Dark Encounters: A Collection of Ghost Stories by William Croft Dickinson

Dark Encounters: 

A Collection of Ghost Stories

by William Croft Dickinson

Historian and archaeologist William Croft Dickinson (1897 – 1963) was born in Leicester and raised in Yorkshire.  He had no Scottish antecedents yet developed an affinity and love for the culture of the country, becoming an expert in the early modern Scottish history and the Scottish Reformation.  Dickinson himself made history when he was appointed Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, the oldest and most distinguished professorship in the field, becoming the first English-born holder of this role, and occupying the chair for close to twenty years.  Dickinson also served on the Scottish Records Office Advisory Council, as a Trustee of the National Library of Scotland, as a member of the former Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and on the Councils of the Scottish History Society and the Stair Society (which promotes knowledge of the history of Scots Law).

As one would expect, Dickinson’s writings are mainly of an academic nature, and in this regard, he is particularly known for his contributions to The Scottish Historical Review which he revived and refounded in 1947.  However, Dickinson also wrote fiction.  In 1944 he published his magical fantasy novel Borrobil, describing the adventures of two children, Donald and Jean, who meet a friendly magician named Borrobil and travel with him to a legendary Celtic past.  The same characters visit medieval settings in two sequels – The Eildon Tree (1947) and The Flag from the Isles (1951).

Dickinson was surely aware of the rich tradition of Scottish supernatural legend which eventually inspired several authors of Gothic, ghost and horror fiction.   Perhaps it was this which led him to try his hand also at ghost stories, starting with The Sweet Singers, first published in Blackwood’s magazine in 1947.  This became the title work of The Sweet Singers and Three Other Remarkable Occurrents, a collection Dickinson published in 1953.  When he died in 1963, Dickinson had just finished proofreading Dark Encounters, which brought together these four ghostly tales with nine others he had written over the previous decade.  In 2017, Polygon, an imprint of Edinburgh-based publishers Birlinn, reissued Dark Encounters in an attractive yet good-value hardback edition, augmented with the posthumously published The MacGregor Skull, the final “annual Christmas ghost story” Dickinson wrote for The Scotsman.

Dickinson’s ghost stories have been compared to those of M.R. James and it is not difficult to see why.  Dickinson writes of the academic circles he knows very well.  Most of the stories start with a group of professors sitting around a fire in the Common Room or the Smoking Room of the University, with the talk invariably leading to discussions about strange and unusual occurrences. The protagonists of the story are, more often than not, scholarly types who, through carelessness, sheer bad luck or failure to heed friendly warnings, end up face to face with unearthly forces.  As in M.R. James’ classic Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come to You, My Lad, several of Dickinson’s tales involve spirits which have been disturbed.   Inquisitiveness as to the contents of a sealed room in a ruined castle unleashes a spectral black dog (Quita Non Movere), the digging up of ancient grave sites spells bad news for the archaeologist concerned (Let the Dead Bury the Dead), and an ancient demonic book brings any curious readers to an early death (The Work of Evil).

Dickinson’s stories have an old-fashioned feel to them.  In his specially written introduction to this collection, Alistair Kerr valiantly tries to portray Dickinson as a “moderniser” of Jamesean tropes and to position him as the bridger of “the gap between M.R. James and modern writers like Ray Russell and Stephen King”. I don’t really understand why Rusell and King, in particular, are mentioned as examples, as they are hardly best known for ghost stories in the mould of M.R. James.  In any case, however, I don’t believe Dickinson’s strengths are as a “moderniser”. It is true that he is writing decades after James, and that this is reflected in the setting and in some of the plot details.  (His Own Number even features an early “haunted computer”).  However, Dickinson is ultimately happy to stick to old formulas and, frankly, I see nothing wrong with that when it’s done well.

The real distinguishing feature of Dickinson’s stories is their detailed Scottish background. Unsurprisingly, given his academic interests, these are tales imbued with the history, legends and landscapes of the North of the Border. The ghosts which haunt these pages are inextricably linked to the land and its history, particularly the ancient rivalries between warring clans, as in Return at Dusk and The Return of the Native.  These are also amongst the scariest of Dickinson’s creations, the weight of the centuries giving the baddies of the stories an extra aura of malevolence.   Dickinson’s very first story, The Sweet Singers, is less scary than moving, and is inspired by the imprisonment of the Covenanters on the Bass Rock, an episode of the Reformation which the author knew very well.  This background gives the collection a strong sense of authenticity.   As regular visitor to Scotland, a country which I love, I also enjoyed the descriptions of the settings, most of which are either real, or closely based on actual places.  The lonely expanse of Rannoch Moor, the hills and mountains of the Trossachs, ancient ruined castles, the seascape of North Berwick and the afore-mentioned Bass Rock (lately given a new lease of “literary” life by Evie Wyld) – all contribute to that rich atmosphere so necessary to a successful ghost story.          

Some authors are called to be innovators.  William Croft Dickinson is not one of these.  However, the very “familiarity” and old-world frisson of this collection, reminiscent of the classic ghost stories of earlier decades, is what I enjoyed most about Dark Encounters.   

Hardcover, New Edition, 224 pages

Published October 31st 2017 by Polygon (first published 1963)