4 - Walking Abroad: Ghosts and Landscape

Summary

Ghosts are customarily reputed to walk abroad, but the nature and ambit of their wanderings have been uncertainly charted in popular and literary tradition in the British Isles. Spirits are often said to linger in specific locations,but the notion of walking abroad sets them in motion, and suggests that travelling is inextricably linked to haunting. Rupert Matthews's introduction to The Ghosthunter's Guide to England: On the Trail of the Paranormal highlights the ubiquity of ghosts and the variety of landscapes they frequent:

England is a most beautiful kingdom, and a most haunting one. Wherever you turn there are ghosts, phantoms or spectres. The bleak moors are home to some spectacular apparitions that roam the high lands on their unending supernatural business. There are ghosts in the rolling fields of the lowlands and amid the soaring peaks of the uplands. There are ghosts on the open high road and in cosy streets … They crop up almost anywhere. (Matthews, 2006: 4)

This scene-setting exemplifies Michelle Hanks's observation that ‘all forms of ghost tourism are grounded on the assumption that travel is necessary to access a haunting … An interest in ghosts or a desire to encounter them appears to necessitate some form of travel’ (Hanks, 2015: 43). Bold travellers can encounter ghosts close to home and in far-flung places, but while Matthews appeals equally to flesh-and-blood holiday-makers, day-trippers and more dedicated searchers for the supernatural in his guide, he suggests that ghosts too can transport themselves further afield, whether across moors and peaks or along high roads and urban thoroughfares. Ralph Harrington has observed that journeys are a typical feature of the ghost story, a form ‘profoundly concerned with movement’. Ghosts may appear geographically bound, forever associated with particular spots, but they have already crossed one boundary, ‘that between the realm of the dead and that of the living’ (Harrington, 2017: 303). As Harrington remarks, ‘[i]f locatedness is an essential characteristic of the spectral, it cannot be separated from the essential characteristic of mobility’ (Harrington, 2017: 302). In fiction, folklore and tourism, therefore, ghosts seem capable of shedding their attachments to familiar ground and venturing more widely across urban and rural landscapes.