The
Eden Book Society
100 Years of Unseen Horror
The Eden Book Society
Copyright © J.M. McVulpin 1972, 2020
All rights reserved.
The right of J.M. McVulpin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by The Eden Book Society, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.
ISBN 978-1-911585-48-0
About the Society
Established in 1919, The Eden Book Society was a private publisher of horror for nearly 100 years. Presided over by the Eden family, the press passed through the generations publishing short horror novellas to a private list of subscribers. Eden books were always published under pseudonyms and, until now, have never been available to the public.
Dead Ink Books is pleased to announce that it has secured the rights to the entire Eden Book Society backlist and archives. For the first time, these books, nearly a century of unseen British horror, will be available to the public. The original authors are lost to time, but their work remains and we will be faithfully reproducing the publications by reprinting them one year at a time.
We hope that you will join us as we explore the evolving fears of British society as it moved through the 20th century and eventually entered the 21st. We begin our reproduction with 1972, a year of exciting and original horror for the Society.
J.M. McVulpin
J.M. McVulpin was born in 1911. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and read Medicine at University College, London before going on to establish a career in psychiatry in the north of England. He was a consultant psychiatrist in hospitals across Lancashire and Cumbria, including Clitheroe, Pendle, Windhaven and Plunge Hill. His monographs include Diagnosis Hysteria, Birth Trauma Conditioning and The Insulin Shock Therapy Handbook. After the initial publication of his controversial final work, Plunge Hill: A Case Study by The Eden Book Society in 1972, he retired from practice and relocated to Argentina. As a result of an intervention by the then Health Secretary Sir Keith Joseph, Plunge Hill Hospital closed its doors late in that same year. McVulpin is believed to have drowned off the coast of Bertioga, Brazil in 1979.
By the same author:
Birth Trauma Conditioning
Rumpology for Clinicians
Geriatric Psychiatry: A Psionic Approach
The Insulin Shock Therapy Handbook
Diagnosis Hysteria
Neuroses and Taghairm: A Primer
‘In an age of investigation like our own, when we are returning to science as the base of wonders – almost of miracles – we should be slow to refuse to accept facts, however impossible they may seem to be.’
Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm
Plunge Hill
A Case Study
J.M. McVulpin
First published in 1972
by The Eden Book Society
Editor’s Preface
The lesson, such as it is, to be gleaned from what you are about to read is a stark one: beware fiction.
Bridget Shipley’s pathology was hidden, a bud that bloomed in darkness. While she diligently performed her administrative duties at Plunge Hill Hospital, she sank deeper and deeper into the quagmire of her own particular disorder – a disorder unnoticed by those around her, and tragically untreated by those who were best placed to help. Late last year, she took her own life. The gruesome and violent circumstances of her death have been widely reported and the prurient reader may consult the articles published in the gutter press for more detail at their own risk. I will not reproduce them here.
In the immediate aftermath of Bridget’s suicide, I heard rumours concerning a number of papers she’d left behind: letters, a diary, and handfuls of postcards. I confess that my initial sympathy swiftly gave way to professional intrigue: I imagined that these documents, if they existed, would provide a rare, direct insight into the flowering of a mania few professionals find themselves in a position to study. I immediately determined to locate them and construct a kind of case study from them. Bridget’s landlady, and later on, her parents, both supplied me with the material I asked for. You hold in your hands now the case study that resulted from my work.
It feels appropriate, while I detain you with these prefatory remarks, to stress that I did not know Bridget Shipley personally. This may surprise the reader, but any functioning hospital is like a heart, its chambers and ventricles sealed and separated from one another yet working in a co-ordinated and greater harmony. I cannot be expected to know precisely what takes place in the surgical theatres, the kitchens and the laundry rooms. I have never inspected the maternity wards and the dark art of gynaecology remains a mystery to me. My own ‘ventricle’, so to speak, affords a lofty view down the hill towards Plunge Hill itself, the small, charming village by which our hospital is – or was, I suppose I should say – fortunate enough to be located, and, as such, I have, during my time here, been provided with nothing in the way of direct insight into the workings of the typing pool, where Bridget spent her final weeks. Although she was not my patient, the Hippocratic Oath lead me to conceive of the notion of letting her papers lie unedited, hidden and unknown – as her suffering was during her life – as something tantamount to a kind of professional neglect on my part.
There is a further motivation for the present case study. News of Bridget’s tragic end – her body found in most vivid and unfortunate circumstances in the well-tended grounds of the hospital – could not escape my attention. I also became aware – in common with you, dear reader – of the fabrications and speculations about her final weeks. I feared – as did Dr Kapoor, my colleague and friend – that these stories not only slandered Bridget’s name, causing unnecessary pain to her suffering parents, but risked doing damage to the greater mission of Plunge Hill Hospital itself. I trust the reader will encounter in the present volume a curative to such salacious nonsense. Although, of course, in many ways it is now too late.
To return to my opening words of warning – beware fiction – it behoves me to expand. Many years of clinical experience have taught me this: manic and deluded patients, the ones who project their squalid obsessions onto the everyday, carve paranoid fantasises from unremarkable interactions and weave extravagant conspiracy theories from happenstance, who accuse those around them of the very lunacy from which they themselves suffer – well, frequently they can seem very credible. It is crucial to remember that. Freud reminds us, ‘from error to error, one discovers the entire truth,’ and my aim here is to present the web of Bridget’s errors so that we may advance together upon a more rarefied strain of truth: the intricate mechanics of a mangled mind.
Thus
