“Ghost Stories,” “Haunted Victorian America,” and “Historical Fiction”
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of this interview series here at Cemetery Dance and over on my YouTube channel.
Through in-depth conversation with authors this column explores the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror and dark fiction, and more.
My short story collections with Cemetery Dance are full of the kind of stories that operate with Night Time Logic. My latest is called Phantom Constellations and is coming in November 2025.
In June 2025, Joshua Rex was one of my guests as part of the Summer of Liminal Space series. You can hear him in conversation with the panelists as well as hear him read his story “The Caretaker” here.
We began our conversation here with a question about Joshua’s work as a historian.
DANIEL BRAUM: Please tell us about your work as a historian. How does it inform and inspire your writing?
JOSHUA REX: I am the historian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums. My research there focuses on the Hayes family and his presidency, but also on Victorian American culture, architecture, and art. I was extremely fortunate to find a position not only in my field (they are rare), but in the very time period that was the focus of my graduate studies, and that I am most interested in.
My historical work informs every aspect of my writing. I am inspired by the Victorian vernacular in art, architecture, dress, literature, and music, but also generally their daily lives and the world they built, which is slowly vanishing.
Please tell us the concept of Haunted Victorian America: Ghost Stories and how the project was conceived.
Joe Morey (from Weird House Press) and I were chatting, and he asked if I had ever given thought to producing a collection of Victorian-era stories. I had written some period pieces (like my novella The Inamorta published through Weird House). There was not, to my knowledge, a volume that specifically addressed Victorian American ghost stories, so I thought I’d give the idea a go, looking to represent many aspects and voices from the period.
In the introduction you compare being an author of historical fiction to being a magician — using sleight-of-hand to create suspension of disbelief. As both a reader and as a writer, how important is this willing participation in the illusion as opposed to knowing what is presented is not actual accuracy?
Creating a believable setting that feels period accurate in historical fiction is tricky and daunting, though pleasurable at the same time. How does one describe a world one has never seen, and can never truly know? The L. P. Hartley quote I chose for the epigraph of this book underscores the challenge: “The past is a foreign country; they do things different there.” In a way, this summarizes both the humbling reality that no matter how much a writer may research an era, he or she can never truly recreate the past. This goes for writers of both fiction and nonfiction.
This being said, it is possible to immerse oneself in research to such a degree that the era in question begins to draw itself in one’s mind, and thus becomes realistic on the page. Walks through historic neighborhoods reveal small curiosities that help to further illustrate the differences between past and present. For instance, seeing a boot scraper on a fancy Federal-style house in New England tells you that the streets were once quite muddy, and with all the horses, quite smelly. Imagine someone tracking mud into an elegant foyer; now imagine being the servant or enslaved person that has to scrub that floor with water pumped from a well. Contextual details like these have little to do with plot, but everything to do with the verity of the story.
Please tell us about the chronological sequencing of the stories and the date in each story title.
The idea to assign each story with a year in order to represent each decade of the era came almost at once. And the years influenced the content. For instance, I knew that I wanted to write a story about the whaling industry, and a certain object sailors would leave for their wives while the men were away. In the late 1830s whaling was approaching its peak decades in the 1840s and 1850s. I thought it would be a great place to start. From there, I considered what made each decade unique, and what needed to be exemplified in the stories. In the 1840s for instance, photography and the Oregon Trail were two significant cultural and social aspects, while in the 1860s the Civil War was changing (permanently) everything about the United States, so I included two war-based stories there. Not all of the tales feature large themes, but they were all written with a conscious attempt to ground them in their respective timeframes to help differentiate the seven Victorian decades.
In the introduction you emphasize that the book is a book of ghost stories with ghosts in each of them with a particular focus on the plight of women in Victorian times.
The first story “He’s Come Home (1837)” Is about a young woman waiting for her whaling boat sailor husband to come home. Tell us about the story and the decision to open the book with it.
The decision to open the book with it was sort of made for me, as it’s the earliest date of all the stories. I’m not sure I would have led with it otherwise, but I don’t regret that that’s how things worked out. The story itself is based on an actual object known as a “he’s at home” — essentially they are clay dildos given to wives by their husbands when the men go off to sea for extended periods of time. I recall reading that someone found one in a box stuffed up a chimney in Nantucket. We don’t typically think of Victorians as possessing such things, so it’s interesting to consider this in relation to our contemporary times and the universal notion of longing. In the story, however, the “he’s-at-home” becomes something other than clay when the protagonist intuits that something terrible has befallen her husband. Ultimately, the story is about emptiness, and the things we do to try to fill it.
The book contains the ghostly and ghastly things we think of as “typical” to horror stories as well as depictions of strange and unexplained happenings that we often find in the borderlands of the horror genre. Both kinds of elements are present in “Immortelles,” the story of Thomas, a travelling daguerreotypist. Tell us about this profession and what happens to Thomas at the conclusion of the story.
