1950’s Darna – Back to Edwardo

Episode 14 (and 15) of the 1950’s saga of Filipina superhero Darna versus Valentina is here!

Last episode, we saw Valentina return to her jungle home after being violently rejected by the town. Edwardo, “her very last hope,” is waiting for her there. Will he accept her when the town didn’t?

Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo. Original scan by Simon Santos

Click on the image to go to the translated comic as a PDF.

The scans for Episode 15 are completely missing, but Simon Santos provided a summary, which I’ve translated and included at the end of this episode.

If you want to see the (almost) complete run of the Darna vs Valentina story in Filipino, head over to the Video 48 blog.

Translation links, if you need to catch up:

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1950’s Darna – The Aftermath

Episode 13 of the 1950’s saga of Filipina superhero Darna versus Valentina!

Last episode, Valentina finally revealed her secret to the town. It did not go well. In this episode, we see how Valentina handles all the townspeople turning on her.

Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo. Original scan by Simon Santos

Click on the image to go to the translated comic as a PDF. There are two pages missing from this scan, but Simon Santos provided a summary of those missing pages, which I’ve translated and inserted here.

If you want to see the (almost) complete run of the Darna vs Valentina story in Filipino, head over to the Video 48 blog.

Translation links, if you need to catch up:

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A Little More Literary Sleuthing

[Update 8/27/2024 – updated links to Dark Tales Sleuth]

I know I promised one last winter tale this season, but last weekend I got sidetracked by a little literary sleuthing….

MadelynMack books
Image: From Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective, by Hugh C. Weir (1914).
Source: Internet Archive

Over Christmas break, a researcher for the Internet Speculative Fiction Database left a comment on a post on my blog Dark Tales Sleuth. Some of you may remember that this is a blog I put up to support my projects in literary sleuthing: that is, tracking down proper author/translator attributions and provenance of uncredited (or miscredited) stories. You come across a lot such stories, if you like to read short fiction from nineteenth century periodicals or anthologies. The amount of copypasta and plagiarism is staggering. Even the New York Times wasn’t above it.

The story in question was one I’d identified as probably being an English translation of a story from a Danish literary journal, that was possibly itself a translation from another language. Maybe even English? That would be funny. Thanks to leads my commenter gave me, I did find a German version of the story that may be the original. Maybe. And I wrote about it here.

Continue reading →

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The Miser’s Ghost

The last winter tale of 2023 is from Canada: a tale of ghostly redemption from French-Canadian journalist, politician, folklorist, and one-time mayor of Montreal, Honoré Beaugrand. It’s a tale I read someone refer to as “a reverse Christmas Carol,” which is an apt description.

Exbcivuwsaeiuht jpg Blog

New Year’s Eve, 1857: a lively family party to see out the old year and welcome in the new. As the partygoers seek a way to pass the time until midnight, a little girl asks her grandfather to tell everyone the story of a New Year’s eve seventy years previously. A New Year’s eve when her grandfather got lost in the snow, and sought shelter at house that he didn’t recall seeing before….

You can read “The Miser’s Ghost” here (Link to the cas d’intérêt website).

Please note that while the French-language story is in the public domain, the English translation, by Carol A. Seidl, is not.

Continue reading →

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The Ghostly Rental

As we make our way through the twelve days of Christmas, we still have a few more Winter Tales for this season. Today’s offering is “The Ghostly Rental,” by Henry James. It’s the first of two stories I have for New Year’s Eve.

399px 133 of The Haunted House Illustrated by H Railton With an introduction by Austin Dobson 11236822764

The narrator, a young divinity scholar in the Cambridge area of Boston, comes upon a mysterious house on the last day of the year, and spies on the house’s unusual visitor. A few days later, he meets that visitor again, by chance: one Captain Diamond, who owns the house, and rents it out. To a ghost.

You can read “The Ghostly Rental” here (PDF from Wikisource).

“The Ghostly Rental” first appeared in Scribner’s Monthly 12 (September 1876), so it’s from James’s early, or “apprentice” period of writing—what I think of as his “straightforward, readable” period. So, if you’ve ever struggled with The Turn of the Screw and have been regarding today’s tale with trepidation, don’t worry. It’s a pretty good read, one I’ve always liked.

Enjoy!

A list (with links) of the winter tales I’ve shared in previous years is on my Winter Tales page.

Featured Image: Lenox [Massachusetts]: “haunted house” on East Street, circa 1880-1930. Source: Lenox [Massachusetts] Library Association (CC BY-NC-ND)

Illustration by H. Railton for The Haunted House by Thomas Hood (1896). Source: Wikimedia

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The White Witch

For Christmas Eve: an interesting little fairy tale from Mary Wilkins Freeman!

King and highchamberlain whitewitch

Welcome to the land of Polaria, where everything is white: the animals, the vegetation, the people. It’s a well-off, prosperous country, except for two things. First, the “color disease,” which afflicts people with a hunger for color, and an inability to deal with the lack of it. Second, the “epidemic of discontent” that has struck the children of Polaria, and rendered all of them profoundly displeased with their Christmas presents—to the point of temper tantrums.

It’s up to the White Witch to cure the country of both its afflictions.

You can read “The White Witch” here.

As you might guess, “The White Witch” is what the Victorians would have called an “edifying” children’s story. It even has the subtitle “A Story for Discontented Little Ones Who Have Too Many Presents for One Day.” But unlike other children’s stories of this kind, this one is neither pious nor stuffy—it’s actually rather eccentric. I like it, and I hope you will too.

“The White Witch” first appeared exactly 130 years ago, on December 24, 1893, in The Boston Globe, Portland Oregonian, Philadelphia Inquirer, St. Louis Republic, and San Francisco Chronicle.*

Hope you enjoy this little tale! Here’s wishing a Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and a wonderful day to all who don’t.

