A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof

by Roger Clarke

The world of ghost stories is riddled with class, and the poltergeist is occasionally tagged as the ‘council house ghost’.

Lady Jane Grey is said to appear on the date of her execution – though, since the calendar was adjusted in the eighteenth century, this can be thought nonsensical. It is more likely that this idea is related to the sublimated Catholicism that marks English ghost-belief – ghost days are rather like saints’ days. Like Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey is another villainess in the Anglo-Catholic folkloric pantheon.

Ghosts of dogs are frequently demonic, in other words, elementals, such as the hounds that haunt the country lanes of Suffolk and, in the church at Bungay, leave deep scratch marks on the door. These creatures have dramatic names: Galleytrot, Black Shuck and Barghest. The fact that they are mostly located in East Anglia and Yorkshire seems to suggest a Viking antecedent.11

Ghosts have changed over the years, which is why, I would suggest, there is a natural history needs to be told of them.

So, what are ghosts seen as, now? To some extent, the idea of the demonic ghost has been re-imported to the UK by the descendants of the East Coast Jacobeans, who took the idea over to the New World with them in the seventeenth century. There are a collection of contemporary beliefs in popular culture, but people are very clear about what’s possible. The overwhelming primacy is of the mood and atmosphere, having your head touched on ghost hunts, feeling a sudden breeze, falling temperatures, doors opening by themselves, then sudden noises, staccato or single words. Apparitions in plain sight are rare, but they do turn up on camera, and on digital cameras now, there are ‘orbs’, which, we are told, are ghosts before they dress themselves for the human eye.13

Ghosts are no longer souls. Ghosts are now an emotion field.

Though the conventional Puritan line on ghosts was denial (since Puritanism held that Purgatory,8 a theologically suspect Roman Catholic doctrine, did not exist), Glanvill believed that ghosts were the best, almost domestic, way of proving that God existed and that atheists were wrong.

Logical to her fingertips, she was much troubled, for example, as to why the souls of the dead wore clothes, since clothes had no souls; this, she believed, was proof that ghosts could not be the dead returned.

Until his death, Green believed that ghosts were an electrical residue of emotions that became entangled in the living.

He saw ghosts as ‘a surviving emotional memory’, a kind of fragment of a living person that has somehow peeled off from their mind like the rind from an orange. These ghosts often do not know that they are dead, and are confused.

In the modern age in the western world, ghosts are increasingly connected with our emotional selves, and have less and less to do with providing proof of any supernatural or paranormal occurrence.

The moniker of ‘rumbling’ or ‘noisy spirit’ comes from the verb ‘poltern’, to cause a disturbance, and the noun ‘polter’, a rowdy individual; ‘geist’ means ghost.

By the end of the eighteenth century, ghost-belief was common among proselytising Methodists and even Anglican clergymen with evangelical tendencies,

Interestingly, just as Roman Catholicism was returning to British public life after centuries of banishment, the Methodists were choosing to distinguish themselves from establishment orthodoxy with a similar belief. For centuries, to believe in ghosts had indicated Roman Catholic tendencies; now, it could also mean that you were at the other end of the scale.

Everyone knows that ghosts appear at midnight, but not so many know that the same applies to midday, and that, traditionally, ghosts are summoned by the extreme transitional stages of the clock. You are as likely to see a ghost before lunch as you are after going to bed. In later years, this tradition died out, since it seemed ghosts were inalienably connected to the night.

What reads so strangely now, however, is the religious nature of the apparition. Defoe was keen to make it an apparition rather than a ghost, since the word ‘apparition’ wasn’t just the upper-class word for a ghost, it lent the possibility that the visitation was at least in part angelic.

The antiquarian Francis Grose (1731–79) wrote, ‘Dragging chains is not the fashion of English ghosts; chains and black vestments being chiefly the accoutrements of foreign spectres, seen in arbitrary governments; dead or alive, English spirits are free.’

Thus the whole iconography of snowy greetings cards comes from an atypical Regency weather event; its trigger, a naturally occurring nuclear winter, the eruption of a volcano that set loose the first literary vampire story (‘The Vampyr’, 1819) and Frankenstein’s monster in the air drifting west from tropical Sumbawa.

But it was Protestant writers who took the extremities of Catholicism and turned it into fiction: the modern ghost story arose from Lake Geneva.

The gothic novel, which arrived almost in tandem with the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, was a literary genre written largely by gay men and asthmatic women.

It was as if the Cock Lane ghost was a monstrously amplified manifestation of eighteenth-century slander, drunkenness and delusion.

Looking at all the evidence centuries on, it’s pretty clear that the Cock Lane ghost was a pub joke that grew out of control, a boozy prank that grew exponentially in the year that followed. Alcohol plays a very big part in this story; this is the London of Hogarth’s Gin Lane, in which a whole generation of Londoners were suddenly and permanently drunk on cheap distillations. Parsons was drunk. The mob outside his door was drunk. The séances, it seems fairly clear, were drunken sport, boisterous shadow-plays, with the Parsons family relishing their roles at the centre of a phantasmagorical soap opera.

Until Victorian times, ghosts never dressed in black, but changing fashions meant that ghosts changed too:

Society for Psychical Research show a great upsurge in sightings of female ghosts wearing black clothing in the latter part of the nineteenth century,

In medieval Western Europe, ghosts were seen dressed in black at the very first stage of their journey through Purgatory, and by the time they were dressed in white, the purification process had nearly ended.

deep-rooted connection between black-clothed ghosts and a sense of very fresh malaise, and possibly even evil.

Belief in ghosts has always been vulgar

What you think about ghosts and how you perceive them – indeed, how you process that perception – once depended on where you came from, your own profession and the profession of your parents. To some extent, it still does.

for most of the last few hundred years, only the upper and lower classes tended to believe in them.

The middle classes have always deplored the idea of ghosts.

Your middle-class sceptic would say that toffs like ghosts because it is a symptom of their decadence, the plebeia...

England may well be the most haunted country simply because more people in England believe in ghosts. Belief in the paranormal has become a form of decayed religion in secular times: ghosts are the ghosts of religion itself.

The Catholic Church rationalized (and to a large extent took over) the ancient belief in ghosts by teaching that such apparitions were the souls of those trapped in Purgatory, unable to rest until they had expiated their sins.

Many early ghost stories were explicit morality tales in which the dead returned, burdened with the weight of their sins, to warn the living.

The question of whether one believed in ghosts now marked the difference between Catholic and Protestant as strongly as belief in the transubstantiation of the host or the infallibility of the Pope.

Many saw the ghost stories of the past as the Catholic Church’s attempts to exploit popular credulity in order to enhance its own wealth and position. No true Protestant could believe in ghosts.

There are three things that constantly mediate our belief in ghosts – religion, the media and social status. Since these are things that change, our ghosts have changed in accordance with them.

among the many reasons for the arrival of the English Christmas ghost story is that – as happened with the Epworth poltergeist – house servants were traditionally hired at Martinmas, in early November. At Christmastime they would have just moved into a house they didn’t know

Statistically, you are most likely to see a ghost while you are dozing in bed, recently bereaved, have some limited brain damage or a history of temporal lobe epilepsy, or take drugs that interfere with your dopamine levels (such as amphetamines and cocaine).