The Dance at Weirdmoor Castle by Lord Dunsany

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (July 24, 1878 - October 25, 1957) was a prolific writer of just about everything—plays, novels, short stories, essays, poems, etc. He’s best known these days for his fantasy work—his 1924 novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, is considered by many to be one of the most influential in the genre and a precursor to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work—and for the impact, and influence, he had on H. P. Lovecraft. “The Dance at Weirdmoor Castle” was originally published in Homes and Gardens, December 1950. It was later intended for a short story collection Dunsany was assembling in 1956 but never published. The majority of these tales can be found in the a recent publication by Hippocampus Press, The Ghost in the Corner and Other Stories. This story is probably my favorite Christmas ghost story and one that I read every year.

It was at an inn by a big road through the flat land of East Anglia. Before a fireplace by which a dozen men could have warmed themselves in comfort seven or eight sat, men upon various businesses who had come in there from journeys in many directions, most to stop for the night, one or two to go on again in the cold after dinner, which all that were gathered before that fire had had. For some while all of them gazed at the orange light of the fire, and watched the slow change of the landscape that seemed to glow there, as though there were significance in it or things to be studied. And whatever calculations they made concerning the scenes in the fire they made in silence, but for the faint sounds that murmured from pipes of those that were smoking. In the warmth of the room in which that good fire was glowing the silence had lasted so long that any remark would have rung in it, and would have held anyone back who was perhaps about to slip through the quiet gateway of dreams.

“Why, I wonder,” said one of those before the fire, “do we associate ghosts with Christmas?”

For a moment the silence fell back again after his words. And then from the depths of a chair there came a voice saying, “Everything has its season; butterflies, moths, swallows, cuckoos, and lots of other things. I suppose ghosts have too.”

“But why at Christmas?” the first man asked.

“I don’t know,” said the other and sank back again in his chair.

I was afraid that the conversation was going to be dull. For I was one of those seven or eight before the fire. And I could do nothing to brighten it. And then the man in the deep armchair began to speak again. “At any rate,” he said, “I never saw one at any other time.”

“Never at any other time?” echoed one of us weakly.

“Never,” said the man in the armchair.

“Then you have seen a ghost?” said the one who had spoken first.

“Only once,” said the other.

“Would you tell us about it?” I asked.

“Well, if the rest don’t object, I don’t mind,” he said.

Everyone of us leaned forward, and a murmur of syllables arose, all encouraging him to tell his story of ghosts. One or two pipes were tapped out and refilled, and we settled down in our chairs before that warm fire to listen. “It was some years ago now,” he said. “Some years. I was a foxhunter in those days. Still am in a way; always will be; though it isn’t often I go out now. There was less wire in those days. Well, about the ghosts. We had had a great hunt, and I was riding home alone. A great hunt, and I was out of country I knew. I had heard of the country through which I was riding, but had not been that way before. It was a part of the country called Weirdmoor. It was one Christmas Eve, just as it is now, which is what reminded me of it. Not that I should forget it in any case. It was bitterly cold, colder than what it is tonight. There had been some snow too, and there was a north wind blowing. I had heard of it because of an old castle that there was there; a ruin called Weirdmoor Castle. And I had never been there, because none of us ever did go. There were stories about its being haunted. It wasn’t that I was afraid of ghosts; but if there were none there, there was nothing to go for, and, if there were, they are chilly and clammy things and I saw no reason for not keeping away from them.

“Well, there it was, a ruined castle standing by a bleak moor, with bats and owls in it and, there seemed, ghosts. No particular reason for going there, and nobody went.

