Earlier this month I was contacted by a reporter from the Tokyo newspaper Chunichi Shimbun with questions on ghost beliefs in the UK. The occasion for the query was the Obon Festival – the time of the year when spirits of the dead are believed to reunite with their families –, which is currently celebrated in Japan. The Festival is drawing to a close and I don’t know if the reporter used any of my replies, which naturally reflect my professional background as a historian of science and magic, as well as my personal views on certain cultural differences between Germany and the UK. So I thought I’d share my replies with you, and provide a (fairly random) list of suggested readings for those who’d like to know more.
Why are there lots of stories about ghosts in the UK? Some people say that it is connected to the ancient Celtic culture. What do you think about that?
As a German living in the UK I think that British culture certainly has a much more relaxed attitude to ghosts than Germany, even though Celtic and ancient Germanic cultures were perhaps equally steeped in spectres and magic. The big question is of course what happened on the way from antiquity to modernity. After all, a defining feature of modernity is that is supposedly “disenchanted” and has no room for any notions of real ghosts.
A standard Western narrative that is also taught in British schools and universities is that beliefs in ghosts and magic were vanquished by science. But as mainstream work in the history of science and medicine has shown, this story is wrong: Fundamental antipathies to belief in spirits and magic existed long before modern science, and scientists battling the ‘occult’ were often motivated by strong religious, philosophical or political concerns.
(To cut a long and complex story short: Questions of the soul and its state after death were major political issues not only since the Enlightenment. Reports of ghosts as empirical means of supporting beliefs in souls were fiercely contested during the French Revolution, and during subsequent similar revolts over the political power of the Church in other countries like Germany during the professionalization of modern sciences.)
The willingness by elite scientists to impartially investigate reports of ghosts at the dawn of modernity was especially notable in Britain, where religio-political upheavals were not nearly as dramatic as in Germany or France. In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London by elite intellectuals and scientists, specifically to impartially investigate such controversial phenomena. It included various physics Nobel Laureates such as Lord Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, and (later) Marie Curie.
A famous early American SPR President was Harvard psychologist William James, who collaborated in an international Census of Hallucinations, a research project organized by his English colleagues. The findings of the SPR Census suggested that visions of alleged ghosts where much more common in the general public than previously suspected and could not merely be dismissed as signs of mental disease.
Do you think that people in the UK like ghosts or ghost stories, and why do you think this?
Ghost stories (and movies involving ghosts) are a massive global industry, so I doubt they are more popular in the UK than elsewhere. And while I think that British culture has been more open to discussions of the possibility of ghosts, there is no question that even here such beliefs have been contested – typically by (to again oversimplify) being monopolized by orthodox religion on the one hand, and marginalized by secularizing science popularizers on the other.
A lot of people in the UK and elsewhere certainly “like ghosts”, but a vast number also will have none of it – for various reasons, which in my view are not always more rational than uncritical ghost belief.
So I think that even in Britain there is a certain timidity of open talk about ghosts and spirits, and fiction might provide one important way to deal with this taboo.
Yet again, when I compare British and German cultures I do think there are striking differences. In the UK, it’s not uncommon for pubs and other public places to advertise themselves as “Britain’s most haunted” pub (etc.). Moreover, you can find spiritualist churches in most British cities and suburbs, where mediums claim to convey clairvoyant visions of spirits of the dead to surviving loved ones. All this is practically unheard of in Germany.
I sometimes wonder if this might have to do with fundamental differences in temperament: in my view, Britons are certainly more pragmatic when dealing with every-day (as well as many scientific) issues and problems than Germans. And a wry, good-natured sense of humour is an integral part of British culture, while I have to admit that stereotypes of Germans lacking humour, and being scared to death by anything that’s not controllable by cold reason, are not entirely unfounded.
Advertisements of “Britain’s most haunted pub”, etc. – and even services in spiritualist churches – are usually coupled with a good dose of humour, and it might be telling that (to my knowledge) the only state-sponsored counselling service for people struggling to cope with alleged ghostly visitations and other disruptive “paranormal” experiences is to be found not in Britain, but in Germany.
Is there any difference between ghosts in the UK and in other countries?
I’m more a casual consumer than an expert of ghost fiction and folklore, so while I assume cultural differences to be vast, I’m unable to comment on this specifically.
However, there seem to be some notable differences between ghosts in popular culture and more empirically grounded studies of apparitions. For once, the theme of “unfinished business” on the side of the departed (as suggested, e.g., in more recent newspaper articles claiming large-scale reports of apparitions of victims in the aftermath of natural disasters in Japan, and after the 2004 Tsunamis in South East Asia) seems to be more prevalent in popular accounts than in Western empirical studies of apparitions that have been conducted since the 1880s.
These studies have been largely ignored by the scientific mainstream (in this regard they share the fate of academic historical works which enormously complicate simplistic science-magic dichotomies). Yet, it seems that ghosts have started creeping into conventional academic and medical literature. In recent years, responsive visions of the departed have been increasingly addressed in mainstream studies of so-called “hallucinations of widowhood”, as well as in journal articles discussing the apparently high prevalence of visions of the dead alleged by dying patients.
But perhaps the most striking difference between popular ghost stories and this more empirically grounded literature is that in the latter, ghosts are usually not very scary. Whatever the ultimate causes of reported visions of the dead in the recent clinical literature mentioned above, they appear on the contrary to have mostly constructive functions – such as helping some bereaved persons deal with devastating losses, and putting the minds of many terminally ill patients at ease as they approach the great unknown.
SUGGESTED READINGS
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Barrett, William F. Death-Bed Visions. London: Methuen & Co., 1926. [Open access] [Search on Abebooks]
Lawrence, Madeleine, and Elizabeth Repede. “The Incidence of Deathbed Communications and Their Impact on the Dying Process.” American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine 30 (2013): 632-39.
Le Maléfan, Pascal, and Andreas Sommer. “Léon Marillier and the Veridical Hallucination in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century French Psychology and Psychopathology.” History of Psychiatry 26 (2015): 418-32.
Sidgwick, Henry, Alice Johnson, Frederic William Henry Myers, Frank Podmore, and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick. “Report on the Census of Hallucinations.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 10 (1894): 25-422.
Olson, P. Richard, Joe A. Suddeth, Patricia J. Peterson, and Claudia Egelhoff. “Hallucinations of Widowhood.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 33 (1985): 543-47.
Osis, Karlis, and Erlendur Haraldsson. “Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses: A Cross-Cultural Survey.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 71 (1990): 237-59. (By the same authors: At the Hour of Death. Revised Edition. New York: Hastings House, 1986. [US readers] [UK readers] [Search on Abebooks].
