I attended the National Literacy Trust’s Haunted Birmingham event at The Exchange last week. It was an evening thing, on the very same day when I was supposed to have finished writing my own new book. It was a little treat after doing all those weeks of hard work. And I really do love ghost stories.
Besides — I’d discovered about a fortnight previously that the NLT was running another open callout for people to write their own ghost stories set in Birmingham which would form part of its second successive online collection. I couldn’t very well expect people to contribute things to my True Voyage Is Return anthology without having the good grace to contribute something of my own to someone else’s, could I?
And anyway — surely the very thing I needed on top of having one massive unfinished writing project hanging over me was to commit myself to yet more writing, and not only that, to a project with a fast-approaching deadline?
By way of example, a number of last year’s community-submitted ghost stories were shared for the assembled audience at The Exchange — including two great ones, about mannequins coming to life at Selfridges, and about something sinister devouring a girl somewhere on the canal network — both read out for us with immense courage by the two young people who had written them. (I can imagine how daunting it must have been for them in the cavernous space of the Banking Hall…)
Later, while some visitors went on a tour of the building to learn more about its spooky history, and while others heard about djinns and duppies and ghosts in non-Western traditions, I took part in a workshop led by Liam Brown, who was exploring AI’s capacity to write good ghost stories — and by extension, our own. Who would do better — us, or it? There was more at stake than just our pride and our pretensions.
Liam gave us short prompts and invited us to write something in response, there and then. Three minutes to imagine you’re at the Old Crown, Birmingham’s supposedly oldest and most haunted pub — complete with its sinister old well. You’re stood near the bar and you hear a ghostly voice — what does it say?
And then something more elaborate teased out across three blocks of five minutes each — first, to imagine a place in Birmingham and conjure up its spookiness by describing what you could see, hear, feel — second, to capture the moment when a ghostly presence reveals itself — third, the discovery that the ghost wants something, and the choice to help or to escape.
I broke my own cardinal rule by reading my work out in public. Someone always needs to take one for the team at these sessions, to signal to the others that it’s safe to be vulnerable, and that you will be supported rather than ridiculed if you do. For once, I decided to be that person.
I’m going to share what I came up with here, and I’ll admit, without any shame, to how I coped with the pressure to write so quickly: I did what Austin Kleon would tell me to do: I stole like an artist.
Here’s the ghostly voice in the pub experiment; remember that Liam had just told us about that well:
“There’s no room for another one, Your Grace — so where shall we put him? —— No, Your Grace, full, quite full to the brim. —— well, Your Grace will insist on killing them faster than the rats can eat them. —— Though their appetites be large, they are but small creatures. —— I have said, Your Grace, and I say again:— the well is full — so I ask once more; now you have murdered him, where shall we put him?” (3 minutes)
I fell back on what I know, on the relevant inputs stashed in the vast Rolodex of my mind from a lifetime of reading, and I went straight to the classics for inspiration. The well with bodies down it is a direct lift from M. R. James’s A School Story (published 1911); the auditory trace of dark episodes from the past is so common a device as to merit that much-maligned word trope: James himself uses it in The Rose Garden (also 1911), and I also seem to remember J. Sheridan LeFanu using it in Mr. Justice Harbottle (1872), but you’ll easily find examples of it spread throughout English-language ghost stories.
As a warm-up exercise, it got the brain working and the hand into writing. So far, so good.
Here’s the full text of the longer experiment; the location I chose was Moseley Bog:
1
Beyond the little locked car park where the dealers deal by daylight, beyond the edge of the pool of orange light from the street lamps, the paths of fallen leaves give way to the loose rotting timbers of the boardwalk, to fallen trees ready to clip the heads of the unwary, to the damp scents of fungus draining the juices of decay down into the soil, to slicks of dog waste for the incautious to slip over on, to tiny silver whippets that the nitrous oxide has been sucked out of, to old crisp packets in retired flavours and rusted cans of energy drinks crushed underfoot. (5 minutes)
I needed a better alternative noun than “light” to describe the orange pool from the street lamps; I needed a third “beyond” item to fill out the opening section in a more pleasing way, and the energy drink cans are a weak climax to the list of sensory details. But otherwise, I’m fairly pleased with lots of this. It kept me moving forward.
2
A stand of nettles parts and a face, or something like a face, peers out.
A voice — yet the lips of the mouth do not move.
“I did not deserve this,” it says. “I came here in search of love, or something close to love. And for that, they pressed my face down into the mud, and held me there, until I moved no more.” (5 minutes)
More M. R. James pilfering here, I’m afraid. The face in the shrubberies is influenced by The Rose Garden again, but there’s also one that peeps through a hole in a gate in A Vignette (1935) as well, and a face that turns out to be a mask peeks through the curtains in his 1929 essay Stories I Have Tried To Write. (The irony of that last one is not wasted on me.) I am convinced that I’ve copied the phrase “a face, or something like a face” verbatim from somewhere, maybe even from a James story, but I can’t recall where just yet.
Rather functional lines for the ghost, I’m afraid, but he (and it is a he, despite my careless use of “it”) does at least get to hint at some kind of coded queerness, which is very much in keeping with ghost stories of a certain age, and at what some scholars infer about M. R. James himself, as it happens. The weakest of the three sections, I think.
3
“Come with me,” the voice said, soft, insistent. “Show me at last the love in death that I sought in vain in life.”
A hand, or something like a hand, extended from the nettles, palm upward, inviting, beckoning, pale in the starlight.
I turned. I fled. At a walking pace, to try convincing myself I was not as afraid as I was.
I had never known love, and so had none to give. I have wondered since if he has ever found it, or if I ever will, and who is lonelier; him, or me. (5 minutes)
There I go again: “A hand, or something like a hand.” At least the repetition of that structure feels deliberate now, intentional. If only I’d found time to slip in a third one.
The ghost’s lines are really unforgivably poor here. Such a shame that he goes to all the effort of speaking from the other side, only to be given such rubbish to say. I was writing quickly and the dialogue failed me. I apologise to you, and to the ghost.
Cliché as they are, though, those imploring words did propel me into the last two lines of the piece, which I think are probably the bit I’m blushingly proudest of. There’s a lot going on in there, and the more I look at it, the more I find to like about it. Vast realms of anguished experience, both for the ghost and the protagonist, and a suggestion that not much has changed from past to present for either hapless man, maybe even anticipating that the fate of one will eventually become the fate of the other.
Oh — you still want to know how ChatGPT did, compared to the humans in the room?
Pretty bad. Lots of Victorian references, lots of adjectival atmosphere but terribly sketchy on plot. Not scary, not sinister, not sad. Superficial — no subtext. It had all the outward signs of human life, but when you looked at it closely, you could see right through it. Not an exciting or enjoyable piece of writing, but merely the pale and insubstantial appearance of one. (The irony of that is not wasted on me, either.)
