Introduction

Abstract

England has long had a reputation for being haunted. In 1712 the literary critic Joseph Addison, in an essay on the popularity of ghosts and spirits, wondered why ‘we abound with more Stories of this Nature’.¹ A few years later, Anthony Hilliar, adopting the guise of an Arab visitor to this country, portrayed the people as exceedingly credulous with regard to ghosts. ‘If you tell them that a Spirit carry’d away the side of a House, or play’d Foot- ball with half a dozen Chairs, and as many Pewter Dishes,’ he observed, ‘you win their Hearts and Assent.’ ‘Whole Towns and Villages’, he continued, ‘have e’er now been depopulated, upon a white Horse being seen within half a Mile of them, and near a Church Yard in the night time.’² Moving forward a couple of centuries, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, perhaps influenced as much by the more recent history of English spiritualism as older perceptions, expressed his surprise at finding that the belief in ghosts was just as widespread in his own country as ‘among the English’.³ To try and give a quantative sense of how haunted the country was in the past, in the 1940s a Warwickshire folklorist calculated that there was one ghost to the square mile in his district.⁴ Taking this as a representative figure, it can be extrapolated that in war-time England, when according to opinion polls ghost-seeing was at a low ebb, more than 50,000 ghosts haunted the country.