Chapter 5 - ‘Test the Spirits’: Ghosts and Apparitions of the Gothic

Summary

If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead

– Luke 16:31

In this chapter, we address one of the most famous manifestations of the supernatural in the Gothic: the ghostly. First, to define terms; ‘ghostly’ refers broadly to supernatural manifestations of spiritual entities. I will throughout differentiate between ghosts (the spirits of the deceased) and apparitions (supernatural manifestations appearing human more broadly). The emphasis in Gothic dream accounts on the interpretation of an accepted ‘event’ cannot be directly transferred to a consideration of the ghostly. Outside the fictional world, the ubiquity and continued mystery of dreams left them firmly within the remit of theological interpretation. ‘Ghost’-sightings, on the contrary, were usually experienced at second hand. The ‘evidence’ for the ghostly was almost always ‘less than the evidence of our senses’ (Hume 1795, 17), and encountered, and challenged, as testimony. Ghost testimony was particularly suspicious as it was often related to private (rather than public) experience and associated with heightened, unpredictable emotions capable of distorting perception. It was moreover frequently declaimed a priori the result of ignorance and either enthusiasm or superstition. The enduring association of ghost stories, articulated in John Locke's ‘Of Education’ (1698), with the ‘indiscretion of servants’ and nursemaids’ tales (1727, 81) connected ghost ‘testimony’ with the lower classes, women and youth rather than the ‘ideal’ educated rational adult male subject. For Hume and other sceptics, moreover, ghost tales were a form of testimony in which ‘the incredibility of a fact…might invalidate’ the testimony (Hume 1795, 23). In both contemporary ghost discourse and Gothic fiction, then, the focus is not only on the interpretation of ghost-sightings but on their very possibility.

Before investigating the particularities of ‘ghost’ discourse in the period, it is worth noting that while I am writing separately on the ‘dream’ and the ‘ghost’, the contemporary distinction was not so clear cut. As a reflexive reaction, the idea of a ghostly encounter being ‘just a dream’ certainly appears in contemporary accounts. For example, in the anonymous Life after Death (1758), in the account of George Villiers' ghost, the ghost-seer ‘believed all this to be a Dream, and considered it no otherwise’ (1758, 45).