Though photography had to some degree been experimented with for centuries, a process was finally perfected in the 1830s that allowed an image to be fixed on a copper plate coated with silver using chemicals and mercury fumes. These plates were called daguerreotypes, named for their inventor, a Frenchman called Louis Daguerre. Samuel B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, brought the process the United States, and by the 1840s everyone who could afford it had one of these generally small and pricey images “struck.” Some took photographs of their dead as keepsakes. We think of this as morbid today, but it was regarded as quite the opposite then. Most photographers had studios where they produced such pictures, but some photographers, particularly when the wet plate process came into popularity in the 1850s, traveled around taking photos and developing them in portable dark rooms. At the end of the story, Thomas is seeing things that he shouldn’t in the pictures of his dead subject. The dark room and the lens become portals, and it is unclear whether he has been influenced by the mercury, or if something more malevolent is at work.
Many of the hauntings and strange and supernatural encounters are presented without neat resolution or explanation. This favorably evoked the way Robert Aickman often presents the supernatural in his work. The story “The Dark Horse (1845)” comes to mind as an example of this structure and technique. Is this story inspired by a historical event from your research or is it one of your own invention?
I think many of Aickman’s stories actually do end with a resolution and explanation; it’s just so subtle and expertly done that it feels like a loose end. For instance, the last line of “The Hospice” always struck me as the perfect final statement for that harrowing journey. It’s all in how he uses metaphor. “The Swords” is a great example of this, with all those men sticking dirty blades into that woman in the tent.
“The Dark Horse” was inspired by two pieces of art: “Peytona and Fashion: In Their Great Match for $20,000. Over the Union Course L.I. May 13th. 1845, Won by Peytona. Time 7:39 3/4, 7:45 ¼” (c.1845) by Currier & Ives, and “The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse” by Albert Pinkham Ryder (c. 1896-1908). Peytona and Fashion were famous racehorses, one from the North and one from the South, who raced for what in today’s money would be about $850,000 (measuringworth.com is a great resource for translating historic currency).
I have always loved both pictures; they convey beauty and time in completely different ways. The Peytona and Fashion lithograph was the impetus for writing “The Dark Horse,” but as I started it “The Race Track” popped into my mind, and the combination of one race moving forward while the other ran backward seemed a strong metaphor for life and the ever-increasing acceleration towards death.
Please tell us how strange tales and Robert Aickman’s stories inform and influence the stories in the book.
I love Aickman — he himself is a strange story, and an undisputed original, like the great illustrator Edward Gorey. It seems that only those who are persistently original in their own lives can create truly unique art. And I don’t mean intently original, e.g. trying to do something new just because it hasn’t been done before. That is not, on the whole, difficult to do, and the result is almost universally boring and contrived. It is much harder to live originally, guided by one’s own unique set of contrasting and often conflicting interests. This is what yields an original person, and (hopefully) original art. I find the biographies of the people behind the work almost always as interesting (and sometimes more so) than the work itself. For instance, all the canal business that Aickman was involved in. It strikes me as a decidedly odd thing to be passionate about, and yet his work in preserving them is in some ways as significant as his fiction. The randomness of one’s obsessions, and the honest pursuit of them, can lead to genuine work and a deliberate life.
That being said, it took me a long time to approach my art with this in mind. For a long time, I did not trust my own weird confluence of interests. I had to identify these and see how they complimented each other before I could produce anything of interest. And when I say “of interest” I mean interesting to myself; I’m not sure if it strikes anyone else as such, but it feels right to me at least.
Ghost stories from the 19th Century often depicted ghosts as figures from beyond the grave with a message, such as the ghost in Charles Dickens “The Signalman” from 1866. This kind of “helpful ghost” appears in “Shadow Stone (1849),” where an apparition of the narrator’s deceased mother appears to help his journey Westward.
Later on, authors such as M R James presented ghosts as strange, frightening and even incomprehensible things, in contrast and reaction to Dickens’ kind of ghosts. These kinds of ghost stories often do not have a resolution or closure. Tell us about “The Brooch,” “Phantom Limb,” “The Hairy Land” and others in the book that operate with this kind of haunting and supernatural element.
Yes, some of these stories certainly have that element. In “Shadow Stone,” which takes place on a long dirt road headed west, I wanted to focus not only on the loss of the young protagonist’s mother (who dies along the way and is buried in the dirt road trodden flat by wagon wheels) but his culture. It is perhaps difficult for us in the twenty-first century to imagine the shock of just how immense and alien the American West must have looked to white Europeans and native-born white Americans from the east coast who voyaged there seeking a new life. This would be particularly true for someone coming from a place such as lush Ireland, a land with its own centuries-old traditions, customs, language, etc.
