Seeing Ghosts: Experiences of the Paranormal

Seeing Ghosts: Experiences of the Paranormal. By Hilary Evans. London: John Murray, 2002. 300 pp. Illus. 19.99 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 0-7195-5492-6

At a recent conference I rather shocked one of the other speakers by saying I thought I might believe in ghosts. This book has convinced me that I do not. Ironically, what has led me to this conclusion is the evidence Hilary Evans presents here for believing that ghosts "must" exist (p. 273). This evidence is almost exclusively personal narrative--a corpus of almost two hundred stories mainly drawn from the American magazine Fate or from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.

There are several problems with using these stories as a basis for overall conclusions about ghosts. First, most of these stories are highly traditionalised; excellent material for discussing ghost traditions, but for that reason less reliable as evidence of the nature of ghost experience. Evans says at the outset that what he proposes to do "is to see what we can learn about ghosts by looking at people's experiences of ghosts." This is fine so long as one can be certain that the experience they had was exactly the same as the one they reported. I doubt the match is usually this exact. Telling stories is a social activity and there are all sorts of reasons for doing it and for doing it in one way rather than another. A story about a strange experience will only be told if it fits expectations; if it does not but the narrator insists on telling it anyway, the hearers will ask questions and suggest details and generally try to get it into better shape as a ghost story. This might be the form in which it eventually gets into print.

Second, many stories that Evans treats as first-person experience are plainly nothing of the sort. Disregarding the stories from Fate, which is a magazine for believers, not a confessional, we come to a number of famous ghost stories. There are the hauntings of Willington Mill (p. 54) and Borley Rectory (pp. 50-1), the ghostly re-enactment of the battle of Edgehill (p. 48), and a story said to have been the personal testimony of a Mrs Boulton in Scotland (pp. 4-5) but that is actually a version of La Maison, a short story by Andre Maurois.

Third, these stories were told during a specific time span, roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. One is therefore only entitled to draw conclusions about the behaviour and causation of ghosts in the period 1840-1960. One cannot say that "the vast majority of apparitions are so life-like that they are frequently mistaken for living people" (p. 263): ghosts mistaken for humans are in fact a relatively recent development. Apart from a few instances in the early modern period, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that ghosts were mistaken for living people. Nor can one argue that: "Throughout history, it has been assumed that ghosts manifest, not because they choose to, but because they need to" (p. 102). This statement leaves out the many nineteenth-century ghosts of wicked men who chose to haunt. Equally the statement (p. 89) that ghosts, like extraterrestrials, rarely "leave us some tangible evidence of their visit" leaves out a whole class of vanishing hitchhikers who do just that when they leave a coat on a grave or a pool of water in a car. Again, the statement that: "No ghost gives us an account of where he comes from, how he got here from there, what he is made of, what he plans to do for the rest of the day, let alone leaving us an address where he can be contacted" does not apply to medieval or early modern ghosts. For example, the ghost of Hamlet's father answers several of Evans's facetious questions when he announces that he is "doomed for a certain term to walk the night/And, for the day, confined to waste in fires/Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/Are burn't and purged away."

Statements such as these are deeply ahistorical. In fact, only in Chapter 6 does Evans attempt to discuss ghost traditions in a cultural or historical context. So the result is that everything looks like special pleading designed to lead inexorably to his conclusion that: "The short answer to the question, 'Do ghosts exist?' must be, 'Yes'" (p 273). As for what ghosts are and why they manifest, after a lengthy analysis of all the possibilities, his answer is that where they are not solely artefacts of the percipients' subconscious, ghosts are the separable or extended self of a living or dead person (p. 273).

So, as a persuasive or polemical text, this book fails for me. However, there are many good things to be found in it. Treated as folkloric rather than experiential analysis, his discussion of the types, contexts, and natures of ghost experiences (Chapters 2-4) is good, and his analysis of current interpretational frameworks (Chapter 8) is very interesting. On the way, he has some wise and balanced observations, and he is particularly good at neat resumes of the various positions it is possible to take towards ghost belief. He says: