Based on research among women in England and historical research in supernatural traditions, Bennett looks at the nature and patterns of belief in the supernatural.

"Alas, Poor Ghost!"

Traditions of Belief in Story and DiscourseBy Gillian Bennett

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 1999 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-277-8

Contents

Introduction........................................................................................................1Background..........................................................................................................1The Structure of This Book..........................................................................................6Chapter 1. Belief and Disbelief....................................................................................9Is Belief in the Supernatural Declining?............................................................................9Telling It Slant....................................................................................................14Patterns of Belief..................................................................................................17Order in Chaos......................................................................................................25Family Love.........................................................................................................28Competing Cultures..................................................................................................31Chapter 2. Contact with the Dead...................................................................................39Life after Death....................................................................................................39Ghosts and Hauntings................................................................................................42Visitations.........................................................................................................49Cause, Consequence, and Lack Liquidated.............................................................................51Delving.............................................................................................................66Summary.............................................................................................................75Chapter 3. Witnesses, Bereavement, and the Sense of Presence (with Kate Bennett)...................................77Witnesses...........................................................................................................77Bereavement.........................................................................................................81The Sense of Presence...............................................................................................95Conclusion..........................................................................................................111Chapter 4. From Private Experience to Public Performance Supernatural Experience as Narrative.....................115Belief and Disbelief: Patterns of Narration.........................................................................118Story Dialectic: The Imaginary Judge and Jury.......................................................................124In Brief............................................................................................................137Chapter 5. "Alas, Poor Ghost!" Case Studies in the History of Ghosts and Visitations..............................139The Ghost of Hamlet's Father........................................................................................139The Cock Lane Poltergeist...........................................................................................145The Clodd/Lang Debate...............................................................................................150The Vanishing Hitchhiker............................................................................................159A Brief History of "Witnesses"......................................................................................1671. Collecting the Data..............................................................................................173The Manchester Study................................................................................................173The Leicester Study.................................................................................................1782. Transcribing Spoken Texts........................................................................................1833. The Manchester Respondents.......................................................................................1894. Linguistic Clues to Belief and Disbelief.........................................................................1935. Word Lists Showing Story Patterns in Memorates...................................................................195Notes...............................................................................................................199References Cited....................................................................................................207Index...............................................................................................................221

Chapter One

Belief and Disbelief

Is Belief in the Supernatural Declining?

It is common nowadays to think that belief in the operation of supernatural forces is declining in the developed world. Historians and psychologists have hastened to assure us that "for the most part, the dead have little status or power in modern society" (Blauner 1966, 390), that "the social function of belief in ghosts is obviously much diminished and so is their extent" (Thomas 1971, 605), and that "ever since [the] age of enlightenment, percipients in ... much of Western Europe, have attributed to the dead an ever-diminishing social role" (Finucane 1982, 222). Such statements betray a concept of history in which civilization is a process of movement (as they see it, "upward" movement) from a supernatural world view to a materialist one (or as they would term it, from superstition to rationality). There is no real evidence, however, for evolutionary assumptions as applied to society and culture, and there is certainly no evidence that rationalism and materialism are the evolutionary end point of civilization. So such statements may be based on no more than the prejudices of the authors and an assumption that the progression of society will of course lead towards abandoning belief in ghosts. One would like to see some evidence before accepting this point of view.

It must also be remembered that many or most writers have relied on written accounts for their portrait of supernatural beliefs. These may be literature, the classics, or local histories. Folklorists (also on the whole locked into the rationalist intellectual tradition) have compounded the impression by printing collections of readable but unbelievable legends and calling them the "folklore" of the supernatural. If researchers rely solely on accounts like these, they get a very mixed bag of unlikely manifestations which defy belief. If they then ask people whether they believe in such things, of course they get negative answers. But that could simply mean that the researchers' own prejudices, or misinformation, has led them to ask the wrong questions. To find out what our contemporaries really believe, one must leave the books on one side and go out and try to access the informal oral traditions.

It would be wrong, however, to create the impression that this never happens. There have been several studies, though rather scattered and...