From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

The events that I mean to relate took place some while ago, but the feeling they produced in me lingers as freshly as if it were yesterday. At that time, the local museum had been under refurbishment for many years. Being of antiquarian inclination I eagerly awaited its reopening, and when the appointed evening finally arrived, I took myself along to admire the new galleries. Many of the objects I remembered from the earlier displays: a Bronze Age funerary urn, a 17th-century cradle, a Roman stone coffin. Alongside them were several things I did not recognise: a Roman pipeclay figurine, recovered from a child’s grave; a lead curse tablet, wishing for its victim to turn to pus. There were trinket boxes and medicine bottles; old tin toys and costume jewellery; embroidered dresses and little silken shoes. In short, it was the usual miscellaneous accretion of a provincial people and their lives.

On first entering the main gallery, I had found myself in a throng of visitors, many of them families with young children, talking and laughing about what they saw. Between the hubbub of conversation and the noise of the interactive exhibits, I found it difficult to concentrate, so I waited patiently for the others to move on. Gradually the room emptied out. At last, I thought, I could read the labels in peace. I walked from case to case, admiring this teapot, that matchbox, that toy dog on wheels. Now the gallery was quiet, yet still I found I could not settle. Although quite alone with the accumulations of so many centuries, I began to feel that I was not alone after all – that the room was, in fact, full of people. I had the sensation of being jostled in an invisible crowd, deafened by the chatter of a hundred silent voices, each one connected with an item on display. I felt like an intruder. The sensation was so strong that I left, finding refuge in another, busier, room, and its soothingly dull display of fishing tackle.

As ghost stories go, this one is a bit disappointing. But ask any curator, particularly if they work in an old building, and they often have strange stories to tell. Objects that move around of their own accord; maintenance men, working late, hearing footsteps when nobody is there; unexplained disturbances on CCTV. Haunted houses are a staple of the English tourist industry and many history lovers might fantasise about a direct encounter with the past. But there is something about art history and archaeology that makes previous ages seem especially immediate. No wonder so many scholars of those disciplines have turned to writing ghost stories – chief among them M.R. (Montague Rhodes) James (1862–1936).

By day, James was a medievalist, making his career as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and subsequently provost of Eton. His catalogues of manuscripts in the collections of college libraries are still widely consulted and in many cases unsurpassed. In the late 19th century, ‘scientific’ approaches to historical enquiry were gaining traction and James’s trajectory set him firmly among the ranks of the professional scholar, distinct from the more amateurish ‘antiquaries’ of the past. Yet in 1904 he published Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, illustrated by his close friend James McBryde, who had died earlier that year. Originally written to be read aloud to small groups of friends and colleagues, often on Christmas Eve, these eight stories, and those that were published later, explore the less respectable side of historical studies, especially the emotional and even magical pull of objects usually studied from more sober angles.

Although the uneasy rural settings of many of the stories rightly identify James as the ‘father of folk horror’, many more deal with the physical remains of the past. Often he drew on his work as a medievalist. In ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’, the main character, Dennistoun, comes into possession of a folio of fragments cannibalised from illuminated manuscripts, a situation that must have been familiar to James. Alberic’s fragments, ‘plundered [from] the Chapter library of St. Bertrand’ in the late 17th century, prove too tempting for Dennistoun, who plans to take the album to Cambridge, for the ‘Wentworth Collection’ (read: the Fitzwilliam Museum). Like Alberic before him, however, he pays a terrible price for his acquisition.

There is a moralising overtone to the punishments visited, first on the album’s original compiler, who mutilated manuscripts to create it, and subsequently on the modern scholar, who wishes to further dislocate the album from its home. James took Dennistoun’s name from the real-life Scottish antiquarian James Dennistoun (1803–55), who spent the middle decades of the 19th century travelling around Italy collecting manuscript cuttings, some bought directly from cash-strapped monasteries. The real-life Dennistoun intended to use the resulting album as the basis for a history of Italian medieval art, but never completed it. James was no doubt aware of Dennistoun’s fragments, some of which were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London after the antiquarian’s death; beneath the surface of James’s narrative lurks the implication that ‘unprincipled’ scholars can just as easily disturb or destroy the past in their efforts to preserve it – and, perhaps, that the ones who do deserve to be punished.

