In his ‘antiquarian’ ghost stories, Montague Rhodes James sought to examine the male character 'sub specie ludi', as solitary types who – in their sensitivity to inherently playful, or ludic, situations – are launched into a transformative game in which their identity is traumatically and horrifically challenged. In the vast majority of his tales, James focuses upon a main character that is usually a middle-aged English academic or antiquarian who, by his insatiable intellectual curiosity, encounters a demonic spectre in some cathedral or library. In this paper I argue that James emphasises the ‘amateur’, avocational, and non-professional status of these ghost-seers as a playful textual strategy that reflects upon his own blended identity as a career academic and part-time supernatural savant. It is the typical ‘normality’ of M.R. James’s amateur academic that allows for abnormal events to occur which dramatically invigorate everyday life and challenge stable identity through the medium of familiar, yet fearful, scholarly artefacts.
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