SOURCE: Wakefield, H. R. “Why I Write Ghost Stories.” In The Clock Strikes Twelve and Other Stories, pp. 3-6. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 1998.

In the following essay, which was originally published as Wakefield's introduction to the 1946 Arkham House edition of The Clock Strikes Twelve, the author presents his personal belief in psychic phenomena as the basis for writing his ghost stories.

Dr Montague Rhodes James, who wrote the best ghost stories in the English language—but not the very best one, which is “The Upper Berth”—said that such tales were meant to please and amuse. If he meant to imply by this dictum that they are just arbitrary exercises in ingenuity, the baseless phantoms of a rather perverse imagination, I heartily disagree. Unless I believed there are inexplicable phenomena in the world, marshalled under the generic term ‘psychic’, I should never have bothered to write a...