Welcome to Ghost Month on Fantasy Reads. This October I’m recommending From Out of the Silence: Seven Stange Stories (1920). This is the only published collection of stories by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor (1869?-1922), a rather mysterious British author whom I find as haunting as her fiction. It has been republished in paperback and ebook formats by Black Heath as part of their excellent Gothic list (2014). There are other paperback editions and a recent hardback with an introductory essay by Gina R Collia (Nezu 2025).
All seven stories in From Out of the Silence are set in Britain and contain strong supernatural elements. Most could be classed as traditional Ghost Stories. One of them – Outside the House – is now high on my list of Best Ghost Stories of all time. The first story in the book – Room Number Ten – concerns Peter, a depressed writer who accepts an invitation to stay with friends at their house in Scotland. There he is allocated a bedroom with a grim history because his friends secretly hope that Peter will be able to break a long-standing curse. In Two Little Red Shoes we meet a woman who is irresistibly attracted to empty houses and neglected gardens. In one such house she finds an abandoned nursery full of toys, hears distressed cries and begins to see disturbing visions of two children. John, the narrator of Outside the House, is a soldier who has been severely wounded during World War 1. While recovering in hospital in England he falls in love with his nurse, Elsie Falconer, and becomes engaged to her. When visiting the Falconers’ grand home John is baffled to be told that he must not set foot outside the house after dusk or even look out of the windows.
In The Wind in the Woods a reclusive amateur artist ventures into a place known as the Silent Wood and is caught up in an old tragedy. The Twins tells the story of two brothers who look alike but are completely different in character. The gentle twin, Dallas, has been persecuted all his life by the malicious Basil and that continues even after Basil is hanged for murder. In Sylvia a man who has come to Wales to recover from a nervous breakdown glimpses people and melodramatic events from a century before. Sylvia involves another pair of good and bad twins but in The Star Inn we meet an almost disturbingly devoted brother and sister who decide to visit a distant village on a whim and end up staying in a haunted inn.
At this point I would normally add a brief biography of the author but this is almost impossible to do since so little seems to be known about Bessie Kyffin-Taylor. Her maiden name was Cope but in 1892 she became the first wife of a solicitor (lawyer) called Gerald Kyffin-Taylor. He was active in local politics, becoming a Member of Parliament, and in the Territorial Army, rising to the rank of Brigadier-General. They lived in a village on the edge of Liverpool for thirty years and had no children. Bessie (I’m going to call her this to detach her from the stuffy Kyffin-Taylors) seems to have carried out the duties expected of a woman of her social status but was said to have been a keen angler and motorist – rather unusual pursuits for a woman of her era. This pillar of respectability also had an intense inner life that gave rise to the ghost stories which she intriguingly dedicated to those two or three whose constant loyalty has been a never-failing source of inspiration.
The stories in Out of the Silence have been described by some as amateurish and they certainly don’t give the impression that they were written for money. Although they show the influence of standard types of Ghost and Horror stories, I would call them intensely personal. There is one aspect which makes them distinctive. In most of the classic Ghost Stories of M.R. James (see Fantasy Reads October, 2013) or E.F. Benson (see Fantasy Reads October, 2021) the protagonists are generally content with their privileged lives before something awful happens to them. In Bessie’s fiction, the leading characters (whether male or female) are generally depressed or frustrated by their urban or suburban lifestyles and long to get away to the countryside in search of peace and quiet. For example, the narrator of Room Number 10 describes his life as suffocating and his suburban village as a soul-killing spot to live in, and I was very weary of it and its perpetual creed of “Thou shalt not”.
I don’t usually indulge in the game of trying to deduce things about an author from their fiction but in Bessie’s case it is hard not to. Did she find her own life as a dutiful wife suffocating? Were her known hobbies of motoring and angling mainly ways of escaping alone to the countryside? Most of her stories convey a deep love of nature and solitary rambles in wild places. The mountainous landscapes of north Wales seem to have particularly attracted her. I’m not the first person to wonder whether Bessie is describing herself in Two Little Red Shoes whose narrator has an infatuation with empty places where she likes to imagine other people’s lives. This distracts her from the tedium of the hundred and one small duties which go to make up the everyday life of the everyday woman. The unnamed narrator confesses that her daydreams sometimes seem more real than her everyday life.
Another distinctive characteristic of Bessie’s fiction is what I would call the disturbing happy ending. Things only end tragically in this collection for one of the narrators and yet several of the stories left me with a lingering sense of disquiet. In Two Little Red Shoes the ghosts have been created by hideously cruel child-abuse so turning the haunted house into a Home for Convalescent Children seems to be asking for further supernatural trouble. The haunted bedroom in Room Number Ten (Don’t you just hate ghosts who manifest while you are in bed?) is linked to an unusual curse on a family of nurses. The narrator ends up marrying a sinister member of this family surely creating ideal conditions for the curse to continue.
I’m not sure what to make of the intense sibling relationships in From Out of the Silence. I only know that Bessie had at least two sisters. The brother and sister in The Star Inn do not see each other often but are depicted as having a strong link of affection that bound us together. This link allows them to stand up to a haunting caused by a particularly brutal murder. The story has other notable features. The first is its two appealing animal characters, a dog and a cat, who are both devoted to their respective owners. The perpetual question of whether beloved pets can continue to be with us in the afterlife seems to be conclusively answered in The Star Inn. The second feature is the magnificent defiance of the ghost of the murdered woman who refuses to behave like a victim and be driven from her home.
Most of her fiction would not place Bessie in the top league of Ghost Story writers but then there is Outside the House. What an innocuous sounding title for a devastating story that almost seems to pulsate with anger. Experiencing the horrors of war has injured the narrator, John, both physically and mentally and made him determined to shun for evermore the superficial shams of his previous life. He hopes for happiness after he falls for his pretty young nurse, Elsie, but readers may already notice warning signs. John finds Elsie’s incompetence as a nurse charming, even when she causes him pain, but it is an indication of what kind of family she comes from. After John is invited to convalesce at Elsie’s home, she urges him to try to like it there and not to worry because Nothing can really do you any harm. But does this statement only apply to the very insensitive or the very callous?
John first meets Elsie’s family, the Falconers, as they are having tea on the sunken lawn outside their beautiful home. It is a tranquil scene familiar from numerous Edwardian novels and Golden Age Mystery Stories but after reading Outside the House I will never find such scenes idyllic again. Even after experiencing part of the transformation that the garden undergoes at night, John is reluctant to follow the family’s strange rules about staying deep inside the house until dawn. No one will explain these rules because to do so would involve revealing the tainted source of the family’s wealth. The Falconers keep to indoor gardens which are painted with imaginary scenes of a paradise unspoiled by their greed. This doesn’t placate John who is determined to seek the truth, whatever the consequences. If you want to know what horror John sees when he forces open the shutter on his bedroom window at night you will have to read this remarkable story. Until next month….
Geraldine
October 2025