"The Ghoul and the Corpse" (1923) by G. A. Wells
Charles, Sean, narrator. "The Ghoul and the Corpse." Nightshade Audio, 20 June 2023.
Readers unfamiliar with "The Ghoul and the Corpse" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
Narrator, prospector, ghoul, corpse
"The Ghoul and the Corpse" has been discussed by others here and here. It can be read online here and here. I listened to the Nightshade Audio version on YouTube. It was my introduction to the story, and I highly recommend it.
"The Ghoul and the Corpse" opens with first-person narrator MacNeal telling us we are about to hear his friend Chris Bonner's story. And that it is a lie.
[….] He came marching into my igloo up there at Aurora Bay. That is in Alaska, you know, on the Arctic sea. I had been in the back- country trading for pelts for a New York concern, and due to bad luck I didn't reach the coast until the third day after the last steamer out had cone. And there I was marooned for the winter, without chance of getting out until spring, with a few dozen ignorant Indians for companions. Thank heaven I had plenty of white man's grub in tins!
I suppose fur trading companies had to hire those who applied.
After Chris Bonner enjoys some tinned grub, the rhetorical fun begins:
"Say, MacNeal," he spoke at length; "what do you know about a theory that says once on a time this old world of ours revolved on its axis in a different plane? I've heard it said the earth tipped up about seventy degrees. What d'you know about it?"
That was a queer thing for Chris Bonner to ask. He was simon-pure prospector and I had never known him to get far away from the subject of mining and prospecting. He had been hunting gold from Panama to the Arctic Circle for the past thirty years.
"No more than you do, probably," I answered his question. "I've heard of that theory, too. I'd say it is any man's guess."
"This theory holds that the North Pole used to be where the Equator is now," he said. "Do you believe that?"
"I don't know anything about it, Chris," I replied. "But I do know that they have found things up this way that are now generally recognized as being peculiarly tropical in nature."
"What, for instance?"
"Palms and ferns, a species of parrot, saber-tooth tigers; and also mastodons, members of the elephant family. All fossils and parts of skeletons, you understand?"
"No human beings, MacNeal? Any skeletons or fossils of those up this way?"
"Never heard of it. Prehistoric people are being found in England and France, however."
"Huh," he said.
He pondered, puffing at his pipe, his eyes on the fire. He looked perplexed about something.
"Look here, MacNeal," he said suddenly. "Say a man dies. He's dead, ain't he?"
"No doubt about it," I laughed, wondering.
With talk of wandering north poles, "The Ghoul and the Corpse" almost sounds like something out of Graham Hancock la la land. In addition to being the first piece of Bigfoot fiction, is it also the first pole shift fiction?
"I had climbed the hill maybe a hundred feet, following the edge of the glacier, when I caught sight of a dark blotch in the edge of the ice. It was about two feet under the surface. I brushed away the film of snow to have a look. The ice was as clear as a crystal, of a blue color. And what d'you think, MacNeal? It was a man's body!"
He paused and gave me a quick glance. He wanted to see how I took that, I presumed.
"The body of a man," he went on. "And the queerest-looking man I ever saw in my life. He was lying on his belly and I didn't get a look at the front of him just then, but I knew it was a man all right. He was covered all over with long hair like a—well, like a bear, say. Not a stitch of clothes."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Why, I was that surprised I let my pan and shovel drop and started at the damn thing with the eyes near popping out of my head. What would anybody do, finding a hair-covered thing like that frozen in a glacier? I won't deny I was a bit scared, MacNeal...."
It turns out that in addition to being the first piece of Bigfoot and pole-shift fiction, "The Ghoul and the Corpse" might also be the first don't thaw out a piece of ice with a body in it fiction. "The Ghoul and the Corpse" was published fifteen years before "Who Goes There?" (1938).
(G. W. Thomas's excellent posts about what he terms "weird northerns" can be found here).
Where did fiction about Bigfoot begin? Was "The Ghoul and the Corpse" the first? The Internet Speculative Fiction Database currently thinks so.
Today viewers and readers are inundated with Bigfoot stories presented as true in all varieties of media. Books and tv shows I have looked at express no interest in how fiction writers have approached the topic. Bigfoot fiction occupies a very small niche, piling up everything from Max Brooks' Devolution (2020) to self-published erotica.
Given a limited knowledge of the contemporary horror field, I can count on one hand the number of worthwhile novels published about Bigfoot encounters. Joseph A. Citro's The Gore (1990), in my judgment, is the best Bigfoot novel so far, filled with real terror and enigma.
If MacNeal disbelieves Chris Bonner so firmly, why does he tell the man's story, and in the man's own words? I suspect the tusk blade gave MacNeal many sleepless nights. Perhaps akin to poor Phillipps and Dyson at the end of Machen's "The Red Hand" when Selby shows the pair that small piece of curious gold-work called "Pain of the Goat"?
Was "The Ghoul and the Corpse" G. A. Wells' choice for title? It is a crass pulp abstraction, conveying nothing about the story's setting or conflict. Chris Bonner is certainly an accidental and remorseful ghoul, and the corpse is consigned to flames with finality if not dignity. I doubt many men in the Alaskan gold fields let dignity guide them when gripped by the fever.
Jay
