“The Striding Place” was written by Gertrude Atherton and first appeared as “The Twins” (The Speaker, June 20, 1896). Atherton (1857-1948) was a notable American novelist who won the Légion d’Honneur for her hospital work during WW1.

The Strid, the setting of “The Striding Place,” is a real location, a particularly dangerous length of water in Yorkshire.

Weigall is on a weekend shooting trip in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He is out of sorts, however, because the weather has been bad, the company is poor, the shooting is tedious, he is feeling “continental and detached.”¹ Worst of all, his best friend Wyatt Gifford has disappeared. Gifford was a guest at an adjoining estate, and one night he simply walked out without his hat or overcoat and did not return. Though dozens of men were looking for him, he had not been found. This weighs on Weigall's spirit, because he loves Gifford and misses him. Weigall thinks about his conversations with Gifford, and how Gifford said, and probably believed, that the soul “sometimes lingers in the body after death,”² and how he intends to return to his body after he dies, even if the body is damaged: “I should rather enjoy experimenting with broken machinery.”³ One night, restless, Weigall goes for a walk along the river through the woods and comes to the Strid. There he sees

something tossing in the foam below the fall--something as white, yet independent of it caught his eye and arrested his step. Then he saw that it was describing a contrary motion to the rushing water an upward backward motion. Weigall stood rigid, breathless; he fancied he heard the crackling of his hair. Was that a hand? It thrust itself still higher above the boiling foam, turned sidewise, and four frantic fingers were distinctly visible against the black rock beyond.⁴

Weigall immediately pulls a branch free of a tree, leans over the water, and thrusts the branch at the hand, which grabs the branch. Weigall pulls, and the hand and then the arm come free of the river. Weigall recognizes the cuffs and the fingers, and pulls harder. There is life in the hand, and it eventually wrenches itself and the branch free of Weigall's grasp, and the body is flung into a nearby pool. Weigall carries Gifford on to land and moves to resuscitate, but then looks at Gifford: “there was no face.”⁵

Atherton thought “The Striding Place” was the best story she ever wrote. It became famous on publication, and has repeatedly been anthologized. Horror aficionados generally rank this story highly. It is not frightening, but it is very effective. “The Striding Place” might or might not be a ghost story–did Gifford come back to occupy his body for one last time?–and it might or might not a Gothic story about a Wrong Place–was the Strid just toying with Weigall and using Gifford's corpse to do so?–but either way, the ending is pleasantly chilling. Atherton tells the story economically and well, concisely portraying Weigall's and Gifford's characters and investing some emotion in their friendship, evoking the atmosphere of the Strid, and setting up and completing the plot, all in around 2300 words. Atherton's style is vivid, with well-chosen phrases which convey exactly the effects she was striving for. “The Striding Place” deserves the esteem with which it is held.

While Atherton’s intention in writing “The Striding Place” may never be known, one intriguing modern interpretation of the story is that it is a lightly-veiled tragic gay love story:

For a horror tale, the ending is superb. But beyond that we recognize, if we step back, the cues throughout the story that invite an alternative reading—the exotic locale in the very heart of workaday England and the several references to the “intimacy” of Weigall and Gifford’s friendship. The story becomes startlingly symbolic of the predicament that the 1890s gay man faced with the nature of his sexuality. Forced to confront the singular importance of his friendship for Gifford, Weigall finds the otherworldly qualities of the setting all too appropriate for the depth of his feelings; for it is only amidst the Romantic strangeness of the turbulent Strid that he can bypass the normality of society to face literally the unfaceable—that is, his homosexuality. In attempting to revive Gifford he (sub)consciously examines the true nature of his friendship, discovering that indeed his love has “no face,” for this is “the love that dare not speak its name.” Such an encounter fits perfectly into the mechanics of the horror story, for often the naturalization of homosexuality requires a supernatural setting in which to operate.⁶

Print: Peter Straub, ed., American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps. New York: The Library of America, 2009.

¹ Gertrude Atherton, “The Striding Place,” in The Bell in the Fog, and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1905), 47.

² Atherton, “The Striding Place,” 51.

³ Atherton, “The Striding Place,” 52.

⁴ Atherton, “The Striding Place,” 54.

⁵ Atherton, “The Striding Place,” 57.

⁶ James Gifford, Dayneford’s Library: American Homosexual Writing, 1900-1913 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 22.