SOURCE: "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" by M. R. James  (1893)

DESCRIPTION: "In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled. He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at his heart. The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his scalp. There was black and tattered drapery about it; the coarse hair covered it as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin - what can I call it? -shallow, like a beast's; teeth showed behind the black lips; there was no nose; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils showed black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there, were the most horrifying features in the whole vision. There was intelligence of a kind in them - intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man." ("Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" by M. R. James)

NOTES: The hairy demon haunts anyone who possesses Canon Alberic's Scrapbook of mystical medieval lore. Only by getting rid of the book, by giving it to someone else without coercion, will the possesser be free.

HISTORY: M. R. James' first ghost story, written as a Christmas Eve treat for his fellow dons at Eton. The reading of his ghost stories became a yearly tradition. M. R. James saw J. Sheridan Le Fanu as his master, taking from him the idea that a ghost should be felt before it is seen. That idea works well in this story.

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