There has been a mountain of academic research
published on witchcraft, but little on ghosts; the only significant general
social history of ghosts has been Ronald Finucane’s Appearances of the Dead
first published a quarter of a century ago. This book reprises much the same
ground, from more of a believer’s point of view, though belief in exactly what
other than a general distaste for science and the enlightenment is not entirely
clear.
Maxwell-Stuart takes us on a tour of beliefs in the
afterlife and ghosts from classical times onwards, which shows that such
stories are subject to constant cultural change, though there may be a less
variable core. In the middle ages they served as religious instruction, putting
across the Church’s party line on matters such as purgatory. Later on they took
on the role of simply providing counter evidence against ‘saduceeism’ or
atheism.
Maxwell-Stuart really does not add much to Finucane’s
account in this tour, and perhaps because it is outside his own area of
specialism, his treatment of Victorian and modern ghost stories is much weaker.
Though he is clearly aware of the existence of the literature of psychical
research and quotes from it, he seems to have little interest in the meaning of
ghost stories to a modern audience. He seems largely unaware of the rising
popularity of books of ghost stories in the early 21st century. Nor does he
address the question as to why certain sets of experiences become linked with
the activities of the dead.
It is curious that in the midst of our high tech age
stories of futuristic phenomena such as UFOs have lost much of their appeal,
while stories of ghosts haunted houses, inns and such are enjoying one of their
highest levels of popularity in a long time. Tempus, the publishers of this
book, are specialists in works of popular and semi-popular history, they also
produce a series of works on haunted towns produced mainly by ghost tour
operators.
This points to some sort of connection with the
massive appeal of family history and the rise of the heritage industry. At one
level this material is a product of the tourist industry itself, but clearly
deeper needs are being met. In confused and dislocated times people search for
routes, for some connection to ‘history’. This history is however
problematical, for it has power over us, haunting us through our genes and
memes but we have no control over it, it is an unalterable brute fact of the
world. – Peter Rogerson.
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