My third novel, Hazardous Spirits, takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1923. It follows a woman, Evelyn Hazard, whose husband, Robert announces one day out of the blue that he has acquired an unexpected talent for speaking to the spirits of the dead. While nursing a loss of her own, Eveyln has to navigate a new world of Spiritualists and high-society eccentrics as she tries to determine if her husband is a fraud, unwell, or perhaps most frighteningly, if he’s telling the truth.
I wrote a large part of the novel during the Covid-19 national lockdowns in the UK, and perhaps like many people forced to spend longer physically in their homes than ever before, my thoughts turned to ghost stories. We have a powerful history of ghost stories in the UK, and across the nation there are many contenders battling it out for the title of the ‘most haunted’ castle, pub or hotel. Perhaps it’s the gloomy weather that has driven people indoors around a crackling fire, perhaps it's a hangover from the macabre inheritance of the Victorian imagination, or an awareness of the many layers of historical turbulence that saturate even the most humble village. Whatever the cause, ghost stories are a popular tradition across the UK, and the appeal of a spooky tale only increases as the days grow shorter.
When the events of Hazardous Spirits open in 1923, the characters are trying to cope with a world that is not unlike our current moment, almost exactly 100 years later. In the early 1920s, society was still suffering the after-effects of the combined trauma of WW1 and the 1918 -1920 flu epidemic. In this moment, appetite for the esoteric became particularly popular, and the Spiritualist movement reached arguably the peak of its appeal, as people sought comfort for their grief.
Spiritualism as a movement emerged in response to the public mediumship of two young women, Kate and Maggie Fox in America in the late 1840s, who claimed the ability to channel spirits though rapping and knocking noises. The movement grew in popularity and influence on both sides of the Atlantic, adopted by some as a religious practice within a Spiritualist church, and for others a social phenomenon that promised thrilling and comforting messages from mediums in touch with disembodied spirits.
An example of one prominent Scottish advocate for Spiritualism is Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930) who is most well remembered as the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle became involved in Spiritualist circles from the end of the 1880s and by 1916 he was more publicly associated with the movement. The loss of several close family members, including his son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley, due to injuries inflicted by the war only served to reinforce Doyle’s belief in Spiritualism. Doyle went on to write several non-fiction books about Spiritualism, and in 1922 published The Coming of the Fairies, which defended the infamous set of photographs of allegedly real fairies taken by another pair of young female relatives, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths.
Both Kate and Maggie Fox and Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths eventually renounced their gifts for communing with the supernatural. Kate and Maggie Fox produced the ‘knocking’ sounds of their spiritual counterparts by clicking their joints. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths created their fairies initially as a hoax, by cutting out and posing with paper images held up by hatpins. But the stories catalysed by these young women had for a time seized the popular imagination, promising that a new horizon of spiritual encounters was only a few moments away.
Ultimately, the appeal of a good ghost story makes similar promises; familiar enough to be recognisable, with enough suggestion of the otherworldly to be spine-chilling. In Hazardous Spirits, it is just this kind of slippery struggle between falsehood and reality that makes Evelyn’s questions about her husband so difficult to answer. Throughout the novel, Evelyn changes her mind often about the possibility of life persisting beyond death, finding it hard to trust even her own instincts. As a reader, I have always felt that tales of the supernatural are often at their most terrifying when the hint of the paranormal interrupts and transforms the everyday. And as a writer, I’m interested in exploring the uncanny sense that what has previously been hidden may suddenly be revealed. After all, what could be more frightening than the ghost of your own secrets?
Hazadous Spirits by Anbara Salam. (John Murray Press) Out Now
Edinburgh, 1923Evelyn Hazard is a young woman living a comfortable and unremarkable middle-class life. One day, her quiet existence is shattered when her steady, reliable husband Robert makes a startling announcement: he can communicate with the deadAs the couple are pulled into the spiritualist movement that emerged following the mass deaths caused by the First World War and the Spanish Flu, Evelyn's life becomes increasingly unsettled as dark secrets from her past threaten to surface.Faced with the prospect of losing all that is dear to her, Evelyn finds herself asking: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman or - most frighteningly - is he telling the truth?A gothic literary mystery, written in sparkling prose, Hazardous Spirits evokes the spirit of 1920s Edinburgh, in all its bohemian vibrancy.
More information about Anbara Salam and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on “X” at @anbara_salam and on nstagram @anbarasalam