[*]: Kinsey, Valerie. “A Recovered Children’s Christmas Story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: ‘The White Witch’”, American Literary Realism Vol 33 No. 3 (Spring 2012). JSTOR link.↩

A list (with links) of the winter tales I’ve shared in previous years is on my Winter Tales page.

Featured image: Six Detectives looking over the Witch’s garden wall (inverted), illustration for “The White Witch”, San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 1893. Source: San Francisco Chronicle Archives, via San Francisco Public Library.

The King and the Lord High Chamberlain set out for the house of the White Witch, illustration for “The White Witch”, San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 1893. Source: San Francisco Chronicle Archives, via San Francisco Public Library.

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The Twelfth Guest

For this Christmas weekend I’ll be following my usual tradition of sharing gentler Christmas-themed supernatural tales—one today, the next on Christmas Eve. This year, both stories are by New England writer Mary Wilkins Freeman, who is one of my favorite late nineteenth-century American ghost story writers.

Illustration from twelfth guest

“The Twelfth Guest” is an excellent example of Freeman’s “New England domestic” style. It’s less overtly supernatural than some of her other well-known stories; but pleasantly mysterious and quite appropriate for the season.

The extended Childs clan—eleven of them—are sitting down to Christmas dinner, when a mysterious waif appears at the door. By coincidence, the daughter of the house has accidentally set an extra place—“a sign somebody’s comin’ that’s hungry,” one of the family says. And the waif’s name? Christine. Is it a sign? Of what?

You can read “The Twelfth Guest” here.

“The Twelfth Guest” first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 80, no. 475 (December, 1889).

If you’re interested in more Mary Wilkins Freeman, I’ve shared a number of her stories in the past. Here are some old posts:

A list (with links) of the winter tales I’ve shared in previous years is on my Winter Tales page.

Featured image: Plan of Dinner Table, illustration for Smiley’s cook book and universal household guide, 1895. Source: Wikimedia.

Illustration from Twelfth Guest (Christine at the door of Willard Morris’s house), Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol 80, no. 475 (December 1889). Source: Internet Archive.

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1950’s Darna – Valentina Reveals All

In between the Winter Tales, I’ve found time for another Darna! Here’s episode 12 of the 1950’s saga of Filipina superhero Darna versus Valentina….

Last episode, Valentina cured a young boy who was dying of a snake bite, after the local folkhealer failed. Now the townspeople are more sure than ever that she’s the Virgin Mary, come from heaven to visit them. And Valentina decides it’s time to accept the challenge that Kobra made to her back in episode 8: to reveal her true self to the town.

Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo. Original scan by Simon Santos

Click on the image to go to the translated comic as a PDF.

If you want to see the (almost) complete run of the Darna vs Valentina story in Filipino, head over to the Video 48 blog.

Translation links, if you need to catch up:

Continue reading →

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Warned by the Wire

Today, we have a tale of haunted technology from California! “Warned by the Wire” first appeared in The San Francisco Call on December 25, 1895*. There isn’t anything particularly “wintry” about this selection, but given its publication date, it definitely qualifies as a Christmas ghost story.

The narrator is a mobile telegraph operator, traveling with a railroad crew as they build a line through the mountains. Late one night, his receiver taps out a message on its own, announcing a tragic event that will happen the next day. Prophesy? Or practical joke?

You can read “Warned by the Wire” here.

The author of “Warned by the Wire,” Louis Glass, worked as a telegraph operator with Western Union for ten years, just one job of many in an interesting career. He also went on to invent the coin-operated phonograph—the predecessor of the jukebox! He installed his first “nickel-in-the-slot phonograph” at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. I assume the establishment burned down in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, since the address, 303 Sutter Street, is now the location of the landmark Hammersmith Building, built in 1907.

If you’re curious about the jukebox angle, here’s a couple of interesting articles:

You might want to complement all this with “The Avenging Phonograph”, by E.R. Punshon—not a ghost story, even if it sounds like one, but fun all the same. I’ll have to try to find a real haunted phonograph ghost story for a future Winter Tales season.

Enjoy!

[*]: Publication information is according to Christopher Philippo, the editor of The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories 4, which includes this and other Christmas ghost stories culled from U.S. and Canadian periodicals. “Warned by the Wire” is the only overlap between that collection and my selections for this year.↩

A list (with links) of the winter tales I’ve shared in previous years is on my Winter Tales page.

Featured Image: Morse key and register (colors reversed), from Popular Science Monthly, vol. 9 (1876). Source: Wikimedia.

Detail from The Progress of the Century, Currier & Ives (circa 1876). Source: The Library of Congress.

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La Corriveau

This week’s winter tale is from Canada, an extract from Les Anciens Canadiens, by the then-75 year old lawyer and landowner (seigneur), Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé. This novel cum historical discussion of eighteenth-century “tradition, character, and manners”—as Wikipedia says—nominally relates the adventures of young Jules d’Haberville, the son of a seigneur, and his friend, the Scottish orphan/refugee Archibald Cameron of Locheil.

In the section of the novel that this extract is from, Jules and Archie, accompanied by Jules’ servant José Dubé, are traveling along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, near Quebec. José tells the other two men about the time that his “late father, who is now dead” encountered the goblins of the Île d’Orléans, and the ghost of the infamous La Corriveau!

You can read “La Corriveau” here..

The historical La Corriveau, Marie-Josephte Corriveau, was convicted of the murder of her second husband, Louis Etienne Dodier, in 1763. She was sentenced to execution by hanging, and her body “exposed in chains”: ie, gibbeted. The story has her skeleton suspended in a hanging cage. She was also rumored to have murdered her first husband—though apparently those rumors didn’t start until after her second husband’s death.

Continue reading →

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