Edward Parnell is the author of The Listeners, and more recently Ghostland, a memoir-cum-literary tour of Britain’s ghost tales and loss. The book was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2020 for memoir and biography. Its hauntings are linked with landscape, memory and an awareness of the passage of time. I spoke with Edward via email ahead of the paperback release of Ghostland.
Elizabeth Kim What compelled you to write Ghostland and what did you initially have in mind for it?
Edward Parnell The book came out of a meeting with my editor Tom at HarperCollins, who’d seen a blog post I’d written about the village in Suffolk where M. R. James grew up. We met and bonded over a love of ghost stories and slightly pulpy ‘70s horror movies and I went away wondering whether I could write a book about the love I’d harboured for ghost stories since being a young boy. I soon realised that were I to engage on such a project I’d only want to do it if I could bring something unique to the subject. And I realised how entwined many of the places that I would want to visit – places that were in some way linked to various stories, authors or films – were with my own rather haunted family history. And so I went away and came up with a proposal for a book that, as well as examining some of my favourite authors, would also be an exploration of my own lost family.
EK Is that blog post still available, somewhere?
EP No, I took down that blog post when I began writing the book as there was some material in there that I wanted to use! I kept a few photos on my website.
EK Why do you think people in Britain and Ireland are so good at writing ghost stories?
EP All that pressing history, I think. Almost everywhere you go there are reminders in place names or old architecture of the people who have been there before you. Only the other day I was driving back to my house from the North Norfolk coast and passed a small country drove I’d not previously noticed called Gallowhill Lane, which put me straight in mind of M. R. James’s ‘A View from a Hill’…
EK You often refer back to M. R. James. Why do you think was James so influential, and which of his stories would you recommend to new readers?
EP I think James is so influential because his stories are simply so good – so full of atmosphere, eeriness and playfulness. He wasn’t that prolific (there are around 30-odd stories that were published in his lifetime) and as a result the consistency remains high throughout. I’d definitely try and read them chronologically in the order that they were published, though, as I do think there’s a bit of a drop off in the later stories – though actually the reason that some of those are perhaps a bit more unsatisfying is because they’re structurally more complicated and harder to try and decode. It’s hard for me to pick out a favourite as that seems to fluctuate depending on my mood, but ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, ‘Lost Hearts’, ‘The Mezzotint’ and ‘Count Magnus’ – all from his first published collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, are a good place to begin.
EK Aside from M. R. James, which ghost stories have frightened you or spoke to you the most?
EP I’d like to think I’m not that easily spooked, but the one book that did unsettle me when I was writing Ghostland was Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House. I remember reading it on my own at home at night and definitely feeling a little nervous of killing the light and trying to go to sleep. Other favourites include Algernon Blackwood’s sublime ‘The Willows’, William Hope Hodgson’s weirdly wonderful novel The House on the Borderland, Rudyard Kipling’s heartbreaking ‘They’, and E. F. Benson’s ‘Pirates’. And if we’re talking TV and film then there would be another huge list!
EK I love Shirley Jackson! Now you mention near the beginning of Ghostland that most ghost stories happen in the past. There is a narrow division between nostalgia, sadness, and the uncanny in most. Your own tour of Britain via the ghost stories written about it is interwoven with a memoir of loss. Is there some truth to these weird tales? Are there some ghosts that don't move on?
EP I certainly think that there’s a truth in the subtext of lots of these tales, the best of which deal with huge themes like grief, loss and mortality. And life and the world can obviously be weird and unsettling – as these strange present days show us – with things happening that we can’t easily make sense of. A good ghost story can certainly help to explore this.
As to ghosts that don’t move on, I think that most ‘real’ hauntings intrinsically contain place-bound phantoms. And that’s something that I feel a bit of myself, as I know that in Ghostland I was trying to stare back into my own past. Yet, I wouldn’t want to stop – to not be able to look back on everything that’s happened to me, even though doing so is sometimes painful; I think we walk a tightrope between acknowledging our histories and being beholden to them, but hopefully I’ve got the balance about right.
EK From your book and beyond, have you ever had an experience or encounter you couldn’t explain?
EP I talk about a handful in Ghostland – one odd occurrence that took place in a room I subsequently found has a long and documented history of strange occurrences, and another in the house I grew up in, when I returned to it as a student. Generally though, I’d hazard that if as people we have different levels of weird-detecting ‘radars’ then mine is set at a very low level… Because I can seem to walk around places and not get spooked by things, whereas I have a friend who could be in that same room and claim to be picking up odd vibes that have completely passed me by.
EK How do you explain such unexplainable experiences?
EP I definitely always try to rationalise any odd experiences that I’ve been privy to – so for instance the ‘phantom door bell’ that periodically goes off in my house and plays a ringtone that isn’t selected is something I’d put down to being some kind of radio interference. I have no scientific basis for this, but it seems more likely than some esoteric spirit trying to contact me! I fully accept, however, that there are plenty of good documented examples of odd things that are difficult to rationally explain. So, like M. R. James, I take the view that “I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.”
EK So open-minded with a healthy dose of scepticism.
EP I would say open-minded with a health dose of scepticism neatly sums up my view of strange occurences. Though a bit like Fox Mulder, a part of me “wants to believe…”
EK New nature writing is increasingly veering into the territory of the numinous. I’m thinking about writers like Robert MacFarlane and Helen MacDonald. What role do you think this new sort of “emotional ecology” might have in repairing our relationship with the natural world, and in order to repair this relationship, do you think it’s important we also reconnect with the supernatural world?
EP I think in order to have even a chance of repairing our fractured planet we do need a lot more people to feel a strong connection to it, and then to make choices and act in ways that start to make a tangible difference. I don’t think that’s going to be easy to achieve, but if part of that process also means that people have to engage with the layers of history, superstition and human experience that are intertwined with places – then that surely can’t hurt.