Another book in the Borderlands Little Book series:
James, M. R. (edited and illustrated by Stephen R. Jones). A Little Jasmine Book of M. R. James. Borderlands Books, 2022. First edition hardback, #462 of 500 copies signed by Jones, a Fine copy, sans dust jacket, as issued. Six tales from the master of the ghost story, plus some nonfiction pieces from James, Jones and others, including a select bibliography.
I will have a small number of copies available in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog (currently in progress).
Yokai is a very broad category of Japanese supernatural entity that can include demons, ghosts, monsters, and just about any other creature from folklore, from microscopic monsters than infect your spleen to dragon-sized titanic snails. Many, but not all, are malevolent, and a goodly number are extremely specific, such as Karakasa kozo, the one-eyed, umbrella-shaped yokai that likes to sneak up on people and lick them with its long tongue.
Here’s a brief guide on identifying various yokai:
There’s also a live-action film featuring 100 of them:
Back on Halloween in 1992, the BBC played a trick on its viewers by broadcasting a program called Ghostwatch. It was an early example of what we would call “Reality TV,” and like the overwhelming majority of Reality TV shows, it was fake.
It was supposedly a BBC camera crew staking out a home where poltergeist was said to be active. In fact, it was a scripted event where viewers intentionally caught glimpses of the malevolent ghost “Pipes” in the background while he was ignored by the cast, with planted on-air callers to the studio adding to the story, and during the course of the broadcast things got progressively weirder.
Like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, there were disclaimers that it was fiction, but the form in which in which it was presented (with real-world TV personalities like Red Dwarf‘s Craig Charles and presenter Michael Parkinson) convinced viewers they were watching the real thing.
Five days after the programme’s transmission, an 18-year-old boy with learning difficulties, Martin Denham, hanged himself, having fallen into what his stepfather described as a trance. He had become obsessed with Ghostwatch and was convinced that there were ghosts in the water pipes of his Nottingham home.
In November 1993, a year after the programme’s one-off airing, two doctors from a child psychiatry unit in Coventry, Dawn Simons and Walter Silveira, submitted an article to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) recording the first cases of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by a television programme. Two ten-year-old boys had been referred to them. One was admitted to an inpatients unit for eight weeks; he would bang his head in an attempt to free himself from thoughts of Ghostwatch and its evil spirit, “Pipes”.
Consultants from Edinburgh came forward with four more children with similar symptoms. Martin Denham’s parents launched an inquiry into their son’s death. In 2002, his mother condemned the BFI’s DVD release of Ghostwatch, saying the programme had killed her son.
The show’s producers, Ruth Baumgarten and Richard Broke, were hauled on to BBC One’s consumer watchdog show Biteback to defend themselves.
Here’s a retrospective video on it:
And here’s writer Stephen Volk on creating it:
Today, of course, fake paranormal reality TV shows have proliferated so far and wide that you can rank over 60 of them and see them parodied on South Park:
I was working in an icu. had a patient who would only repeat what was said to her and was with her all night. One time I went in the room and she started telling me all the ways she died. “I died because of a narcotic overdose, I died because I took too much insulin, I died on a sunny Sunday afternoon,” etc. Then later she looked up at the ceiling and said “they’re all still there.” I ran out of that room as fast as I could.
This is not a library addition, but rather describing a book I’ve owned since 1989. With all the attention paid the new Netflix series of the same name, I thought I would put up a post on my own first edition of the book.
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. Viking, 1959. First edition hardback, a Near Fine copy with slight bumping at head and heel in a Very Good dust jacket with shallow chipping and wear at head, heel and points, slight cracking along folds, and slight dust staining to white rear cover, but otherwise intact. Arguably the most important horror novel of the 20th century. Bleiler, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1766 (in the Supplemental Section on page 547). Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, page 121. Barron, Horror Literature, 4-155. Tymn, Horror Literature, 4-119. Magill, Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, pages 710-714. Bleiler, Supernatural Fiction Writers Volume I, page 483. St. James Guide to Horror Writers, page 292. Basis of the the classic 1963 film The Haunting, the not-at-all classic 1999 remake of same, and the 2018 Netflix miniseries. Bought for $45 at the 1989 Boston Worldcon, the first book for which I ever paid more than $35.
Colby did as was instructed, along the way making friends with a medium named T.D. Giddings, and he would continue to receive guidance during his numerous sessions with the spectral Seneca, told that they would find a place “on high pine hills overlooking a chain of silvery lakes.” In this way, the spirit guided him to a place near the remote settlement of Blue Springs, Florida, a plot of around 35-acres that was near seven wooded hills and Lake Helen and pronounced to be the location of the spiritual camp floating through his visions. Colby and the entire Giddings family would then sign a deed for the land and move in to set up homesteads on what was at the time merely a backwoods feral expanse of trees and scrub brush. Interestingly, it was found that the waters of the nearby lake and spring had healing powers, and Colby would later claim that this water from the local springs had cured him of a case of tuberculosis.
Word soon got out about the healing properties of the springs, and that the famous “seer of spiritualism” and his medium friends had taken up residence here, and lo and behold other mediums and spiritualists began to trickle in, setting up their own humble abodes on this land, and the settlement that would be called The Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp was birthed, with “Cassadaga” being the Native word for “water beneath the rocks,” and the name chosen for a lake of the same name near a similar camp in New York called the Lily Dale Assembly. At first it was mostly a winter retreat for spiritualists, but more and more people began to move in permanently, until by the 1920s it had became an actual town and a major center of spiritualism in the United States, with the size of the camp gradually blossoming to 57 acres and attracting mediums and mystics from all over the country and eventually the world.
And naturally it’s haunted:
Interestingly, Cassadaga has not only gained a reputation as being the spiritualist capital of the world, but also as being one of the most haunted places in Florida. One of the most infamous of the town’s haunted buildings is the Cassadaga Hotel, which maintains a distinct roaring 1920s vibe and is said to be prowled by a ghost named Arthur. This particular spirit is said to enjoy dragging furniture around, flicking lights on and off, and sitting by the windows of the hotel, and he apparently leaves the odor of gin and cigar smoke in his wake. Another famous haunting is at the town’s cemetery, which is even said to have an ornate, old fashioned haunted chair called “The Devil’s Chair,” and there have been numerous apparitions seen here, as well as at the lake. The whole town in general is known for producing a wide array of ghostly phenomena, and this is said to be due to its position over a vortex that allows travel between the physical world and the spiritual.
I’m sure the The Devil’s Chair must a seat of such obvious evil that-
That looks less like a throne for The Prince of Darkness than something you would make because you had a bunch of bricks left over after building a BBQ grill.
Anyway, Cassadaga is about 30 minutes SW of Daytona Beach off I-4…
I arrived at work very early one morning, and as soon as I stepped off the elevator a call bell was ringing. I answered it, and it was a resident asking if someone could come into his room and turn the light on. I went into the room and asked what he needed, and he said, “There’s a man on my ceiling! Do you see him? Get him out of here!” The resident had the most terrified look on his face. I assured the resident that no one was there. I even pulled the curtain back to show him. He looked frightened and said, “He’s right there! Turn the light on! He keeps looking at me!”
