When asked if he believed in ghosts, Coleridge replied that he had seen too many to put any trust in their reality. Verifying their existence does not, according to psychics, always depend upon believing the evidence of one's eyes or ears. Freud attributes a belief in ghosts to our sense of ‘the Uncanny’, whereas the Society for Psychical Research, who first met in 1882, attune themselves to empirical manifestations, as in monitoring changes in atmosphere such as unaccountable drops in temperature.
The moot point is whether ghosts are real or whether they belong in the eye or sixth sense of the beholder. Aside from such epistemological questions regarding the nature of reality, even the question of belief in the ghostly is fraught with ambivalence. For example, while denying that she believed in ghosts, Madame du Deffand admitted to being afraid of them. The reality of such fears is borne out by the evidence of tombstones testifying to those who died of fright after seeing a ghost. Those foolhardy enough to spend the night at London's most famous haunted house at 50 Berkeley Square, for instance, did not always live to tell the tale.
Traditionally being a deceased person who appears to the living, a ghost can also appear as a reanimated corpse or even be a supernatural spirit of a non-human variety or animal spirit phantom, as in Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat (1843). Associated often with a particular building, ghosts can be the restless spirits of suicides, those denied a resting place, or those who have met a violent death; hence the grisly apparitions of mutilated or dismembered bodies, like Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis' Bleeding Nun, or the headless woman, whose image graces many a public house sign across Britain.
Women have been regarded as being particularly sensitive to psychic phenomena. Spiritualism was in vogue for the Victorians, especially since the mechanics of spirit possession involving the female medium, who was overwhelmed by a greater force, reinforced the normative feminine ideal of passive surrender. The empowerment this entailed for women, both mentally and physically, once in the spirit mode was a subversion of the restrictions of femininity. The potential for transgressive behaviour when ‘out of the body’ could manifest itself through blasphemous and obscene language that would drive sitters away from the seance table. Not only could the medium be unruly, but so too could be the spirit or apparition, especially if it turned into a poltergeist which specialized in creating physical disturbances. In Noel Coward's play Blithe Spirit (1941), the troublesome ghost of Elvira appears after a table-rapping session to meddle in her ex-husband's new marriage.
Control over the spirit world through necromancy or the raising of the dead has traversed history from the biblical Witch of Endor, who raises the prophet Samuel's spirit (1 Samuel 28: 11-19) to Aleister Crowley's invocation of the Great God Pan, the result of which allegedly drove him mad. The ghosts of those who died insane or incarcerated against their will have ‘lived on’ to torment their captors and ancestors. Jenny Spinner, after being imprisoned in the East Wing of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, supposedly worked so hard at her spinning wheel that she went mad. One version of her ‘autobiography’ describes how she faked suicide to effect her escape by impersonating her own ghost. That her ghost was reputed to have haunted the East Wing until it was demolished in 1811 is an irony she had not foreseen. Spinner's story probably inspired a later owner of Knebworth House, Edward Bluwer-Lytton, who wrote the short story The Haunted and the Haunters (1857). At his ancestral home, Bulwer-Lytton entertained Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, fellow ghost story writers, who picnicked at midnight in the tower bedroom, which is reputed to be still haunted.
The origin of the term ‘ghost’ is shrouded in cobweb-like uncertainty, which dates back to pre-Teutonic origins. Like the wailing banshee who is a harbinger of death, the ghost cries out for a narrative context, since even the most disembodied ghost needs to be fleshed out with a ghost story. Apparitions and spectres are the cast of a story-line replayed through time, like the lonely sentinel who haunts Chester's Roman ruins or the hungry ghosts of famine-stricken Ireland. Such phantom theatre is captured best by a narrator reciting a spine-chilling tale in a haunted setting to a receptive audience. Ghosts need ghost stories in order to preserve for themselves their most tangible and enduring after-death existence.
Whether ghosts emanate from some mysterious ectoplasm, or are the product of psychical projection emanating from electromagnetic fields glavanized by certain individuals and generated by certain locations, or are psychosomatic hallucinations, is still unknown. Do the ghost and ancestral spirit stories of so many cultures represent a subconscious challenge to a collective fear of death, or do they express the uncertainty surrounding our individual corporeality? Having survived the advent of the electric light bulb, ghosts appear to be here to stay. Neither do they fear to tread beyond the traditional boundaries of the ivy-covered Gothic ruin. Nowadays psychic investigators and exorcists are invited to hauntings that take place on recently built housing estates. Like Oscar Wilde's eponymous hero in The Canterville Ghost (1887), for whom clanking chains and a creaking suit of armour were passé, the modern ghost is moving into new territory, such as the world of the computer, where its ghostly presence ventures to compete with the virtual realities of cyberspace.
— Marie Mulvey-Roberts
See also ectoplasm.
