I came to Algernon Blackwood through his weird fiction, tales like ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’. Truth be told, he’s one of my favourite early weird writers. He creates an unseen, invisible or indescribable ‘weird’ without having to tell that’s what he’s doing every five minutes. His weird stories, though, while unsettling and uncanny are rarely terrifying. ‘The Kit Bag’ is terrifying. You can read it here but I don’t recommend reading it in the dark.
As I read it, it’s a story that blends two understandings of the ghostly. The first is the traditional supernatural conception of a ghost returning with unfinished business, specifically to claim what’s his. Johnson got sent the wrong bag by mistake and the bag itself is haunted. John Turk, the murderer, at his death
left a note for Mr Wilbraham saying as he’d be much obliged if they’d have him put away, same as the woman he murdered, in the old kit-hag.
A simple case of coming back for the bag you inexplicably wish to be buried in. The other explanation is more psychological. In my research on ghost beliefs in the eighteenth century, one of the key changes you see around this period is a reassessment of what it means to see a murder victim (bear with me, I know that’s not what happened here!). Old stories and traditional tales were full of ghosts returning to point out their murderer or appearing to their murderer to convict them of their guilt. As medicalised understandings of the mind and its perceptions developed over the 18th century, increasingly this particular type of haunting was given a rational explanation: the effect of a guilty conscience on an overwrought mind. In ‘The Kit Bag’, Johnson is no murderer, but perhaps, after all, he has a guilty conscience and might not that have conjured his ghost? What need does a ghost have, after all, to creep up stairs and hide in empty rooms? As Johnson sits in his rooms and packs his kit bag his mind runs to guilt:
He felt as though he were doing something that was strongly objected to by another person, another person, moreover, who had some right to object. It was a most disturbing and disagreeable feeling, not unlike the persistent promptings of conscience: almost, in fact, as if he were doing something he knew to be wrong.
The guilt he points to here is inexplicable, out of place, causeless. Of course, we could interpret the feeling as caused by Turk’s own desire for the bag, the ‘strong objection’ that this passage talks about. I’d say though that the passage points us towards his very real guilt over the verdict of not-guilty, resulting from the work of his law firm, on a man he knows to be guilty of a brutal crime. He is haunted already by John Turk’s face, which he cannot clear from his mind. Is this just one more haunting of his ‘sin guilty conscience’ (to quote Thomas Nashe).
I don’t think we need to choose between supernatural and natural readings, they blend well together. The apparition is created both by guilt and by the obsessions of a killer’s ghost. Why not? However we interpret that part of the story, no-one can deny the creepy (and creeping) quality of its terror. I stupidly read this alone at night in my creaky old house. Mistakes were made, shall we say. There is an understated horror and Blackwood conveys perfectly the growing consternation of Johnson. At first, it’s merely a foot upon the stair, it becomes a figure out of the corner of the eye, a sigh, the movement of a bag across the room… culminating in lights off and a sigh breathed close against your face while ears pricked, he listens to the bag moved across the room. That sense of creeping dread, of trying to explain away the probably mundane noises, of sharpened senses stretched to hear or see anything, the horror of sight taken away, leaving you alone in the dark with something living, something moving, something hostile.
It’s a great story and I don’t want to ruin it. Just don’t read it alone in the dark!
Romancing the Gothic 