"The Ghost-Table" by Elliot O'Donnell: A Review

The Arbo Files

Traditionally, Christmas is the time for ghost stories. One of H.P. Lovecraft’s foremost influences, the Anglo reactionary and antiquarian M.R. James (1862-1936), specialized in moody ghost tales set in medieval cathedrals or in the dusty rooms of snowbound scholars. There is something especially British about the Christmastime ghost tale that goes much deeper than Charles Dickens. It is standard, really.

One British writer of ghost tales, Elliott O’Donnell (1872-1965), specialized in supposedly true tales of hauntings. Prior to becoming a wordsmith, O’Donnell lived quite the extraordinary life. The son of an Anglican reverend from Dublin and an Englishwoman, O’Donnell grew up in southern England. As a young man, O’Donnell experienced tragedy when his father was murdered by thieves in Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia). O’Donnell grew up with aspirations of joining the Royal Irish Constabulary but wound up going to America for a brief spell instead. There O’Donnell worked as a cattleman in Oregon and as a police officer in Illinois during the Chicago Railway Strike of 1894. Upon his return to England, O’Donnell immersed himself in writing and the paranormal. This latter interest earned him the title of a “ghost hunter,” and O’Donnell appeared in print, on the radio, and later on television as an authority on spooks and specters.

Ghosts naturally haunt bulk of O’Donnell’s literary efforts, from his select few novels to his numerous short stories. Many of O’Donnell’s ghost stories saw publication in the United States in various pulp magazines, with the immortal Weird Tales being the primary dispenser of O’Donnell’s work. One such tale, “The Ghost-Table,” enjoyed the honor of being the cover story for the February 1928 edition of Weird Tales.

“The Ghost-Table” is set in London, and it concerns an unnamed husband of some wealth and status. The husband and his wife Yvonne live in the city in a nice apartment full of exotic knick-knacks. Yvonne is described as having “the devil’s own taste for the odd and curious.” She is also someone with a lust for the expensive and exquisite, from jade necklaces to Japanese lacquer boxes. Thus, when the unnamed narrator forgets his anniversary, he tries to make up for his blunder by purchasing a high-priced and weird artefact for Yvonne. The gift is found in a curio shop, and is an odd table of Southeast Asian design:

It wasn't teak; of that I was sure. It reminded me rather of that iron-hard and iron-heavy wood from Mindanao, more or less properly called Philippine ebony.

"Wonderful workmanship," continued the shopkeeper. "Look at those legs, sir."

They were wonderful: exquisitely fashioned, curving slightly outward and ending in feet fashioned to resemble the paws of a beast of prey— savage, pitiless claws whose realism made me for a moment wonder why the table was not confined in a cage. More odd than the table itself was the heavy chain that secured one leg to a massive ring in the floor.

The narrator has the table delivered to his apartment that afternoon. Yvonne and her sister Annie both greet the table warmly as something fittingly bizarre and beautiful. However, the trio’s mood sours that night when a mysterious thumping is heard. Suspecting prowlers, the narrator goes to investigate with a .45. He finds nothing. The thumping continues for several more nights, one of which ends with a visit from the police and the accidental killing of Yvonne’s Angora cat. The narrator resolves to end the mystery once and for all by spending a night watching the table with friends. To their horror and amazement, the table leaps up and begins attacking them. The inanimate object proves to be possessed by human intelligence, for, as explained by the curio shop owner, who arrives at the apartment just as the narrator is about to smash the table to pieces, the spirit of a paranormal researcher named Professor William Percival lives within the table. Percival believed in the “spiritual self or ego,” which he asserted could, through focused will, be inserted into objects. During one of his transference sessions, Percival died of heart failure after inserting his spiritual ego into the strange table. The curio shop owner took custody of the table thereafter, and after realizing that Percival’s ghost stayed dormant during the day, chained the haunted object to the floor in order to prevent its nightly jumping.

“The Ghost-Table” is a conventional ghost story that is the furthest thing from surprising. O’Donnell writes with charm, and the story is well-told, but this tale is surprisingly trite stuff for Weird Tales. Given this, you may be asking yourself: Arbo, why are you talking about this story at all? Aren’t there better stories to review?

Here is the kicker: “The Ghost-Table” was the cover story for the same issue of Weird Tales that first put into print Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” In his wisdom, editor Farnsworth Wright picked O’Donnell’s yarn over Lovecraft’s most famous creation. One should not be too harsh to Wright; O’Donnell was a known property writing in a familiar genre, after all. Lovecraft, on the other hand, was popular with Weird Tales readers but prone to doing things that gave his editors headaches. Wright and Lovecraft had a testy relationship, too. Although he published the bulk of Lovecraft’s work, Wright also rejected Lovecraft quite a bit, including turning down At the Mountain of Madness and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” This strained relationship may go a long way to explaining why “The Call of Cthulhu” did not net the coveted cover story spot in February 1928. Then again, a good ghost story is hard to beat…