IMH and New Writing North are delighted to mark the 2024 research cabaret with the publication of this short story.
The Institute for Medical Humanities have come together with New Writing North - the writing development agency for the North of England - to create a writing fellowship as part of 'Landmarking: A Research Cabaret'. Written by fellowship recipient Megan Adams, this ghostly short story is inspired by Durham University doctoral candidate Lucy Jameson’s research on the intersection of the history of disability with the legacy of coal mining in the North East.
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The spark for the idea of a Victorian-inspired ghost story emerged after my first conversation with Megan, where I shared my disability history research on pneumoconiosis in County Durham mining communities. Pneumoconiosis is a progressive and eventually fatal disease of the lungs, caused by inhaling coal dust, and was a ubiquitous occupational disease among mining communities. This spurred Megan’s idea to feature pneumoconiosis within the ghost story, linking together the impact of the mining landscape on long-latency occupational diseases.
Megan’s initial research highlighted that there was a dearth of Victorian-inspired ghost stories set within the North East. Therefore, we wanted something to represent our history. As two locals from County Durham, Megan and I are acutely aware of the impact that the mining industry has played on the health of our communities, and the landscape of the county. Megan took inspiration to set the ghost story in a miner’s hospital from our discussion about the miner’s rehabilitation hospitals dotted across County Durham, as well as the impact of deindustrialisation on Category D villages (villages deemed to have no economic future).
It was important to us both to nuance the nostalgia so heavily imbued in reflections about County Durham’s mining past, that often omit and downplay both the environmental and physical scarring that is still visible today as a result of County Durham’s industrial past.
Joan had been out of hospital for a week and so far every day had been miserable. No matter how high Shirley banked the fire or how tight her blankets were tucked in, the cottage had a coldness that couldn’t be shaken.
Her father’s lawyer had picked the cottage for its peaceful aspect, he’d told her, believing it would be a lovely place for Joan to recover. She thought it was cheap enough and out of the way enough that Joan wouldn’t be too visible
She didn’t think much of the view either. The cottage looked out over a valley pockmarked with demolished buildings and scarred by overhead lines.
The village she had moved to looked like every other pit village in the north. The high street had one post office and a working men’s club, the rest of the building's windows were pasted with newspapers. The only locals she saw were pigeons on the electric lines.
Her own cottage was on the outskirts of the village, a converted miners cottage only just on the grounds of the pit. Her nearest neighbor was a huge square chimney that poked out of the mist.
“The smoke from that won’t be good for my chest.” Joan said as Shirley helped her out of the car.
Shirley scoffed and told her that the mine had been shut for two years, hadn’t she watched any news in hospital? Joan had been too busy trying not to die from pulmonary fibrosis to listen to the news. But it made sense as to why the cottage had been so cheap.
The next night was miserable as only November could be, grey skies with occasional fog thick as chimney smoke and cold drizzle constantly on the windows.
Joan was spending her evening dozing and reading. The painkiller she took in the evening meant that she spent her nights coasting on cloudy nothingness to stop her chest pain keeping her awake. But it also caused a veil to fall between herself and the rest of the world.
She was almost asleep when she jerked awake from her book falling onto her chest. She blinked up at the bright overhead light and cursed herself for not asking Shirley to turn the light off before she left for the club.
It took Joan almost ten minutes to cross the room and back, holding onto the wall for balance. Her legs were wishbone weak and moving them felt like a battle.
When she was back sitting on her bed, she had a long coughing fit until the pain in her chest eased and she could take in some deep, wheezy breaths.
It took so much out of her that her eyes slipped shut without permission.
Since her last relapse she hadn't been able to lie flat on her back, so she had to rest propped up, head held stiffly.
She focused on catching her breath and stared out the hazy window. Her bedside lamp cast harsh shadows over her face. Her reflection in the dark glass was ghostly. Dark pits instead of eyes, skin as pale as a corpse and hollowed out cheeks.
But. Wait. Were there two faces in the window? One beside her own, a double? She raised a hand to wave at her warped reflection. Her dark counterpart did not move.
