As a rule, new bricks and mortar create an environment particularly uncongenial to a self-respecting ghost
- Date of account
- Published 1911
- Source
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore
- Reference
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore · selected passage 34
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
As a rule, new bricks and mortar create an environment particularly uncongenial to a self-respecting ghost
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyAs a rule, new bricks and mortar create an environment particularly uncongenial to a self-respecting ghost. Ivied walls, gabled roots, dim and musty passages leading to gloomy, oak-panelled rooms, supply the kind of setting that the spook of convention demands, and nobody passing a certain little house close to the road, just outside the seaside village of Aber----n would ever think of its being haunted. Built some fifteen years ago by a retired seaman named Captain Morgan, this very ordinary dwelling (of the five-windows-and-door-in-the-middle style of architecture, absolutely unrelieved by gable, porch or balcony) is certainly far from suggesting any thoughts of the uncanny. Yet I remember hearing, soon after it was built and occupied, that it was supposed to harbour a ghost, though inquiry could elicit little beyond the fact that Captain Morgan had remarked to a friend: "I don't know what it is about my house, but we do hear the queerest noises that we can't account for. We begin to think it is haunted." Then people who heard about these "noises" remembered rather a curious thing.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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