“But on this particular night, as I came over the moor, the North wind was going by me like a long knife, and I was wet from the snow that had melted on me, and my horse was tired and, ghosts or no ghosts, I wanted shelter, and there was no dwelling anywhere along that bleak road. I might have kept warm if my horse could have trotted, but I couldn’t keep him at that without hitting him, and he had carried me well; always did; and I wasn’t going to do that. And then an intenser blackness rose beside me out of the dark moor. And it was Weirdmoor Castle. My first impulse was to ride past it, as the members of our Hunt always did, if ever they saw it. It was merely the custom of our Hunt. And that is what I should have done, if there had not come at the same moment a blast from the North that was so especially biting that, cold as I was already and thoroughly wet, I felt that shelter of any sort was now a sheer necessity. My horse shook me with one great shiver, and suddenly I saw that the windows of the castle were all shining with what I took to be lamplight. Later I realized that the glimmer, whatever it was, had not arisen from lamps, and that, for that matter, there were no windows, but only black gaps in the masonry; but that was afterwards. At the time I thought that where there was light there must be warmth. So I rode up to the doorway and hitched my horse to a rusted iron staple that must have once been a hinge of the door. It was on the South side, so that my horse was sheltered from that appalling wind. And I walked in. The moment I had gone through the hanging curtains with which ivy half-covered the door I saw that it was true what had always been said and that the place was haunted, and badly haunted. One has read of bevies of ladies, and, for all I know, they should be so described; but here it rather seemed that there were gusts of them, that floated slightly luminous through the castle’s dark interior, while the North wind sighed outside and stirred the air of the cavities in which there had once been windows, and set dancing the tendrils of ivy that hung loose from the walls. There was no roof on the castle, and looking upwards I saw only racing clouds, that rushed over strips of dim light; but whether such light as there was there came from any remnant of day, or from the stars or moon, I could not tell. The ladies that floated through the dark of the castle drifted together then, and seemed all to look at me, for all of them sharply turned their luminous faces towards me, then turned away and clustered closer together and were obviously talking of me. I could have no doubt of that. And what is more, I could feel that they found something wrong about me. For a while I wondered what it could be. Could it be my wet hunting coat, or the mud on my stock, or the water from melted snow that squelched in my boots? And one by one I became sure it was none of these. And then the idea came to me what it was, a clear feeling, which I corroborated later, that I knew what it was they found wrong. It was simply that I was alive. And life was something that these ladies who floated in that dark castle found common and vulgar and coarse. Then they seemed agreed about something. ‘One of us,’ they seemed to have said, ‘must receive him.’ And at once from the face of one of them, as far as I could see in the darkness, disappeared the amused criticism and was replaced by a welcoming smile as she drifted straight towards me. What she said as she smiled at me with her faintly luminous smiles was said in so tiny a voice that you might have thought I could not have heard it above the howl of the wind through cracks in the walls and the roar of it in the chasms that once had been windows, but it had a clearness like that of the shrill cries of the bats which were also piercing the darkness, and I heard every word.

“‘You are from Earth transitory, are you not?’ she said.

“And I said Yes, though I had no idea what she meant.

“‘Won’t you join us?’ she said.

“And I said that I should be delighted. And she drifted back to the faintly luminous others, and I followed her, walking in my wet boots over the weeds of the floor. I bowed and said Good evening to that dim cluster of figures, but saw from their vacant expression that evenings and mornings meant nothing to them, and I could not say anything apt about eternity, and did not know what to say. But one of them, a graceful figure that swayed with the sway of her silk skirts in the draughts that were waving the ivy, asked me if I did not come from the transitory ways; and, guessing what she meant, I said that I did. And she turned to the others and they all nodded and smiled, and I heard them muttering again, ‘the transitory ways,’ and their smiles put me at my ease. I could not trace by their fashions the dates when they had been here, and the graceful lines of their dresses were too mixed up with the tendrils of ivy which hung and swung from the walls. I should have liked to have asked them something about their story, but coming suddenly thus among an assembly of ghosts I was not so composed as they, who had before them only one stranger, and who were in their own home. So it was they that questioned me. And in answer to their questions I told them that I had been hunting and that I had been taken far from home by a great run, and after a splendid fox. ‘Is it dead?’ they asked eagerly then. And I guessed from the excited eagerness in their faces, and from all that they said later, that they cared only for what was dead; and again and again as they spoke I got the impression that, although they tried to hide it, all living things to them were coarse and vulgar. They closed round me eagerly, asking for news. Had I seen any ghosts by the road, they asked?

“‘No,’ I replied.

“Any spectres? Any phantoms?

