That Damn Fox still Haunts my Dreams

I woke sometimes in the small hours last night and, as is so often the case, needed the toilet. After picking my way across the dark clutter of my floor, I got to my door and prepared to open it. I paused - what would happen if I opened the door and a fox was standing there on it's hind legs wearing a top hat? I opened the door - there was no fox standing upright wearing a top hat, but I was very glad to get back to bed after relieving myself.
That image - one which occurs to me regularly when I wake in the dead hours of the night, comes -originally- from an experience recounted in 'Conversations and Caravansari' by Richard Curle. The story was discussed in 'The Big Grey Man of Macdhui' by Affleck Grey which I was reading on holiday in Scotland, the summer of six years ago.
The story -allegedly true but obviously only a nightmare- recounts how one winter, when he was a child and living in Scotland, the author woke from sleep at 'about two in the morning' in a 'rather isolated' room in the house he had lived in since he had been born. Wide awake, he lies there in his bed, watching a swaying tree branch outside of his window. He suddenly becomes aware of slow footsteps approaching the back of the house 'ominous in their leisurely tread'. He hears the sound of these slow footsteps in the courtyard below - despite the fact that it was locked every night - then, with growing horror, actually inside the house itself. He hears these footsteps 'on the flagstones of the lower passage' and 'with a kind of fatal foreknowledge... on the back staircase'. As he knew the house so well he could trace the journey of the intruder; 'they reached the top of the stairs, turned sharp left, then sharp left again, descended a few steps, approached the door of the room leading to his room, and finally stopped at his own door'. Affleck Gray now quotes directly from Curle himself;

'By this time I was sitting up in bed with my eyes glued to the door and with horror in my heart. The handle turned and in the opening stood a creature with the face of a fox, which walked on its hind legs. It was dressed in some sort of way and, would you credit it, wore a top hat, which added to its appearance an indescribably macabre touch... It gazed at me with a fixed rather than a malign expression but did not speak. I shouted out, 'Go away!' - how well I remember the exact words! - and it turned around and went away. I heard its steps follow, in retreat, the precise route they had followed before, unhurried, and steady as ever, until at last they died out on the road leading to the woods'.

The whole thing is rather obviously a nightmare, elaborate as it is, and yet, I find something so utterly spooky about the whole tale. It is the thing I think about most when I wake alone in the small hours, with the wind blowing outside (well, that and the ghosts of Victorian servants with luminous, consumptive stares). The central image, of the fox on its hind legs seems more a comical than a nightmarish one - particularly with the addition of the top hat, but for me - as a ghost story, it somehow works.
I think it works so well (for me anyway) with the setting, of that lonely country house, that lonely room, the juxtaposition of the warm bed and the wintry landscape outside. Through the narrators's experience of sound (the footsteps) we map out the physical surroundings, 'the lower passage' and 'the back stairs'. Who hasn't woken in the night when a child and been convinced that something dreadful is coming closer?
The actual appearance of the fox - the nightmare revealed - is startling and unexpected. There is no rationality for its appearance. If the figure was of a Victorian servant (perhaps with staring eyes) it would make sense, large houses have servants, but why a fox? Why walking on its hind legs? Why a hat? Such layers of irrationality only add to the tale, pointing, if we are to invest any belief in the text - even as a work of fiction - to the idea that the underlying currents of the universe are anything but what we would consider 'sane'; the universe as mental illness. The even more frightening corollary to this might be the questioning as to what would be healthy and sane - if the rest of the universe is so disturbed, then surely it would point to us (the readers) being wrong, that we would in fact be the spiritually ill?
The haunted, now the haunters.
Then there is that final image, of the footsteps fading away on the path back into the woods, the intimation being that this is where the fox originated from.
I cannot help but wonder if the author ventured into these woods in summer, whether or not the image of the fox bothered any future dreams. Did he talk about it? Did the image of the fox occur to him when he woke in future small hours?
As I said before, the central image is absurd and almost comical. I'm not sure why it works so well - for me anyway. Perhaps it was because I first read the story in a remote farmhouse in Scotland, surrounded by a countryside I found both beguiling and unnerving? It was just past midsummer, and the nights only lasted a few hours. This gave everything a strange disorienting sheen to them. I remember waking in the early morning once with the sun bright and shining and the wind blowing. Looking out through my window I could see a path leading across the fields to a small wood. The wind pushed and shoved the thick leaves of the wood, a great voice in the silence of 5:00am. Everything was unreal and beautiful and unnerving.
Back in Brighton I would tell the tale of the fox to friends. Some found it funny and not remotely spooky. Others did. I remember telling one friend whom I then lost contact with for a few years. When we met up again, one of the first things he said to me was 'you know, that damn fox still haunts my dreams'.
So, looks like I'm not the only one then.