As well as borrowing names from the recent antiquarian past, James drew on his deep knowledge of medieval texts and iconography to craft his horrors. Among Alberic’s papers is a drawing, signed by Alberic himself, of King Solomon on his throne, and before the throne a terrifying, crouched figure:

a mass of coarse, matted black hair […] cover[ing] a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires […] hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils […] Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by this appalling effigy.

James’s imagined scene derives partly from his interest in the apocryphal Testament of Solomon – which claims to be Solomon’s own narrative of how he built the Temple of Jerusalem with the help of enslaved demons – and partly from the author’s notorious fear of spiders. However, the image James describes also recalls illustrations of Jacobus de Teramo’s Consolatio Peccatorum, Seu Processus Belial (The Consolation of Sinners, or the Trial of Belial), written in c. 1382. The text imagines a tribunal between Christ and the Devil, presided over by King Solomon, with the demon Belial as the Devil’s legal advocate. Popular throughout the Middle Ages, the Trial of Belial was reproduced many times, in illuminated manuscripts and early printed books, even into the 17th century. James must have been aware of the tract’s iconographic tradition, which often features a ghastly demon approaching King Solomon’s throne.

In ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’ then, as so often in James’s stories, a fictive artwork – Alberic’s drawing – provides clues to the appearance of a supernatural creature never fully or directly described by the narrator. Similarly, in ‘Count Magnus’, the scholar Wraxall encounters two menacing figures in the narrative engravings on the Count’s sarcophagus: one ‘strange form […] unduly short’, with ‘the tentacle of a devil-fish’ for an arm, the other ‘a cloaked man […] leaning on a stick’. Later on, this pair pursue Wraxall to his death, but now the description is chillingly sparse: ‘both were in dark cloaks; the taller one wore a hat, the shorter a hood […] He had seen them before’. Already half-revealed in an artwork, the horror is ready to be recognised when it emerges into the real life of the story.

In ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, an artwork again helps to tie up the narrative. The most horrifying moment comes when a Mr Somerton recounts his discovery of the treasure, hidden deep in a well shaft (a location revealed, incidentally, by messages in a stained-glass window). Pulling what he thinks is an old leather bag towards him in the darkness, he describes how ‘it hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck’. The reader gets little sense of the fiend’s appearance until Somerton’s friend points out a carving on the Italian marble well-head: ‘a horrid, grotesque shape – perhaps more like a toad than anything else’. The artwork reveals things left unsaid by the narrator.

James’s most famous story about a work of art is ‘The Mezzotint’. The main character, Mr Williams, is tasked with buying topographical prints and drawings for the collection of the ‘Ashleian Museum’ (again, read: the Ashmolean), and James’s narrative revels in the minutiae of the acquisitions process, well known to him as director of the Fitzwilliam. He describes the arrival of a catalogue from a London dealer ‘Mr J. W. Britnell’ with a letter ‘beg[ging] to call your attention to No. 978 in our accompanying catalogue’. This turns out to be a ‘rather indifferent mezzotint’ of a manor house: ‘perhaps’, James quips in an aside, ‘the worst form of engraving known’. The mezzotint soon justifies its advertisement, however, subtly changing each time it is viewed, playing out the revengeful kidnapping of the engraver’s son a century earlier. The mezzotint’s tragic show occurs once and once only: at the end of the story it lies quietly in the museum’s collection and, ‘though carefully watched, it has never been known to change again’.

James never abandoned the idea that objects and artworks might sometimes come to life. In 1923, he reworked aspects of ‘The Mezzotint’ for a new story, ‘The Haunted Doll’s House’, to be copied out into a volume not quite 4cm high, bound in vellum and included in the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle. In the playful manuscript story, ‘A Night in King’s College Chapel’ (not published until 1985), figures in the stained glass come alive: ‘To my horror I saw [the figure of Reuben], distinctly, lower his arms (which had been raised over his head in surprise), retire to the edge of the well, and sit down on it.’ 

