The brilliant and prolific historian of ideas and political commentator Russell Kirk was also a consummate craftsman of ghost stories. This unexpected combination of talents will come as a surprise only to those not acquainted with his books. For Kirk was not only an exceptionally learned and incisive thinker but the master of a forceful prose style that could range from the most abstruse flights of political theory to quite pungent and dramatic epitomes. In “The Conservative Mind” – still the finest study of this tradition – Kirk gave an unforgettable portrait of John Randolph, among others, writing of his tall, cadaverous figure; his flaming eyes like a devil’s or an angel’s; his bony, accusing finger that had punctuated the prosecution of Justice Chase nearly three decades gone; his tormented face, half a boy’s, half a corpse’s, framed by his straight black hair which was a memento of his ancestress Pocahontas; his flood of extemporaneous eloquence like a prophet’s inspired – for a generation, Congress and America had beheld this Ishmael of politics, this aristocratic spokesman of the Tertium Quids, this slave-holding ami des noirs, this old-school planter, this fantastic duellist, this fanatic enemy of corruption, this implacable St. Michael who had denounced Adams and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe and Clay and Webster and Calhoun with impartial detestation.

The concatenation of wildly jostling epithets, in prose at once stately and impetuous, breathes life back into the improbable ghost of Randolph and lends renewed vigor to Kirk’s discussion of his political influence and ideas. His full scale study of Randolph, published in 1964, achieves the same compelling effect; for Kirk knew that ideas, however powerful in themselves, had to be daubed with the blood of their begetters in order to realize their full force. In his ghost stories, too, he ensures credibility by grounding his phantoms in the marl and muck of the palpable.

These stories, published over the years in such magazines as Fantasy and Science Fiction, Frights, Whispers, and New Terrors (how strange these titles must have looked on his otherwise respectable resume!), have been gathered together in “Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales” with an introduction by Vigen Guroian and an appendix containing Kirk’s essay “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.” Though I approached this collection with some skepticism – historians of ideas are not generally known for the suspensefulness of their confections – I soon surrendered to the spell of the tales. Kirk, it turns out, is a master of the ghostly story in the tradition of M.R. James, another scholar who combined sober learning with supernatural fancies and succeeded at both.

With few exceptions – Henry James comes at once to mind – writers of ghost stories do not excel at the creation of memorable characters. The rules of the genre preclude this. It is the situation that counts, not the personages. The force of the story arises from an adherence to certain conventions: a suitably spooky setting, a guilty secret, an ancient wrong, the impingement of another realm on that of the quotidian. Writers who fail to observe these conventions, whether through clumsiness or undue originality, trespass against the form and fail to deliver.

Kirk, as befits the chronicler of conservatism, is no flouter of tradition. Here is how “Ex Tenebris” begins:

Only one roof at Low Wentford is sound today. On either side of the lane, a row of stone cottages stands empty. Twenty years ago there were three times as many; but now the rest are rubble. A gutted shell of Victorian masonry is the ruin of the schoolhouse. Close by the brook, the church of All Saints stares drearily into its desolate graveyard; a good fifteenth century building, All Saints, but the glass smashed in its windows and the slates slipping one after another from the roof. It has been deconsecrated all this century. Beside it, the vicarage – after the soldiers quartered there had finished with it – was demolished for the sake of what its woodwork and fittings would bring.

The ruined and profaned church is appropriately gloomy, and the story that follows takes its impetus from this brooding vestige. But the church serves a symbolic purpose in the tale, for it represents not only the desecration of the sacred but the communal memory of the village of Low Wentford. Indeed, it embodies the common interwoven fibres of human association from time immemorial. This profound past, though neglected, is never dead, as the denouement (which I won’t give away) and the fate of the loathsome S.G.W. Barner, the local “Planning Officer” intent on amelioration through demolition, horrifyingly show.

This summary may make Kirk’s fiction sound overly schematic. It’s obvious he heartily, and viscerally, detested cold-hearted do-gooders and meddlesome social engineers, whom he depicts as despoilers of tradition for the sake of some murky and shallow eudaemonism. But, again, this is compatible with the genre, which often points a moral or a private conviction under the spectral atmosphere; Ray Bradbury, to name but one author, does this routinely. Aside from his muscular and vivid prose, Kirk has another quality absent from most ghost stories: He possesses a sense of time as both unfathomable and strangely elastic. All his tales show the abiding influence of T.S. Eliot, about whom he wrote a study (“Eliot and His Age” of 1971), and especially, the supreme poet of “Four Quartets.” Kirk believed in the simultaneity of different ages; that time is not successive and unrepeatable but cyclical and cumulative. As the epigraph to “Encounter by Mortstone Pond,” perhaps his best story, Kirk quotes from “Little Gidding”:

We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree Are of equal duration.

In that brief tale, a bereaved young orphan who keeps vigil at his mother’s grave in a Michigan cemetery receives a strange consoling touch from a phantom hand that enables him to go on living; only decades later, as he revisits the graveyard, does the now-aging man realize that it was his own future self that reached out to comfort the despairing child he once was – and still is.

What gives Kirk’s stories depth as well as an abundance of shivers, whether he is writing about a grieving child or (in one of his finest stories) the Roman Emperor Diocletian, is his deeply felt conviction that human experience is stubbornly rooted yet boundless in every dimension of time; or, as Eliot put it in a line Kirk loves to quote, “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”