japanese ghost stories by lafcadio hearn

For the next two years, he lived in an East London slum with one of Sarah’s former maids. He was freed from the misery of that boarding school only when Sarah, having been bilked by a fortune hunter, went broke and had to withdraw him. As lasting as the resulting blindness in that eye was Hearn’s terrible self-consciousness about his disfigured appearance. At age thirteen, he was sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school in England, where a playground incident caused a grievous injury to his left eye.

“His mind,” in the words of one of his biographers, was “dominated by horror from an early age.” He had a crippling fear of the dark, which was treated by putting him to bed every night in a pitch-dark room that was locked from the outside. The boy, now seven, never saw his father again, either.Īn ignominious and unexpected burden to his family, Paddy, as he was then known, was reared in the prosperous Dublin home of his great-aunt Sarah. Charles had the marriage annulled, then quickly remarried and moved to India. Mother and child never saw each other again she spent her last years confined to an asylum in Corfu. On a leave between overseas postings, Charles took up with an old girlfriend, around which time Rosa-pregnant again, speaking little English, exhibiting symptoms of mental illness-bolted back to the islands, leaving behind her son, who was then four years old. They married and, with their two-year-old son, relocated to Dublin to move in with Charles’s family, some of whom considered their honor pretty well stained, too. Their youthful romance reputedly grew into love when she nursed him back to health after he was set upon and stabbed multiple times by her brother, who viewed their liaison as a stain on the family’s honor. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkáda (one of the Ionian Islands, at the time still under British control), to an Ionian mother named Rosa and an Irish father, Charles, who was stationed there as a staff surgeon in the British Army. In his fifty-four years among the living, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn wrote twenty-nine books in just about every conceivable genre-folktales, travelogues, novels, cookbooks, translations, dictionaries of proverbs-none of which can compete, in terms of sheer Dickensian horror and pluck, with the story of his own life.

Japanese ghost stories by lafcadio hearn