Giving up the ghost

In Competition No. 2542 you were invited to submit a ghost story entitled ‘The Face of the Horse’. I read the entries by flickering candlelight in a bid to recreate the atmosphere of the dean’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, where M.R. James gave Christmas Eve readings of his stories to a group of friends. By all accounts these were jocular, camp occasions punctuated by laughter, pranks and abstruse jokes, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the comedy — intentional or not — in your entries; G.M. Davis’s speaking horse was a stroke of comic genius.

James’s interest in ghosts was awakened in childhood by the sight of a toy Punch & Judy set, and Brian Murdoch’s malevolent wooden rocking-horse certainly gave me the willies. I also liked his Poe-esque reference to cosmology. Equally disquieting was D.A. Prince’s slow-burn portrait of her protagonist’s mental disintegration — the understated, Jamesian approach more effective than full-on Gothic schlock-horror. Ghost stories are not everyone’s cup of tea, though, and Noel Petty’s entry takes an entertaining pop at the genre.

The winners, printed below, get £30 each. The extra fiver goes to Brian Murdoch and commendations to Gill Holland, Joseph Altham and Paul Wigmore.
Two errors. First, astronomical features never look anything like their names. Wrong, in the case of the horse-head nebula. Second, old-fashioned rocking-horses with deranged, toothy faces rock by themselves in attics when ridden by long-dead children. Wrong reason.
The Old Priest-House had a rocking-horse in the attic. No one knew why. The house had never had children. When it rocked, the incumbents assumed rats, wind or alcoholic overindulgence. After the Trust acquired the house, it renovated the attic, cleaned the skylights, admitting fine views of the stars, and kept the horse.