reading list: ghosts
This is the third installment in a series of reading lists on various subjects. I’ve previously done Celtic and Norse mythology; here you’ll find some of what I think are the best books on ghosts. Let me know in the comments if you think I’ve missed anything. If you like my taste, you may also enjoy my list of horror books you probably haven’t read and books for halloween.
Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places
Dickey is less interested in ghosts per se than in what they tell us about America’s past. Each chapter begins with a famous bit of ghostlore, then delves into the historical fact behind it. All the while, Dickey is mining his material to investigate how history is shaped and imagined. What do haunted Indian burying grounds tell us about how the US has grappled with its indigenous history over time?
Not to be confused with the similarly-titled Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell, which is a survey of ghosts in the British literary environment: the writers’ haunts, the settings and inspirations for famous spooky works, and so on.
Roger Clarke, A Natural History of Ghosts
Clarke — at one point the youngest person ever to be an extended an invitation to the Society for Psychical Research — is entranced by his subject, and while I’m ultimately not sure whether he believes in ghosts he clearly wants to. This fact lends his writing both a skeptical distance and a genuine warmth as he recounts encounters with spirits, paranormal investigations, frauds and hoaxes across five centuries of British history. He draws particular attention to trends and fashions in ghost stories — commonalities in their behavior or appearance in specific time periods. I particularly liked episode in which a 17th-century Protestant family inhabiting a haunted house were advised by their priest to bring in a Catholic one instead, as they’re better at dealing with that sort of thing.
Danny Robbins, Into the Uncanny
The most recent book on this list, Danny Robbins’ book is an expansion of the podcast and television show of the same name. Robbins performs the crucial service of interviewing normal people who have had, or claim to have had, experiences that can’t be explained. You’ll find some excellent tales in this collection, including one of my favorite ghost stories of all time.
Peter Ackroyd, The English Ghost
This is precisely what it says on the tin: a collection of great (and well-recorded) English ghost stories over time. Ackroyd is a justly famous popular historian, and his writing is always clear and engaging. This is a literate and thorough collection of ghostlore both famous and obscure.
Perhaps the standout English ghost book, though, remains the one compiled by Lord Halifax from stories submitted by aristrocrats in the early late 19th and early 20th century. It’s well out of print but can be found on the Internet Archive.
Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages
An academic but accessible text, this is the go-to monograph on its subject. A survey of ghost stories from the medieval period, Schmitt recounts his source material in plenty of detail while tracing the beliefs and developments that shaped how the people of those times understood (and dealt with) the forces of the supernatural. Here you’ll find ghosts that are very different from our modern one — like the mysterious hand that appeared in a German tavern and explained how the dead lived on beneath a pair of nearby hills, or King Arthur, who let a coterie of spectral horsemen.
Andrew Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories
A good companion piece to the book above, this is a straightforward collection of medieval ghost stories — mostly ‘true,’ mostly from the Latin — translated to modern English. That’s very useful if you’re interested in the subject, as most spook tales from the Middle Ages are scattered across far-flung texts, many of which are only avialable in pricy academic editions. There’s little in the way of a scholarly apparatus, but as an anthology it’s hard to beat.