeling that will stay with me to the end of my days is the awful horror of it all, and the miserable sensation that if the strain had lasted a little longer than was actually the case my mind must inevitably have given way.
I get the feeling this story is an even earlier piece than “The Empty House” or some of the other better stories in this first collection. It appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine, April 1899 while the rest were published in the book for the first time. The description of the summer camp make it a delightful portrait of how Canadians from Montreal and Toronto spent their summers, but compared to Blackwood’s images of the deep forest in stories like “The Wendigo”, this is not much more than a quaint ghost story, so common to be notable. It wasn’t unusual for short story writers to fill out a collection with early material felt worthy of inclusion.
Great review. I will track this one down