A few of these stories have “helpful ghosts.” In “The Brooch” the element is subtle, with a frozen woman returning to warn her ancestor of something hideous and predatory in the Canadian wilderness. The protagonist, Nathanial Jay, has also not been fully honest to his fiancé, bringing something back for her that should have remained, something that draws the predator south to their very door.
The opposite of this is “Second Sight,” in which a blind girl named Louisa has a surprise visit from a young man, the pride of her town, who had gone off to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He is essentially a warning and premonition, but also the personification of a confession often denied to us by death. In “The Hairy Land,” the ghost equals liberation, while in “Phantom Limb” the phantom is dumb flesh animated by the record of what its previous owner made it do.
I found “The Angel (1871)” to be the most “cosmic” or “cosmic horror” of the collection. The characters in the story discuss notions that there is no such thing as good or evil and that the things they are seeing are extra-dimensional entities, not angels and devils. Beyond the inclusion of ghosts, and ghouls and monsters and creatures, how does the ghost story fit in and operate with the horror genre and notions of the horrific in fiction?
I would say the primary element in the ghost story linking it to “horror” is the notion of the Unknown. One of my primary aims with “The Angel” was to explore Victorian notions of certainty when it came to the afterlife, particularly a Christian afterlife experienced through the “Good Death” as it was called. A “Good Death” meant that one was in his or her own bed at home, surrounded by family, and ready to meet Jesus when death came. He or she was to confess sins to God, and purify themselves in order to be accepted into heaven. The idea of this moment arriving, only to reveal an entire other system or reality in place, seems genuinely frightening, especially for a society underpinned by such beliefs.
While “Home is Where the Heart Is (1875)” is set in the homestead era and setting I found it operates as an effective “modern” horror story in style and structure. Tell us about the ending of this story and in the similar structure and endings of many of the stories in the book.
Yes, the language of this tale is plainer and more direct, a bit more fairy tale-ish. This is the oldest story in this collection. I wrote it more than a decade ago, and the first version did not have quite the same ending. It was less bleak, and the woods themselves felt like more a destination than a harrowing unknown. Several of the pieces in this collection have similar endings as you’ve pointed out. Though there is nothing wrong with an ending that wraps up the narrative in a “reveals all” way, such endings often betray the ghost story, which explores what is not known and functions (if that is the appropriate word) in a manner that we cannot understand. The entire point is to enter what is unsettling, and so, in my view at least, it is better to leave things feeling as such, while simultaneously allowing the reader to feel that he or she ventured somewhere that has left them changed, though precisely how they might not be able to say.
In ghost stories such as Fritz Leiber’s “The Smoke Ghost” (1941) the ghost operates as a metaphor or allegory of the times. Some of your stories, such as “The Boarding House (1854),” deftly blend realism with allegory and metaphor. It feels like the characters have walked into an allegory of Victorian Times.
Tell us more about the lack of agency and societal cages Victorian women lived in.
During the Victorian Era there gender lines were defined by the “The Cult of Domesticity,” also known as “The Cult of True Womanhood.” This in essence determined the roles of the sexes. The woman was to be the goddess of the domestic sphere. She offered maternal love, wifely affection, and served as a Christian role model. It was a triumvirate known as “Mother, Home, and Heaven.” The homes that women created for their husbands and children were sanctuaries. But it was up the man’s role to establish the rules of the house. He was also the public-facing figure of the family, the one who worked and served as citizenship representation (voting). According to letters and diaries from the period, many women appeared to be fine with this arrangement, though not universally of course. Some women even reversed the roles and became the breadwinners of their families. A good example of this is Currier & Ives artist Frances Flora Bond Palmer, a talented illustrator who produced drawings and paintings in order to earn a living in lieu of her drunken husband.
“The Boarding House” discusses this theme, but also attempts to demonstrate the isolation of women trapped in the domestic sphere—women who are often left alone by their husbands, and eventually abandoned by their children as they grow up. These are often women who would, in today’s society, achieve things similar to men, such as serving in political office, having successful careers in law or medicine, or simply choosing to be independent individuals unshackled by convention. I hasten to add that I am not trying to say that such social structures of man at work and woman at home (or vice versa) are wrong, only that people of both sexes are individuals first, and should have the freedom to follow their own courses outside of social configurations.
Tell us about the stories in the book where the supernatural operates as a release or resignation from or surrender to the Victorian cages and restrictions.
Well, “The Boarding-House” certainly functions in that regard — the deliverance of a woman from the bonds of marriage and motherhood to a strange land where she may at last transcend not only her predetermined Victorian state in life, but herself as well. “The Judgment Trump’,” in which a group of formerly enslaved men find their way onto a steamboat headed up-river to an undetermined destination, also acts as a freeing, or a rightful escape. I suppose concerning the latter we would want to add “institutions” alongside cages and restrictions.
