The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

"The Upper Berth" (1886)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

“The Upper Berth” was written by F. Marion Crawford and first appeared in The Broken Shaft: Unwin’s Christmas Annual for 1886 (1885). Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909) was the son of American parents, but was born and mostly raised in Italy and lived there for most of his adult life. He was a popular novelist who is mostly forgotten today; when he is remembered it is for his supernatural and ghost stories, which he turned out for quick cash. “The Upper Berth” is well-remembered among horror story aficionados, and for good reason; it is well-written and only barely misses being in the nineteenth century Horror Hall Of Fame.

Brisbane is one of the genteel rich, someone who thinks “no more of crossing the Atlantic than taking a whisky cocktail at downtown Delmonico’s.” So he does not hesitate to book a passage on the Kamtschatka, one of his favorite ships. But he has booked room 105 on the Kamtschatka, and this causes the ship’s steward to look at him askance and with alarm. The steward won’t say why, but he acts nonplused at the notion of someone occupying that room. On the first night of the voyage Brisbane shares the room with another man, but something causes the man to flee the room in the middle of the night. Brisbane awakens again, while it is still dark, and the room feels cold and smells of the sea, and he can hear his roommate tossing and turning and occasionally groaning. Brisbane wakes near dawn and finds that the room is cold and that his roommate has left the porthole open. Brisbane closes the porthole and then makes his way on deck. He meets the ship’s doctor and tells him where he is staying, which the doctor reacts negatively to, much as the steward had. The doctor offers one of the berths in his room to Brisbane, who declines. Even the ship’s captain meets with Brisbane. The captain informs Brisbane that three other men who have stayed in that berth has thrown themselves overboard, and asks that Brisbane accept another room elsewhere. Brisbane declines, wanting to have a room to himself.

That evening the same thing happens. Despite having turned the bolts on the porthole before going to sleep, Brisbane finds that the porthole is open when he wakes up, in the night, and that the room is damp and smells of the sea. He also hears something in the upper berth. He tries to find out what it is and discovers that it is a “clammy, oozy mass”¹ which attacks Brisbane when he touches it. The creature flees down the corridor and then disappears. But the bed it was in is dry, although it smells of the sea. The next morning Brisbane meets with the doctor, who tells him that the creature is a ghost. Brisbane is contemptuous of this response, although he vividly remembers the eldritch feeling he had during the night. The captain volunteers to spend the night with Brisbane, to see exactly what is happening. Brisbane, the captain, and the ship’s carpenter go over the room and make sure there is no way someone could be sneaking into it and that the porthole is fastened shut. They sit up and wait, and that night, as they watch, the screws on the porthole unfasten themselves. Then the lights go out, and when Brisbane reaches into the upper berth the thing is there. It attacks him and the captain and overpowers both of them. It then flees the room and disappears. Brisbane does not return to the room, after the voyage is over the captain moves on to another ship, and the door to 105 is thereafter sealed and not made available to anyone.

“The Upper Berth” is excellent stuff, technically sound and told in the conversational and clean style of the better end-of-the-century short story writers. The story has none of the flowery, ponderous, or histrionic rhetoric that so dates many of the earlier Victorian horror stories; there is just the set-up, the first person narration, and a variety of creepy moments--waking up in the middle of the night, with a thing in the upper bunk, is something many children have dreaded, and having it occur as an adult is a nightmare in waiting for most people. What keeps the story from being immortal is the lack of ambiguity about the ghost. There is plenty of ambiguity about why it is there, but unlike de Maupassant’s Horla (see: “The Horla”) and Machen’s Pan (see: “The Great God Pan”) the ghost is described at length. The reader knows what the ghost looks like and how it feels, and although the ghost is disturbing, the fact that the reader knows what the ghost looks like makes it less disturbing than something like the Horla. But that “The Upper Berth” merits comparison to “The Horla” and “The Great God Pan” should indicate the quality of “The Upper Berth.” The preceding cavils are praising with faint damns, really.

Recommended Edition

Print: Roald Dahl, ed., Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000117394