“When I Was Dead” was written by Vincent O’Sullivan and first appeared in A Book of Bargains (1896). O’Sullivan (1868-1940), an American, was one of the central figures in the English Decadent/fin-de-siècle movement of the 1890s and is one of the best horror fiction writers of the past hundred years. The degree to which his name draws no recognition from most fans of supernatural fiction says much the cruelty of posterity. O’Sullivan belongs more to the twentieth century than the nineteenth, so his best stories, such as “Basil Holderness” and “They,” are not included here. But his “When I Was Dead,” “The Business of Madame Jahn,” and “Will” are excellent supernatural stories.

“When I Was Dead” is about Alistair, the curmudgeonly owner of Ravenel Hall, an unpleasant mansion which never receives visitors; there is something about it which they do not like and which sets their nerves on edge. Alistair admits these things but doesn’t care; he is too busy working on his theory that “if you place some drops of human blood near you, and then concentrate your thoughts, you will after a while see before you a man or a woman who will stay with you during long hours of the night, and even meet you at unexpected places during the day.”¹ Alistair has some luck, conjuring up an old woman, but “when I tried to construct the eyes she would shrivel and rot in my sight.”² Then one night, as he is “thinking, thinking, as I had never thought before,”³ there is a terrible crash, and his servants begin entering his library and crying out at what they see. More of the servants gather, and they ignore Alistair’s commands to them, and they act as if he is dead, which Alistair refuses to believe. A doctor sees the body and pronounces the verdict, and Alistair merely wanders the house. Alistair’s sister, who he hates, visits, and when he tries to stab her in the neck she does not die. And then the funeral passes, and eventually he sees “a black thread winding slowly across the white plain” and he cries out, “I’m not dead! Sweet God, I am not dead.”⁴

The central idea of “When I Was Not Dead,” the dead man who does not know that he is a ghost, is clichéd to us now. It is O’Sullivan’s execution that makes the story so memorable. The tone is deadpan intensity, so that Alistair can talk, in a matter-of-fact way, about the shade of the old woman he has conjured up, and how “very complete” she is, except “alas! She was eyeless.” But Alistair grows increasingly shrill and desperate in his efforts to convince himself that he is not dead, and his emotions, such as his hate for his sister, possess him, and the final quote leaves us with an insane ghost who refuses to accept his unlife. O’Sullivan’s descriptions are engrossing; his sketch of Ravenel Hall–“the passages were long and gloomy, the rooms were musty and dull, even the pictures were sombre and their subjects dire...at Ravenel the chain of nerves was prone to clash and jangle a funeral march”⁵–is vivid, but he pointedly omits any description of Alistair’s corpse, so that we know that Alistair is refusing to admit he sees it until he must.

“When I Was Dead” is a sharp, well-crafted short work which puzzles on a first reading and is more appreciated the longer it is considered. As no less a master of horror than Robert Aickman put it, “’When I Was Dead’ is a very rictus or spasm of guilt; sudden and shattering. Vincent O’Sullivan was a master of this dyeing and soaking in guilt.”⁶

Print: Michael Cox, ed., Twelve Victorian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

¹ Vincent O’Sullivan, “When I Was Dead,” in A Book of Bargains (London: L. Smithers, 1896), 130.

² O’Sullivan, “When I Was Dead,” 132.

³ O’Sullivan, “When I Was Dead,” 132.

⁴ O’Sullivan, “When I Was Dead,” 140.

⁵ O’Sullivan, “When I Was Dead,” 130.

⁶ Robert Aickman, “Introduction,” in Robert Aickman, ed., The Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (London: Fontana Books, 1967), 9.