Like an actor after a show, the figure then ‘produced an extraordinarily murky clay [pipe], filled it, struck a match on the stonework of the well and lit up, so that soon an odour as of the worst variety of shag stole over the sacred edifice’. The chapel comes alive with the ‘perfect buzz of conversation on all sides; voices male, female and animal’. A fight breaks out between Eve and Mrs Job and the prophets from the centre lights wander over to the west window, dropping their scrolls behind them or tying them around their necks. ‘They were dreadfully mixed next day in some cases,’ James writes, while the ones that were tied, ‘having been treated in this way persistently for three centuries, are almost entirely illegible now’.

 ‘A Night in King’s College Chapel’ is a playful take on the lives of things, but in ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’, one of James’s last stories, he considers those ‘dreadful days, on which we have had to acknowledge with gloomy resignation that our world has turned against us’:

the world of things that do not speak or work or hold congresses and conferences. It includes such beings as the collar stud, the inkstand, the fire, the razor, and, as age increases, the extra step on the staircase which leads you either to expect or to not expect it. By these and such as these […] the word is passed round, and the day of misery arranged

In the end, however, the rebellion of the objects is connected to the unquiet spirit of one of the protagonist’s enemies, and James concludes that perhaps ‘there is something not inanimate behind the Malice of Inanimate Objects’.

Indeed, in many of James’s stories, objects provide a means for the dead to reach beyond their historical moment and into the world of the living. In ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, a professor called Parkins takes a winter holiday at ‘Burnstow’ on the east coast, where an archaeologist colleague has asked him to view ‘the site of the Templars’ preceptory’. In the ruins, Parkins discovers a whistle with the inscription: ‘QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT’ (‘who is this who is coming?’ – a line from the book of Isaiah). Blowing it produces a note with ‘a quality of infinite distance’, a sound ‘that seemed to have the power […] of forming pictures in the brain’. Parkins starts to see a lonely figure, lingering on the shore and chasing him across the sands, before finally, alone in his twin room at the hotel, he sees someone ‘suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed’.

In the humorous interludes that punctuate the narrative, the sinister power of the whistle is tied to questions of religious discord that were still live in James’s time. One character states ‘that, in Parkins’s place, he should himself be careful about using a thing that had belonged to a set of Papists’ (Catholics had been permitted to study at Oxbridge only since 1871). Other stories suggest James’s interest in the layering of ages in the English landscape and the long history of materials: the figures of a cat, death and the Devil on ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, which seem to come to life in the night, turn out to have been carved from the wood of a ‘Hanging Oak’, a common motif in British folklore.

But for historians of all sorts, James’s most alluring (and, perhaps, most relatable) story is ‘A View from a Hill’. The narrative centres on a pair of binoculars, hand-made by a suspiciously successful local antiquary called Mr Baxter, which reveal the landscape as it appeared in times past. It turns out that Baxter was only too literal in realising his desire ‘to look through a dead man’s eyes’, filling the binoculars with liquid made from boiled bones. But the dead, who ‘didn’t like having their bones boiled’, finally come to carry Baxter off ‘whither he would not’. An unfortunate end for Baxter, but what greater fantasy for students of the past than seeing history first-hand? Historians of all kinds – but especially art historians – devote their lives, by different means, to exactly this cause. What else is Michael Baxandall’s famous concept of the ‘period eye’ – his attempt to recover the culturally shaped modes of vision specific to certain times and places – than a more respectable attempt to look through dead men’s eyes?

James was writing at a time when professional historians were anxious to distance their quasi-scientific approaches from the whimsical studies of antiquaries. But his stories reveal that he understood only too well what many students of art and history feel when faced with the remains of the past. The creeping feeling that we are never quite alone with the objects we study, that we are always somehow accompanied by the people who once made, viewed and used them, and that their intentions and desires are still deeply embedded in the objects that survive them. Drawing out these intentions, accounting for the humanity of the long dead, is a task that can cause the scholar considerable anxiety – accompanied or not by the fear that, should we get it wrong, the dead will find a way to return, to put us right.

From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.