The Ghosts at Grantley

The Ghosts at Grantley is a Victorian ghost story by Leonard Kip, the American lawyer and writer who lived from 1826 to 1906. Kip practiced law in Albany, New York, and wrote fiction as a sideline across several decades, producing a handful of novels and short story collections that found small but loyal audiences in the late nineteenth century.

The story belongs to the substantial American ghost story tradition that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century alongside the better known English Victorian ghost story school of Dickens, Le Fanu, and M R James. American ghost stories of the period tended to draw on the architectural and historical material that the older Eastern seaboard cities and country houses provided. Grantley itself is the imagined old country house at the centre of Kip’s narrative, with the kind of long family history and accumulated atmosphere that the genre required.

Kip handles the supernatural material with the slow patient atmospheric build that the best Victorian ghost stories worked with. The narrator visits Grantley as a guest of the family, gradually becomes aware that something is not right about particular rooms and particular hours of the day, and works through the long process of discovering what the house contains and what it wants from the present generation living in it. The resolution arrives quietly, without the obvious shocks that the cheaper magazine ghost stories of the period favoured.

The story is short enough to read in one sitting. Kip is not a major figure even in the second tier of American Victorian ghost story writers, but the story has stayed in print in various anthologies and collections of nineteenth century American supernatural fiction because the writing is competent and the atmosphere is well managed. Readers who enjoy F Marion Crawford, Sarah Orne Jewett’s supernatural stories, or the various Henry James ghost stories will find Kip working in similar territory.

For readers building a library of nineteenth century American ghost fiction, The Ghosts at Grantley belongs alongside Crawford’s The Upper Berth, Wharton’s later ghost stories, and the various supernatural anthologies that have collected the period’s best work.