“And I saw from that that there were different kinds of ghosts and that all these were different things. Then the North wind outside appeared to increase in violence, so that all the cracks in the castle and weeds in the windows were singing. And the lady that seemed to be the chief of the ghosts asked if I would dance with her. Well, of course I could not refuse. And we danced, and the wind sang. A graceful figure and a lovely face, so far as I could see by the dim glow of it in the moonless and starless darkness. But no warmth came from her, and no warmth came to me from my dancing, but only an increasing cold that pressed in on me from the darkness and clamminess of the castle, and even from every one of those girls themselves whenever we danced near them. And I saw them looking about as though for partners, as though they wished to dance too, and I wondered what ghosts would come to them. Chillier and chillier I grew as I danced, and the waist and the hand of my beautiful partner were as cold as the leaves of the ivy covered with ice. And as I grew chillier still, I knew it was life that was ebbing. And as the music of the North wind in the crannies sank for a moment, I ceased to dance, and my chilly and lovely partner urged me to go on. And the rest came drifting nearer and were all round us and seemed to be trying to drive me on with the dance, but had not the strength to move my weight, though I could feel them trying. And the girl with whom I had danced looked up at me and said in her tiny voice, ‘Will you not dance with me any more?’ And when I said that I feared that it was time for me to go, she clung to me still like damp ivy. And something about her then drew the bare truth out of me, and I said, ‘The cold is beating me, and my life is ebbing.’ And she said ‘Life!’ full of amused scorn. But, if I was to live, I knew that I must get quickly out of the cold of that castle, even into the wind outside. For somehow I knew that even the North wind would be warmer, if I could only pull clear of the dead. But it wasn’t so easy.

“They were not able to move me. They couldn’t drive me to dance. But there was an influence about them that, cold as I was now, was growing too strong for me, and they were all round me, and I no longer had the strength that I needed for pulling away. And my partner was fixing me with her glow-worm’s eyes. I was growing colder and colder. How could I pull clear? Where could I get some help from something alive? I thought of the ivy, and turned from my partner to clutch at a hanging cascade of it. But there were dead leaves amongst the live ones, and they clutched me and held me back and the live leaves were unable to help me. All the ghosts saw my motive and smiled at my failure. They came in closer still, and I grew much colder. Suddenly I realized that I was too weak for those drifting things, a humiliating discovery for any live body. I grew colder and even weaker, and my partner smiled at me, a welcoming smile, as though I were coming over even then to the dead. And so I was. And at that moment my horse snorted, trying perhaps, poor brute, to drive some cold gust away from him. Life, I thought! Something alive!

“‘I must look after my horse,’ I said.

“They all of them turned on me the faint gleams of their eyes. And then I heard them exclaiming with all their scorn, ‘A horse!’ ‘A horse!’ ‘A live horse.’ And more than that they had no need to say, in order to show me the indignation with which they knew that I preferred something alive to them. ‘A horse!’ ‘A live horse!’ they went on exclaiming and muttering. And then the one that had danced with me said, ‘A live horse! Had you wanted a horse the Valkyries would have given you one, or sold it for fairy gold. How far can a live horse carry you over the transitory ways?’

“‘Seventy miles in a day,’ I said, exaggerating a bit.

“‘A day!’ she said. ‘And one of theirs could carry you a thousand times as far, where there are no days.’

“Her indignation was rising, and the indignation of all of them, while my strength was ebbing away with my warmth and vitality. I struggled against whatever influence the ghosts were exerting, but was only able to move a few very slow steps. I was moving towards the door and feared that I never would get there, for they were all round me now like ivy, and their chill was gripping my heart. And now the door was only four or five yards away, but I felt I could no more reach it than one can run to safety in a nightmare. Their cold and their scorn were all round me, hemming me in. One moment I felt that their bitter cold had got me, and then there was warmth all round me and I suddenly felt I was saved. It was the breath of my horse. In the warmth of that I was able once more to move, able once more to put my weight and my reason against imponderable and ghastly things. I patted my horse, unhitched him from the old hinge and climbed up. As I got to the saddle the dance or whatever it was seemed all to die away. One faint wail of indignation or disappointment remained, hanging in the dark air. And the light, whatever it was, had gone from the windows.

“That was Christmas Eve. I rode on with the North wind, which as I think I told you, was warmer than that dank castle. When I got home it was Christmas. I don’t suppose they haunt that place at any other time, or more people would have seen them than have; but I never went back to see.”

That is the tale that I heard one Christmas Eve at an inn, and I remember it yet. It was late when the man who told it ceased to speak and leaned back again in his chair, and it was warm and comfortable before that good fire and I noticed that all but he were by then asleep.