‘The English have been haunted too long for their own good,’
declared the cover blurb for the 1963 compendium The
Stately Ghosts of England. ‘We have become blasé,’ it continued. ‘We
shoulder our way through this perpetual danse
macabre with hardly a thought.’
In her new book, The Ghost: A Cultural History, Susan Owens seeks to address this,
taking a long and fascinating look at how, from at least the 8th century
onwards, ghosts have been making their spectral way through our art, our
fiction and our architecture. In the course of her extensive research, Owens
realised that, ‘ghosts are mirrors of the times. They reflect our
preoccupations, moving with the tide of cultural trends and matching the mood
of each age.’
Ghostly mirrors of
our times
Looking at a wide range of art, literature, folklore and
film, art historian and curator Susan Owens examines how each age has created
and responded to a particular type of ghost. Certainly,
they have not always been the wispy presences we think of today. In the 12th
century, a ghost was less likely to flit through your door, ‘more likely to
break it down and beat you to death with the broken planks’. During the Medieval
era, the undead tended to take the form of savage beasts or decaying corpses, seeking
release from purgatory, or dispensing moral lessons. With the Reformation and
the removal of purgatory, they were ‘reimagined as refugees from the
afterlife…obsessed with seeing justice done.’ Ghosts were forever popping up to
reveal terrible crimes or prevent miscarriages of justice, one even appearing
in the witness box to shock the murderer into a confession.
In the mid-17th century, people’s interest in
ghosts took a scientific slant: experiments were conducted, data gathered,
theories put forward. Thomas Hobbs was not impressed, stating that the very
word ghost, ‘signifieth nothing, neither in heaven, nor earth, but the
Imaginary inhabitants of mans brain.’
Sceptics have been present all along, one writer noting in
1730 that, ‘Nothing weakens the Minds and turns the Brains of the English
people more than the delusive Horrors which the common stories of Daemons and
Goblins bring with them.’ However, the beliefs were entrenched. The ghosts were
going nowhere.
Commercial
opportunities
Writers, ever on the lookout for the next bestseller, have made good use of the ghost. Daniel Defoe clawed his way out of debt by writing A
True Relation, relating the story of Mrs Veal’s ghost. And in 1764, poor old Conrad
was crushed to death by a gigantic helmet at the Castle of Otranto, marking the
beginning of the gothic novel. A growing army of maggot-covered
corpses, bleeding ghost nuns and phantom knights would be employed to satiate
the demands of the reading public.
It wasn’t just writers who saw the commercial opportunities
represented by ghosts. The Cock Lane ghost of 1762, which communicated through
spooky rappings and scratchings, generated great excitement and numerous
visits, until it was revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by a young girl under
duress from her father.
Now you see me…
By the late eighteenth century ghosts had a new look. They
were still wearing white, that being the colour of grave clothes (undyed linen
and, later, wool), but they had ditched the unfashionable shrouds they’d worn
in the 17th century and replaced them with simple white shirts. And
as time went on, they adopted a new quality. They became see-through. When
Dickens described Marley’s ghost as ‘transparent: so that Scrooge…looking
through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons of his coat behind’ he was
drawing on a fairly recent convention.
 |
| 'Stave One: Marley's Ghost' American Household Edition (1876) of Dickens's Christmas Stories |
The idea was reinforced by the invention of photography at
the end of the 1830s: ‘It was not long before shadowy figures, produced by the
technique of double-exposure, were interpreted as ghosts that had been detected
by the camera’s mechanical eye.’
Reality followed art. In her 1848 compendium The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and
Ghost Seers, Catherine Crowe described ‘true accounts’ of cloudy or
‘vapoury’ ghosts.
The huge popularity of these ‘true tales’ coincided with a
rise in fictional ghost stories and with the surge of a movement which was
brought to England by an American woman called Maria Hayden, who in 1852
advertised her services as a medium with the power to contact the dead. ‘Up and
down the land, tables were rapped and tilted, and planchettes poised
expectantly over paper.’ Spiritualism was a hit.
The sceptics were still amongst us, however. In 1882, the
Society for Psychical Research began an inquiry into ‘that large body of
debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and
spiritualistic’. And in 1890, Charlotte Sophia Burne, the first female
president of the Folklore Society demanded that folklorists get out of their
armchairs and do ‘a great deal more recording’ of ghost stories and folk tales
before the oral traditions died.
Ghost stories
One of the most interesting aspects of The Ghost is its exploration of the ghost story and how it has
changed over time. Victorian ghost stories had to be gripping and sensational
in order to fit in with the demands of the magazine format. They became very
much a convention – a Christmas treat. Later eras broke free of the formula,
however. In the 1950s, Muriel Spark reinvented them as everyday apparitions,
‘modern, urban and articulate.’ The ghosts of Hilary Mantel’s 2005 novel, Beyond Black, are ‘repetitive, dreary,
demanding.’ Today’s writers and artists are, Owens says, ‘re-imagining what
ghosts are, what they do, what they mean to us…more creatively and more broadly
than ever before.’
 |
| Engraving by R. Graves entitled 'The Ghost Story', circa 1870. |
Always with us
The proliferation of books, blogs and television programmes
devoted to ‘true hauntings’ show that ghosts have become ‘more entrenched than
ever in our heritage.’
They continue to imbue our art, our fiction, our lives. On 1
July 2016, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, around
one thousand four hundred men, all wearing First World War army uniform, mixed
silently with commuters all over Britain. The National Theatre confirmed that
the work was partly inspired by accounts of people seeing their dead loved
ones’ ghosts both during and after the war. ‘For a few hours that day,’ Owens
writes, ‘the Great War’s ghosts were made visible.’
This is a fascinating and beautifully-presented exploration
of our centuries-long relationship with ghosts – a relationship that has survived
scientific, political and religious revolutions. In 1778, Dr Johnson said of the supernatural: ‘All argument is against it; but
all belief is for it’. It seems not much has changed.
I will be speaking to Susan Owens, as well as to Andrew
Taylor (Fireside Gothic) and Laura
Purcell (The Silent Companions) at History by the River on 14 November
2017.
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