Ghosts in the Great War, and true tales of haunted houses

The subject of Ghosts and Ghostly happenings has always aroused a vast amount of interest, much fear, some amusement and varying degrees of ridicule, but in recent years the names of so many prominent and influential people have been directly associated with it and used in support of the existence of spiritual intercourse that it has become worthy of a careful examination. This fact, and the reported reappearance of the “brown lady” of Raynham Hall, the home of the Marquis Townshend, in the latter part of last year, led the Editor of the Home Magazine Page of the Daily News, in co-operation with the Publishers of this book to invite readers to give their experiences in this matter. In extending this invitation the Daily News, in its issue of November 6th, 1926, stated:

“A vast number of people do believe in ghosts—many on the most inadequate evidence. But up and down the country, in lonely farms, in quiet suburban roads, in London flats—in fact, wherever the living dwell and the dead have dwelt, there are people who fully believe that they have seen mysterious apparitions, sometimes uncanny, sometimes not even uncanny, strange noises unaccountable by any human agency known to the witness. And these agencies they believe to be ghosts.

"Let us find out what these occurrences amount to. We ask our readers, in the interests of sober truth, to tell us of the stories which are authentically within their own knowledge—not the feverish traditional stories of the countryside, but the sights and sounds which they themselves have seen and heard, or which their friends and neighbours have seen and heard, and which have convinced them that ghosts really exist.

“Many will hesitate because the story they have to tell, though inexplicable, seems so futile; but futility is often characteristic of the real living contemporary ghost story as distinguished from the blood-curdling romance handed down from the past, with dripping hands and clanking chains."

As a small recognition of the service rendered by the writers of these experiences, a daily prize was given by the Daily News for the first ghost story published each day during the appearance of the correspondence. It was also announced that it was felt that this important body of evidence on a subject of continual controversy should not be lost, and, therefore, the Publishers of this book undertook to gather into book form the best of the stories, and to equally divide a further sum of £20 in prizes to the authors of the ten best stories used in this way.

It was then thought that one book would be adequate for the presentation of these selected stories, but the response to the Daily News invitation was so enormous, that no less than four books of most extraordinary stories are now completed and published, and the awards have been increased to £40.

The Editor of these books has read through every story received—some three thousand in all—and endeavoured to classify them and then group the various phases of the subject under appropriate titles. It has been a tremendous undertaking, and the work has occupied several months. Every selected story has been reproduced without alteration of fact, and in almost every case the actual wording of the stories has been adhered to.

The task of scrutinising this vast amount of matter could be done by only one person where the merits of each story were to be judged for the purpose of awarding prizes. And that single-handed task had its compensations as well as its trials, because it yielded a comprehensive survey that could not have been accomplished by collaboration.