Ghost Story

Ghost Story, prose narrative which concerns supernatural occurrences or beings, usually the undead in one form or another. Ghosts appear in literature from the earliest times but, ironically, it was not until rationalism developed in the 18th century that ghost stories became a subgenre of their own. In medieval ballads like “The Wife of Usher's Well” they are treated with a matter-of-factness which presumes complete belief: they are every bit as real as the human being they haunt. The spirits who return from the grave to cry out for revenge in Renaissance drama—Hamlet's father in the play by Shakespeare is the most famous—are frightening only in that they introduce an edge of doubt. The possibility that they may not be real, or may be disguised versions of the devil rather than genuine spirits, lends nervous energy to the action. The rise of rational and sceptical philosophy in the 18th century, by virtually abolishing a belief in ghosts in the Protestant countries of northern Europe, made them available for literature with a special purpose. It aimed not so much to frighten its audience as to allow its audience to play at being frightened.

From the first, then, the ghost story was written by and for people who did not really believe in ghosts. Its earliest distinctive form is the so-called Gothic novel. Works such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole and the immensely popular Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe established conventions which remain familiar not just in literature but also in the cinema, to which the ghost story has so successfully been adapted. The supernatural element derives from a “skeleton in the closet”, or mysterious and unresolved past event. The setting is often a remote castle or graveyard in a wild and forbidding landscape. More often than not the victim of the haunting is a solitary woman.

A fascination with the atmospherics of place and the plight of the endangered heroine became staples of a genre which, under the impact of Romanticism, soon took on all the trappings of horror and the grotesque exploited in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley merged elements of the ghost story with the Faustian theme of the over-reaching scientist, while Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker brought the vampire into the mainstream of such literature. The work of Stephen King, as popular in the cinema as on the printed page, adapts it to the age of high technology. Yet more conservative ghost stories, like those from In a Glass Darkly (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu or “Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You” by M. R. James, continue to hold their own as anthology pieces. A classic of such works, understated and provocatively ambiguous, is The Turn of the Screw (1898), a novella by Henry James.