Ghosts and Hauntings: A History of Belief and Investigation

A ghost is the apparition or presence of a dead person believed to return to the world of the living, and a haunting is the repeated occurrence of such phenomena in a particular place. Belief in ghosts is found in almost every culture, but its meaning has changed greatly over time: ancient ghosts were often restless dead denied proper burial, medieval ghosts were souls from Purgatory seeking prayers, and modern ghosts became objects of psychical research and popular entertainment. Scientists generally explain reported hauntings through perception, suggestion and environmental factors.

Ghosts in the Ancient World§

In Mesopotamia the eṭemmu, the spirit of the dead, could return to trouble the living if it was not given proper burial and regular offerings, and exorcistic texts prescribed rituals to send it back. Greek literature is full of shades: in the Iliad, the ghost of Patroclus visits Achilles in a dream to beg for burial, and in the Odyssey Odysseus summons the dead with a blood offering, an episode that lies behind later traditions of necromancy.

The most famous ancient haunted-house story appears in a letter of Pliny the Younger, written around 100 CE. He tells of a house in Athens haunted by an old man in chains; the philosopher Athenodorus rented it, followed the ghost to a spot in the courtyard, and had the ground dug up, revealing chained bones. After the remains were given a proper burial, the haunting ceased. The Roman playwright Plautus had already built a comedy, the Mostellaria, around a fake haunting. The Romans also held festivals, such as the Lemuria in May, to placate restless family ghosts.

Ghost beliefs elsewhere follow their own logic. In China, the gui are spirits of the dead, especially those without descendants to make offerings, and the Hungry Ghost Festival provides for them. In Japan, the yūrei of folklore and theatre are often souls bound by strong emotion or violent death.

Medieval Revenants and the Souls of Purgatory§

Early medieval Christian writers, notably Pope Gregory the Great in his Dialogues (late sixth century), told stories of dead souls who appeared to ask for masses to relieve their suffering. As the doctrine of Purgatory took clearer form in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such stories multiplied. The ghost became a moral messenger, reminding the living of their duties to the dead and of the need for repentance. The historian Jean-Claude Schmitt has shown how monasteries collected these tales.

Alongside these "spiritual" ghosts were corporeal revenants, dead bodies that walked. English chroniclers of the twelfth century, such as William of Newburgh, reported restless corpses that terrorised villages until they were dug up and burned, a tradition with parallels in Scandinavian sagas.

The Reformation and Early Modern Debates§

The Protestant Reformation transformed the question. Reformers denied Purgatory, and with it the main reason a soul might return. Many Protestant writers taught that apparitions were either demons impersonating the dead, angels, or illusions of the senses. The Swiss reformer Ludwig Lavater's Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght (1569; English translation 1572) set out this position and was widely read. Catholics, by contrast, continued to accept that souls from Purgatory might appear. Shakespeare's Hamlet stages this uncertainty: the prince must decide whether his father's ghost is an honest soul or a devil.

In the seventeenth century some Protestant writers turned the argument around, defending ghost and witchcraft reports as evidence against atheism. Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus (1681) included the "Drummer of Tedworth", a noisy disturbance in a Wiltshire house in the 1660s. The haunting of the Wesley family's rectory at Epworth in 1716–1717, attributed to a spirit the family nicknamed "Old Jeffrey", and the Cock Lane ghost in London in 1762, which Samuel Johnson helped to investigate and which proved to be a fraud, show how such cases fascinated the public. Debates about ghosts ran alongside those about witchcraft (see the European witch trials).

Victorian Ghosts and Psychical Research§

The nineteenth century was the great age of the ghost story, from Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) to M. R. James. It was also the age of Spiritualism, which offered not frightening apparitions but friendly communication with the departed through mediums and, later, devices such as the Ouija board.

The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, brought new methods to the subject. Its members Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore published Phantasms of the Living (1886), analysing hundreds of reports of apparitions, many appearing at the moment of a person's death, which they interpreted as possible telepathy rather than ghosts in the traditional sense. The Society's "Census of Hallucinations" (1894) surveyed thousands of people about waking visions.

Poltergeists§

The German word Poltergeist, "noisy spirit", names disturbances involving knocks, thrown objects and moving furniture. Investigators noticed that such cases often centred on a particular person, frequently an adolescent, and some cases, on inspection, were found to involve trickery.

Famous Modern Hauntings§

Several twentieth-century cases became famous. Borley Rectory in Essex was promoted by the psychical researcher Harry Price as "the most haunted house in England" in a 1940 book; a later investigation published by the SPR in 1956 concluded that many of the phenomena could be explained naturally or had been exaggerated, and that Price's methods were questionable. The Enfield poltergeist in north London (1977–1979) centred on two sisters and has been debated ever since, with skeptics pointing to evidence of play-acting. The Amityville haunting, popularised by Jay Anson's book The Amityville Horror (1977), is widely regarded as a hoax; the lawyer for the man who had committed murders in the house later said the story had been invented. Since the 2000s, television ghost-hunting programmes have popularised gadgets such as electromagnetic field meters and recordings of "electronic voice phenomena".

Scientific Explanations of Ghost Experiences§

Surveys in Britain and the United States consistently find that a large minority of people, often a third to nearly half, say they believe in ghosts, and many report personal experiences. Psychologists and other researchers have proposed several explanations for these experiences:

• Sleep paralysis and hypnagogic states, which can produce vivid sensations of a presence in the room.
• Pareidolia and expectation, the brain's tendency to perceive faces, figures and voices in random patterns, especially when primed by a building's reputation.
• Environmental factors: the engineer Vic Tandy suggested in 1998 that low-frequency sound (infrasound) produced by a fan caused unease and visual disturbances in a laboratory said to be haunted; carbon monoxide poisoning has also been documented as a cause of apparitions and dread.
• Bereavement experiences, in which grieving people sense or see a dead loved one, which psychologists regard as common and often comforting.

There is no scientific evidence that ghosts exist as spirits of the dead, though researchers recognise that ghost experiences are real and meaningful to those who have them.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the difference between a ghost and a poltergeist?§

A ghost is usually an apparition of a specific dead person. A poltergeist, German for "noisy spirit", refers to disturbances such as knocks and moving objects without a visible figure, and investigators often found that such cases centred on a particular living person.

Why did medieval people see ghosts?§

Medieval Christianity taught that the souls of the dead could be purified in Purgatory, and that prayers and masses by the living could help them. Ghost stories reinforced these duties, as the dead were believed to appear and ask for help.

What is the most famous haunted house?§

In English tradition, Borley Rectory was famously called "the most haunted house in England" by Harry Price, though later investigations cast doubt on the claims. Other well-known cases include the Epworth Rectory, the Cock Lane ghost and, in America, Amityville, which is widely considered a hoax.

Sources and further reading§

• Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght — Ludwig Lavater, 1572
• Saducismus Triumphatus — Joseph Glanvill, 1681
• Phantasms of the Living — Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore, 1886
• The Haunting of Borley Rectory — Eric J. Dingwall, Kathleen M. Goldney and Trevor H. Hall, 1956
• Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts — R. C. Finucane, 1982
• Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society — Jean-Claude Schmitt, 1998
• Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England — Peter Marshall, 2002
• The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts — Owen Davies, 2007
• Religion and the Decline of Magic — Keith Thomas, 1971