I think “The Spring Boy” also is an example of a liberation, one in which a twin sister falls in love with an “other” and absconds with him/it. The denial of passion and lust and the formulation of a life outside of the expectations of Victorian mores certainly is demonstrated here.
Then there is “The Reckoner,” where a woman is forced to surrender her loved ones to Death, which played so central a role in Victorian society. The biographer of Emily Dickinson and Yale professor Richard Sewall once mentioned that in Victorian times, when you asked someone “How are you today?” it wasn’t merely to be friendly — the person was actually asking how you were feeling/doing. With so many diseases and accidents waiting to take you, tomorrow you might be gone.
In the “Mourning Maker (1893)” a character winds up becoming a ghost and floats away over an expansive fairground “watching time digest the moment.” Tell us about the poignant line that ends the story.
I suppose there is a bit of the Bhagavad Gita “I am time, the destroyer of the worlds” here, or as the band Low called time, “The Great Destroyer.” But time seems also to function as a destroyer of itself. The protagonist in “The Mourning Maker,” Lucy Bobbins, is simultaneously experiencing two ephemeral things: childhood and a marvelous fair, the latter’s palatial buildings constructed of staff and wood and brick rather than the marble and stone of which they appear to be made. There are similarities between girl and faux city, as their foundations are both temporary and tenuous.
I suppose the Mourning Maker herself could be a metaphor for time — a thing coming for Lucy, a thing that has set up at the fair (an illusion of permanence and stability and manifold pleasures), nestled amongst the booths that showcase the greatest achievements and mark the progress of the age. Ultimately it takes not only a part of Lucy (a part that can be preserved for millennia no less), but cannibalizes all of her time to come.
In “The Lithographer’s Chamber” we travel to a Lithograph Factory where the two main characters take stock of commercial images that are a “visual catalog of an expired zeitgeist.” Tell us about the line and the images it refers to. How does the fate of these two characters encompass the theme of the book?
The phrase “expired zeitgeist” is really just a puffy way of saying “old fashioned.” In this sense, it’s the prints that Fogg & Co. produced that show a more bucolic, handcrafted way of life in contrast to the great industrialization that took place during the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. The prints that the protagonists Rupert and Dawes observe in the dusty old manufactory show pastoral scenes and technologies that appear quaint and outmoded compared to the great thrust of the steam engine and the seeming magic of the telephone. But there is also something eerie about the pictures left behind by Fogg; there are dark images, and as well, a series that at length explains to the two men why they have found themselves there. Whether they want to or not, there is something they must see, and the two have decidedly different reactions to what Fogg’s prints reveal.
On the whole, as you’ve rightly pointed out, Daniel, the fate of Rupert and Dawes does indeed encompass the theme of Haunted Victorian America. More unnerving than their findings, perhaps, is the strangeness of things all around them in the town of Swallop Falls. A sort of eerie transience in the expired surroundings and abandoned places that we recognize in the settings of our own lives.
Please tell us about the line “nostalgia is a prison” from the final story in the collection “The Caretaker (1901).”
It’s quite easy for most of us to become lost in reminiscence, particularly when we’re remembering our own pasts. Childhood is especially alluring because it’s a time when everything is still before us. We are generally healthy and without fear in a way that we’ll never know again. I like to think of our lives as videotapes of predetermined lengths. The story is all there, and we are experiencing it in real time as it plays out. As we age, approaching the middle of our reels, we begin to long for the time when there was more rather than less of the tape left to play. The quality of the film is remembered with brightness and sharpness, with more feeling, and it features more of the people we’ve loved. The impressions of those earlier moods trap us in a loop where we can only see the beauty of the first half of the story. We feel the loss of and longing for that part which we can replay but not relive, and it costs us large swathes of the rest of the reel if we’re not careful.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOSHUA REX is an American author of speculative fiction and historian of Victorian America. He is the author of the novel A Mighty Word (Rotary Press), the novella The Inamorta (Weird House Press), and five collections. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Nightscript, Pseudopod, Tales to Terrify, Chthonic Matter, Nightscript, and others. You can find him at the following places:
Website: www.joshuarex.com
Facebook: @JoshuaRexAuthor
Instagram: @joshua_rex_author
Amazon: Author Page
DANIEL BRAUM writes “strange tales”, intentionally ambiguous stories in the tradition of Robert Aickman that evoke the old Twilight Zone shows. His stories, set in locations around the globe, explore the tension between the psychological and supernatural. His debut collection from Cemetery Dance, The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales is currently on sale for 99 cents as an eBook as part of the Cemetery Dance summer sale.
His all-new short story collection Phantom Constellations is coming in November 2025 from Cemetery Dance Publications.
More about him can be found at https://bloodandstardust.wordpress.com/.
