The New Murrey and Blue blog

Ghosts and spooky stories are not new, and no doubt tales of them were told aeons ago around cave fires when mammoth-hunting was over for the day. Shakespeare created the ghost of Hamlet’s father to alarm audiences in 16^th-century England, and ghosts were certainly around before then, in the medieval period, as you can read here Paranormal Activity in Medieval England: The Ghosts of Byland Abbey – Medievalists.net. I was impressed by this excellent article but won’t spoil things by giving too much away. You must read the entire article yourselves. It is concerned in the main with Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire.

I’ve written about Byland Abbey before, specifically about the earthly goings-on involving its rather unholy monks. You can read my article here Medieval monks often lacked all trace of holiness…. – murreyandblue. But the Medievalists.net article is concerned with supernatural matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Holy Ghost!

“….Around the year 1400, one of the monks [of Byland] made use of a few leftover pages at the end of [a] book to record [twelve] stories he had heard. These were often frightening tales – the monk was even scared to write it….!”

These tales were first discovered by M.R. James and published in 1922. I’m a great fan of the great M.R. James (and many other such writers) and have a bookshelf devoted solely to the genre. It’s deliciously shiversome to sit in a comfortable armchair after dark (preferably by candlelight, for real effect) reading stories that make me curl up to prevent anything from grabbing my legs under the chair! I can well understand the monk who was frightened to even write down such tales.

So read the Medievalists.net article, but be sure to have a few candles ready before you open M.R. James’s account of the twelve tales from Byland Abbey….

You can read more about the ghost stories of Byland Abbey here: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2020/10/byland-abbey-ghost-stories.html which link contains the following sources:

For the Latin text, see: M.R. James, ‘Twelve Medieval Ghost-Stories’, The English Historical Review, 37 (1922), pp. 413-22.

For English translations, see: A.J. Grant, ‘Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories’, The Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 27 (1924), pp. 363-79.

Byland Abbey ghost stories project, Saint Anselm College.