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Haunting is the idea that a former life, its experiments, trials, goods, and evils, is retained by the spaces

one inhabited and in the relics they once possessed, that the ephemera a person leaves behind

contains a trace of the beyond, which, should one be so bold or so unlucky,

can be summoned at will.

Montague Rhodes-James was manifestly obsessed with ephemera, a world-renowned medievalist scholar

of prestigious British academia, who moonlighted as a horror

author.

In 1904, James published among his best enduring collections, ghost stories of an antiquary,

that is one who collects antiques.

The book reads at times like a nonfiction document, citing real places and sworn testimony,

blending details pulled from contemporary life with those of the unknown.

The first story in this collection, originally written in 1894 and printed soon after in the National Review is titled

Cannon Albrecht's scrapbook.

It takes place in the real village of St. Bertrand-Commange, where an English tourist

spends a full day surveying the relics of a dilapidated cathedral, with the sanctuary's

caretaker ever looking over his shoulder.

And those efforts pay off, so to speak, in the form of a scrapbook.

Canon Albrecht's Scrapbook by M.R. James.

St. Bertrand de Comange is a decayed town on the spurs of the Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to Bagnier de Luchon. It was the site of a

bishopric until the revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of tourists.

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