When I think of Muriel Spark, ghost story isn't what comes to mind first, but then maybe I'm not as familiar with her work as I thought. She won a number of awards for her novels, a few of which I have read and enjoyed, so when I saw she has an entry in The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Ghost Stories edited by Peter Haining, I flipped straight to it. "The Leaf Sweeper" is one of Spark's first pieces of fiction, which was published in the Christmas 1956 number of the London Mystery Magazine. It's a quirky rather humorous story which Haining calls "a benchmark in ghost fiction with its portrayal of what can only be described as the phantom of a living person."
Johnnie Geddes is the leaf sweeper of the story, a skill he learned while living in an asylum. Johnnie's problem is that he's had Christmas on the brain and can't stop obsessing (and in some cases shouting) about it. As a matter of fact twenty years earlier he started the Society for the Abolition of Christmas. He believes in doing away with Christmas and even wrote a pamphlet and books about it.
"Johnnie demonstrates that every human unit in the kingdom faces inevitable starvation within a period inversely proportional to that in which one in every six industrial-productivity units, if you see what he means, stops producing toys to fill the stockings of the educational-intake units. He cites appalling statistics to show that 1.024 per cent of the time squandered each Christmas in reckless shopping and thoughtless churchgoing brings the nation closer to its doom by five years. A few readers protested, but Johnnie was able to demolish their muddled arguments, and meanwhile the Society for the Abolition of Christmas increased."
But trouble brews in the kingdom and those moderates within the society become even more moderate and break the whole thing up. It's enough to drive anyone mad, or at least Johnnie, so into a mental home he goes. Several years later the narrator of the story returns to his home town where he sees Jonnnie sweeping away. Still raving about Christmas. He visits Johnnie's aunt, where things are turned upside down, because there is Johnnie, in the flesh it would seem, dressed in an appropriately festive manner fixing holly behind a picture. The ghost of Johnnie comes every Christmas to cheerfully pass the holiday in happy spirits (no pun intended, well, maybe just a little bit) with his aunt (who's actually pretty displeased by the arrangement). It's not just Johnnie's aunt who finds the ghost of a living man creepy and repulsive.
Definitely this is one of the oddest ghost stories I've ever come across, though certainly one of the more amusing.
For a little more atmosphere I decided to turn to a master of the genre, M.R. James. I've read a few of his short stories in the past and always mean to get back to his work. M.R. (Montague Rhodes) James led an interesting life. A lifelong bachelor, he was not only a distinguished scholar of medieval manuscripts and early Christianity, but he was a professor and administrator at Cambridge University and Eton College, and he also managed to write ghost stories in his spare time. The perfect background for writing chilling tales of ghostly hauntings, right? It's his ghost stories that he is known for today. He traveled widely, which served him well in his writings. In 1892 he took his first bicycle tour of the Continent, and later he took at least one trip a year to France where he studied Medieval cathedrals, visiting nearly all those there were to see.
James would often read drafts of his stories to friends and collegians, usually at Christmastime. Although his earliest couple of stories had been published in magazines, he probably wouldn't have considered publishing them in book format had not a friend wanted to do the illustrations for them. It seems as if James's work can be seen as a bridge between Gothic novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries to a more modern tradition of ghost stories. Writers of Gothic novels liked to set their tales firmly in the Medieval period, but James wrote about more contemporary subjects. His stories usually are set in a small village or seaside town, or an abbey or university, involve a gentleman scholar (am guessing he drew heavily on his own life experiences?) and there is usually a discovery of an antique book or artifact that is in some way supernatural or menacing.
James's signature style is apparent in "Lost Hearts", which appears in Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories(the first of two volumes of ghost stories). The year is 1811 and a young boy, an orphan, is taken in by an elderly cousin. It's a generous and incongruous offer from a man who is little more than a recluse. Mr. Abney is a professor of Greek, very learned in mysterious arts as reflected in the many scholarly texts in his vast library. Oh, and he'd like to discover the secret for immortality (a little side hobby?). Mr. Abney has a particular interest in young Stephen's age and is gratified that he's still practically a child. The housekeeper reveals that the kindly gentleman took in two other children, also orphans, prior to Stephen. Unfortunately they ran away without a word to their benefactor. That gypsy blood, no doubt. Or so we're led to believe. I'll leave it up to your imagination to wonder what happens on Stephen's twelfth birthday.
If you're really curious to find out, you can read the story here, or even see the film adaptation (the link is the first of four parts) of the story here.