THE SPECTRE OF THE PAST

The “Great English Ghost Story” offers a form of comfort and is rooted in the ache of nostalgia for a more elegant era

J. S. Barnes

IN HIS STUDY, THE ENGLISH GHOST, PETER ACKROYD informs his readers, with characteristic sonorous certainty, that “the English see more ghosts than anyone else”. He lays this phenomenon at the door of a “peculiar mingling of Germanic, Nordic and British superstitions”, allied to our islanders’ sense of isolation. Although the origin of his data is not immediately clear, the statement feels potent nonetheless — true, perhaps, on some deep, instinctive level. For the last two hundred years, England has processed through cycles of seeing and experiencing the persistent dead: from the early nineteenth-century craze for spiritualism, to the rise in posthumous communication in the wake of the First World War, on to that uniquely haunted decade, the 1970s, with its Enfield Poltergeist and surge of domestic hauntings, right up until…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2024

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