Here are Ghosts and Witches
Illustrated by Michael Ayrton
Published by B.T. Batsford LTD, London, hardcover with dustjacket.

ENGLAND has always been fortunate in the number and ubiquity of her ghosts. As to the witches, they too were plentiful in their day, and even in more recent years there still remained country folk in remote districts 'with a lingering belief in their survival. In Wentworth Day, Ghosts and Witches have found a chronicler with an unusual gift for evoking the eerie and macabre atmosphere essential to the subject. The stories which he retells are unusual in two respects: they are nearly all of them of incidents which have taken plan; within living memory, and the great majority have been com-municated to the author at first-hand by the people who were witnesses of the manifestations. Thev have been taken from every part of the country: from the Author's own East Anglia, from the West and from the South Country, and from London itself-always a fertile source of hauntings in spite of Dr. ]ohnson's scepticism about the Cock Lane Ghost. There are, too, stories of the Battlefields, of Poltergeists and Will-o' -the-Wisps, of Spectral Coaches, Headless Queens and Devils on Horseback. 'Well indeed may the Author describe his hook as a Gallimaufry of Ghosts and a Web of Witches.
The illustrations, chapter headpieces and jacket design are all by Michael Ayrton; his work adds not a little to the uneasy fascination created by the Author. Whether the reader is a believer in ghosts, or whether he maintains an obdurate scepticism about their existence, the book will appeal to him as one of the most original and evocative collections of stories of the supernatural that have appeared since the times of M. R. James.