The Death Spancel
and Others
By Katharine Tynan
“Come to me, a lonely ghost, / Out of the night and rain.”
Katharine Tynan is not a name immediately associated with the supernatural. However, like many other writers of the early twentieth century, she made numerous forays into literature of the ghostly and macabre, and throughout her career produced verse and prose that conveys a remarkable variety of eerie themes, moods, and narrative forms.
From her early, elegiac stories, inspired by legends from the West of Ireland, to pulpier efforts featuring grave-robbers and ravenous rats, Tynan displays an eye for weird detail, compelling atmosphere, and a talent for rendering a broad palette of uncanny effects.
The Death Spancel and Others is the first collection to showcase Tynan’s tales of supernatural events, prophecies, curses, apparitions, and a pervasive sense of the ghastly.
Hardback edition limited to 350 copies.
Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Cover design by Meggan Kehrli
Introduction by Peter Bell
ISBN: 978-1-78380-035-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-754-3 (pbk)
Katharine Tynan
Katharine Tynan (1859-1931) was born in Dublin and raised at Whitehall, the family home in Clondalkin. Her literary salon there attracted notables such as W. B. Yeats, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship. Tynan became a prolific writer, authoring more than a hundred novels in addition to memoirs and numerous volumes of poetry. Her works deal with feminism, Catholicism, and nationalism—Yeats declared of her early collection Shamrocks (1887) that “in finding her nationality, she has also found herself”.
Read more“An important work of literary recovery . . . whatever her theme, Tynan’s lovely, musical sentences carry a hint of Irish mist and melancholy.” – Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“Of remarkably high literary quality . . . a great collection recommended to any good fiction lover.” – Hellnotes
“[Tynan’s] fiction is of a high standard, crafted in relatively simple yet still lyrical prose . . . a very assured craftswoman of the supernatural tale.” – Supernatural Tales
“Lovers of late Victorian and Edwardian ghost fiction will assuredly adore the restrained literary quality of these tales, shining golden, dust-mote beams of waning sunlight across forgotten rooms of half-glimpsed tenants.” – The Pan Review
The Death Spancel and Others by Katharine Tynan; cover art by Brian Coldrick; cover design by Meggan Kehrli; introduction by Peter Bell; edited by Brian J. Showers; copyedited by Jim Rockhill; typeset by Ken Mackenzie; published by Swan River Press.
Hardback: Published on 19 November 2020; limited to 350 copies of which 100 were embossed and hand numbered; xxiv + 200 pages; lithographically printed; dust jacketed; illustrated boards; sewn binding; head- and tail-bands; issued with four postcards; ISBN: 978-1-78380-035-3.
Paperback: Published on 3 October 2021; no limitation; print on demand paperback; xxiv + 200 pages; ISBN: 978-1-78380-754-3.
The Ghost Story of a Novelist
The Winnipeg Tribune (10 October 1905)
“Mrs. Katharine Tynan relates a Weird Tale—May Be a Coincidence.”
Mrs. Katharine Tynan, the well-known novelist, sends to the Daily Graphic the following weird story:
“This may be a coincidence. On the other hand, it may be a ghost story. It happened to one near and dear to me. It was in his college days, and it was a long vacation, during which he had elected to stay on in his college rooms and work. The rooms were at the top of one of the highest houses in the ancient foundation of Queen Elizabeth, T.C.D. [Trinity College Dublin]. There was not a soul in the house but himself, and the quads and buildings were full of echoing emptiness after nightfall. He was not nervous in the ordinary sense of the word, and did not object to his solitude in his eyrie, although an impressionable Celtic visitor calling on him one afternoon remarked that he would not occupy those rooms in the empty house in the empty college for a single night, no matter what inducement were offered to him to do it.
“It was a night or two later. The sole occupant of No. —— awoke in the dark. He had been awakened by an unusual sound on the stairs. He heard the foot ascend and pause outside his door. He sprang out of bed, and fumbled for a light. By the time he had got it, he heard the foot going downstairs again. He hurried to his door, opened it and listened. All was silent as the grave in the empty house. He returned to bed mystified, and slept till morning. In the morning, as he made his own breakfast, and thought of his mysterious visitor of the night before, he glanced toward the door, and noticed something white half-way under the door—a visiting card. He picked it up. It was the card of a man he knew—a college acquaintance, whom we shall call Roland White. In the corner of the card was written in pencil, ‘Just passing through.’ The mystery was not cleared. Why on earth should Roland White have called in the dead waste and middle of the night? He had heard of him a few days before as enjoying himself thoroughly grouse-shooting in the west.
“A day or two passed. As he came into college one afternoon he was stopped by one of the porters. ‘Very sad about poor Mr. White, sir?’ ‘What about Mr. White?’ ‘Haven’t you heard, sir? It’s in the evening papers.’ It was the familiar accident of the trigger of a gun catching in a twig as the sportsman scrambled through a fence. Shot in the head, Roland White had died within a few minutes of the accident. The coincidence would have been if the card was an old one, and had been dislodged from somewhere or another to lie below the door on the very night following the day when the fatal accident had occurred. But then the foot on the stairs in the middle of the night! Ghost story or coincidence, it remains a mystery to this day.”
