"The Rules of Folklore" in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James

One striking detail in "Count Magnus" is the padlocked tomb. The count lies in a copper sarcophagus with sinister engravings (but no crucifix), secured by "finely worked and massive padlocks, three in number" (ibid., 113). Three times the hero, moved by some half-conscious impulse, finds himself saying aloud that he wishes he could see the Count. Each time, a padlock opens and falls off, and the third time, the lid moves. Hunted down by the Count and his monstrous hooded "messenger," the hero comes to a bad end. This is a magnificent example of a Jamesian ghost behaving in accordance with "the rules of folklore." I have not found anything so crude as a direct source of these padlocks, Bengt af Klintberg having kindly confirmed for me that there is none in Swedish legend, though the general idea that if a buried person is mockingly greeted he will emerge in a frightful shape is common there. However, as regards the padlocks, I can point to one English tale and a cluster of Danish ones which could have provided stimulating guidance for James's creative imagination.

The English legend is one James certainly knew: that of the Witch of Berkeley, as told by William of Malmesbury (on whom James once lectured). She asked that her corpse should be sewn up in the skin of a stag and laid in a stone coffin fastened with three chains, which should be left unburied for three nights; in vain - for each night devils came and snapped one chain, and on the third night Satan kicked the coffin to pieces and carried her off (Westwood 1986, 244-5). But these chains have no padlocks. In Danish tradition, on the other hand, there are indeed padlocks, but they are rarely on coffins, the only example I have found so far being the following reminiscence about a Cunning Man:

Knud the Smith in Elsborg claimed to be a good deal cleverer than most people, and he was a bit peculiar too. For instance, while he was still alive he had a coffin made and painted red, with a padlock to it, and he declared that he wanted to be buried in that when he died, as was indeed done (Kristensen 1880, 205).

Elsewhere, the padlocks are linked with ghost-laying; in some cases they symbolise the power which the exorcist achieves over the revenant, and in others the stages by which the latter draws closer to the house where the exorcist awaits him. The motif is regularly found in the legend of how a man named Bertel the Unborn (like Macduff, he had been cut from his mother's womb) laid the ghost of a landowner named Gyldenstjaerne, who had been haunting the manor-house of Stubbergaard. In one version, it is said that Bertel set three lights and one padlock on a table, and told a girl to watch the padlock carefully, "for by that she would know if he had won the mastery, for if the lock closed properly he would have succeeded, but if it couldn't or wouldn't, then Peder Gyldenstjaerne had mastered him" (Kristensen 1876, 240). James delicately hints at this symbolism when he notes that his hero tries to re-close the first two padlocks, but fails.