Cocktail Talk: Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
I’ve been dipping my terrified toes into more 1800s, early 1900s ghost/supernatural stories lately, specifically those written by J.S. Le Fanu, an Irish writer born in 1814. Not going to say I feel as ghastly good towards his works I’ve read so far as a I do to M.R. James, but ol’ J.S. can spin a scary yard. He was one of the (if not the) writers of horror tales who took the genre from Gothic chain-rattling to more psychological other-worldness, if that makes sense (and he was a somewhat troubled person himself, it seems, so the terrors really have that personal feel lots of the time). The stories I’ve been reading are all in a scarily swell collection called The Tiled House, put out by Collins Chillers (I need to track more of the anthologies in that line down, as it seems there are some ghoulishly grand ones), and includes the story the below spirits – the boozy ones – are featured within.
A night or two after the departure of my comrade, I was sitting by my bedroom fire, the door locked, and the ingredients of a tumbler of hot whisky-punch upon the crazy spider-table; for, as the best mode of keeping the
Black spirits and white,
Blue spirits and grey,
with which I was environed, at bay, I had adopted the practice recommended by the wisdom of my ancestors, and “kept my spirits up by pouring spirits down.”
–J.S. Le Fanu, “Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”
