Bagnell Terrace

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, July 1925
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,000 words
(First read 19/06/2012)

One of EFB's London spook stories.  Unidentified Narrator lives in Bagnell Terrace, a place so tranquil that ...

even the cats [...] have caught something of its discretion and tranquillity, for they do not hail each other with long-drawn yells of mortal agony like their cousins in less well-conducted places, but sit and have quiet little parties like the owners of the houses in which they condescend to be lodged and boarded. [this is the high point of the story]

U.N. lusts after the end-terrace house, which is occupied by a mysterious recluse, a man neither young nor old but, in the words of neighbour and intimate friend Hugh Grainger*, 'timeless'.  Well anyway, the long and the short is that after a purely coincidental trip to Egypt, U.N. takes ownership of the house, which, almost forgot to mention, has a 'garden room' exactly like EFB's in Rye, and the place turns out to be haunted ... or possessed ... by the previous owner ... or EFB's Egyptian cat souvenir ... or something.  As usual good old Hughie comes to the rescue and exorcises the place merely by invoking God's name once or twice.
I can't imagine it took Benson more than about 35 minutes to write this garbled twaddle.  Hardly his finest hour.
You can read it online here.


* Renamed Hugh Abbot for this particular outing. 

THE CRITICS

In several of [Benson's spook] stories, the lust to possess a particular house forms the fulcrum of the plot (as in Bagnell Terrace) and the unassuaged anger and revengefulness of the dispossessed owner is often what creates the haunt. Reconciliation and Naboth's Vineyard are two of his most successful stories, especially the latter, which has a really blood-curdling climax.

~Joan Aiken in foreword to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson 1992

The thematic unity of Spook Stories partly arises from its founding myth of Naboth, whose name is evoked in both Bagnell Terrace and Naboth’s Vineyard. Naboth, it should be remembered, would not sell his vineyard to King Ahab because it was his birthright. Ahab was persuaded to procure the land by using some rather underhand means, only to incite a prophet’s curse and the death of his own son. Ahab had violated the mystical connection between land and blood, and, even though he was a king, he should have accepted his allotted place.

Whilst Ahab was cursed for coveting the land of a lowly and powerless neighbour, Benson was altogether happier to imagine covetous social inferiors. If M. R. James’ ghosts penalised the “curious,” Benson imagines the spiritual world as revolving around the need to check human ambitions for the redistribution of property. The Naboth myth is overturned completely in Bagnell Terrace, in which the narrator reclaims a delightful suburban residence from a foreigner who does not justly belong there. The narrator nicknames the foreigner “Naboth” only because he personally “coveted” this fellow’s house, but Naboth will sell his house as a trap, unleashing a curse which the narrator will have to defeat. Yet the inferior Naboth is sent packing, allowing the virtuous king to enjoy his new vineyard.
[…] Unlike the uniquely Gothic disaster of The Face, the subsequent contributions [to Spook Stories] “And No Bird Sings” (which features an estate rather than a house), Bagnell Terrace, and The Temple are jolly frontier tales in which the bourgeoisie successfully impose their suburban will on to a place which is still haunted by ancient forces.

~James Mooney at “Tychy”, 25/07/2011. Quoted from here.