Customer Reviews

Cambridge College Ghosts

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"Cambridge College Ghosts" is ninety percent about the architecture and history of the various Cambridge colleges, and only ten percent of the text concerns itself with ghosts. This makes sense, I suppose, since the author Geoff Yeates is an architect. However, if you're looking for a book with one scary story after another, "Cambridge College Ghosts" is probably not for you.

The book is a short, lively history of Cambridge University and its colleges, with detailed architectural descriptions of the buildings, and lively anecdotes about its residents, living and deceased. If you are planning a trip to Cambridge, this book would make a good guide to the college buildings, although the one map is small and hard to read without a magnifying glass. The black-and-white photographs and drawings of buildings and architectural details are interesting, sometimes even eerie.

Author Yeates didn't exactly have an easy time collecting this book's ghostly anecdotes. Here are some of the replies he received from potential information sources:

"I regret that we have no ghosts in our cupboard."

"We have not as yet experienced anything spiritual. I shall let you know if it changes!"

"We...have no history of any ghosts connected with the property (apart from the Holy Ghost which we very much believe in)."

Nevertheless Yeates persevered and came up with a few supernatural sightings, a rector who met a ghost that predicted his own death and that of a colleague, the disposition of Oliver Cromwell's head, the (possibly) original skeleton in the cupboard, and quite a bit of information about Cambridge's own Society for Psychical Research which was founded in 1882 by three dons of Trinity College.

The most frightening story in this collection is fictional, but was written by Arthur Gray, who was the last master of Jesus College to be elected for life. "The Everlasting Club" was part of a collection of stories that Gray published under the pseudonym 'Ingulphus," and was entitled, "Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye."

Short though it is, this book contains one astounding omission. It makes no mention of a provost of King's College, Cambridge who was the greatest ghost story writer of them all: Montague Rhodes James. I hope Mr. Yeates plans to correct this curious lacuna in the next edition of "Cambridge College Ghosts."