Montague Rhodes James was born at Goodnestone Parsonage in Kent in 1862. Although a great scholar of his day, it is now for his ghost stories, many set in East Anglia, that James is best remembered. Fascinated by the supernatural, he was an admirer of the Irish mystery-writer Sheridan Le Fanu, whose ghost stories he edited. His stories were usually first published in magazines such as the Cambridge Review, but some were written for special occasions. Wailing Well is one such story, composed for the gathering of the Eton College Boy Scouts in 1927. The stories were published in several volumes between 1904 and 1931, including Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925). M. R. James died in 1936.