Joan gasped and the sudden inhalation made her choke. An ache started in her chest. She tried to will it away by breathing through it but the pain took over.
Coughs erupted, fiery phlegm landed in her hanky. It was better she sat up straight, she knew, but the fire in her throat was so great that she was hunched over like a cat hacking up a hairball.
Each cough felt like it was rending her lungs into strips.
Images swam in front of her eyes; the hospital ward she had just escaped collaged on top of the cottage.
Through blinks she thought she saw a bed next to her own, a man screaming and thrashing on white sheets turning red from a wreckage on the end of his arm.
Next blink and the bed was gone. Joan lolled back against the pillows. Tears leaked from her tightly shut eyes. She was swaying in place, it seemed, but knew she was still. The coughing continued until her vision swam like marbled endpapers and her mind emptied.
Probably only minutes had passed when she awoke. At first, she thought the sound of coughing was coming from her own body. On autopilot she reached for the handkerchief dropped on her chest. But the awful dry coughing was not her own. Her own wheezing breaths were loud, but even louder was the coughing.
She must still be dreaming. Imagining the echoes of her hospital stay. Or she'd finally given herself brain damage from all the oxygen deprivation. It sounded like the man- for it was definitely a man- was in the room, close by, perhaps even in the hospital bed adjacent to hers.
But she wasn’t in the hospital any more.
She was home, in the pokey, mice-filled cottage in the middle of nowhere her parents had packed her off to so they wouldn’t have to deal with their disappointment in her. And there was someone in there with her. She felt his coughs rattle through her body as though they shared the same lungs, marbled with scar tissue.
She must have a fever again. The last time she had a fever she thought there were hedgehogs under her pillow and was terrified of squishing them. This was just like that.
She wished Shirley hadn’t gone to the bingo at the awful club. Her nurse could sit up with her and listen to the radio and tell her it was just a dream.
The radio. That would help, take her mind off the strange morphine induced visions.
She dragged a hand out from under the leaden blankets and reached for the radio by the other side of her bed. Her clumsy fingers hit the lamp instead and sent it crashing to the floor, throwing her into darkness.
Immediately the coughing stopped and instead painful saw-like breathing stalked through the dark. Hairs stood on end all over her body. Her eyes drew to the only light source, the moonlight distilled through mist and leaving a pitiable grey light. In the dead centre of the window, a dark silhouette blocked out the moonlight.
Joan fell out of bed, hands scrambling for the lamp she’d knocked off. Shaking fingers found the switch but the silhouette did not disappear. The shadow creature stared in at her without eyes. She tried to pull herself up on the bedside table, if she could make it to the phone she could call someone, but as she did she heard a pop and the hiss of air leaking.
She’d pulled her oxygen tube from the cannister.
She stared at the shadow as her breaths came faster.
Blood on her tongue as her coughs grew harsher. Her ears popped and her head lolled against the bed, eyes still on the window. Her arms were too weak to fix the oxygen tube, her bones felt like soft candlewax melting.
She couldn’t move as the creature in the window stepped out from the shadows and limped towards her.
Flickers pass over her vision like a film reel, images of the past layered over her present. Men on stretchers. Bodies and parts of bodies mangled by machinery and rockfall.
As the spirit walked closer, her eyes shut.
When Shirley found her a few hours later, Joan’s lips were blue and her hands were covered in coal dust.
Ghostly Tales: Spine-Chilling Stories of the Victorian Age (Chronicle Books, 2017).
David Almond, Kit’s Wilderness (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 1999).
Kirsti Bohata, Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin, Steven Thompson, Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880-1948 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
Ronald M. James, ‘Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines’, Western Folklore, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1992), pp. 153-177.
Liz Linahan, Pit Ghosts, Padfeet and Poltergeists (Huddersfield: The King’s England Press, 1994).
Alexandra Jones, ‘‘Her body [was] like a hard-worked machine’: Women’s work and disability in coalfields literature, 1880-1950’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(4) (2017), pp. 1-14.
Place inspiration: Eden Colliery–Leadgate http://www.dmm.org.uk/colliery/e005.htm
Eden Colliery Fan House, DJ Aerial Photography
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