THE MAYOR OF HORRORTOWN By Matt Cowan

Edward Frederic Benson, the son the Archbishop of Canterbury, was born in 1867, in Wokingham, Berkshire. He attended Marlborough and King’s College, Cambridge. He spent three years studying archeology abroad in Greece and Egypt. He enjoyed immediate success with his first society novel, Dodo (1893) and ended up writing over a hundred published pieces in a wide range of fields. He is most well known for his comedies and society novels, but his interest in the paranormal allowed him to produce a number of supernatural works of fiction. His novel, Across the Stream (1919), anthologies Visible and Invisible (1923) and Spook Stories (1928) are evidence that he enjoyed the macabre. He sold several stories to Weird Tales Magazine, which I wrote an article about previously. He had a sister and two brothers (both of whom also produced their own writings). He was also the mayor of Rye in Sussex from 1934 to 1937. That town was the model for Tilling, the fictional town that many of his tales took place within. Benson died in 1940 of throat cancer.

Stories I’ve read:

1- “Bagnell Terrace” (1928)- A man, living on a cul-de-sac, gets the chance to purchase another residence in the same area, which he has coveted for years, when their peculiar neighbor suddenly moves out. The strange man who used to live there at times appeared young, until a good look at his face made him seem impossibly old. The house holds the smell of an Egyptian temple inside, and an ancient dark force still has a hold on the place.

2- “The Passenger” (?)- A man boards a double-decker bus and notices a lone fellow passenger sitting ahead of him. The man is quiet and seems to disappear from time to time. When the passenger is finally seen clearly, near the end of the story, it is both chilling and grizzly. Here is a small sample from the story.

“Close around me were secure, normal rooms, tenanted by living men and women, where cheerful fires burnt and steady lights illuminated solid walls. But here companionless, except for the motionless form crouched in front of me, I sped between earth and sky, among dim shadows and fugitive lights. And all the time I knew, though not knowing how I knew, some dreadful drama was immediately to be unrolled in front of me.”

3- “Caterpillars” (1912)- This is a wonderfully weird tale about a man’s stay in a beautiful Italian villa that overlooked the sea. He shares the place with an artist and the house’s owner and his wife. The man finds he cannot sleep in the villa, and one night when he goes downstairs to one of the sitting rooms to retrieve a book, he finds the only unused bedroom door open. Inside he describes what he sees on the bed as follows.

“Then I saw that the grayish light of the bedroom came from the bed, or rather what was on the bed. For it was covered with great caterpillars, a foot or more in length, which crawled over it.”

He goes on to describe these strange caterpillars as having crab-like pinchers instead of the sucker-feet that most have. “There must have been hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of writhing, crawling pyramid on the bed.” He continues. When they notice him watching, the caterpillars begin to drop off of the bed and move towards him. He flees, but it would not be the last he would see of them.

4- “The Witch-Ball” (1929)- A trio of friends finds a blue witch-ball in a curio shop, which they then purchase. The woman is very happy with the find but her husband, who often has psychic feelings, is disturbed by it. Later, when he and the other male friend begin to look into the witch-ball, they see the body of a woman crawl up from where she lay underground. Her specter then leaves the ball and enters their house.

5- “The China Bowl”(?)- A man buys a house that is for sale because the owner’s wife recently died inside and the place reminds him too much of her. Soon afterwards the new owner begins to have nightmares where he is chased by an unseen entity and later he begins to see the ghost of the deceased former lady of the house, drinking from a china bowl in her old room.

6- “Terror By Night” (1912)- Two men are suddenly and inexplicably assailed by a strange dread of oncoming turmoil that lasts for several days until a ghostly visitor comes a-calling.

7- “Mrs. Amworth” (1923)- A kindly middle-aged widow moves into a quiet village where all her neighbors love her, except for one man who believes her to be a Vampire.

There are many more supernatural tales penned by E.F. Benson (and even some by his brother R.H. Benson), and a number of them can be found for free on-line. Do yourself a favor, and give him a try. E.F. Benson’s stories are very easy to read and are always full of intriguing mysteries of the strange variety.