Ghosts in Literature

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the term ghost with the synonyms spirits, specter, phantom
or apparition as follows: “a soul or specter of a dead person, usually believed to inhabit the
netherworld and to be capable of returning in some form to the world of the living” (5:242:3b).
According to the Encyclopedia such spirits may reenter our world as living creatures, as doubles of
deceased persons or in many other shapes and forms as both folklore and literature abound in such
apparitions. “Belief in ghosts is based on the ancient notion that a human spirit is separable from the

body and may maintain its existence after the body’s death” (5:243:1a) sustains the
Encyclopedia, and anthropological and sociological studies have proven that customs and rituals
associated with death, that is funeral rituals aim to separate the dead from the community, to clean
the space polluted by death and to prevent the ghost from haunting the living. If such rituals are
unsuccessful both spaces and people may be haunted and they are believed to be associated in some
manner with the departed, “the haunting spirit [is thought to have] some strong emotion of the past

– remorse, fear, or the terror of a violent death” (5:243:1a), while “individuals who are haunted are

believed to be responsible for, or associated with, the ghost’s unhappy past experience” (5:243:1a).
They make their presence known by displacing objects, or by auditory sings such as
disembodied laughter and screams or footsteps. “The widespread belief in the return of the dead
has resulted in many stories of encounters with ghosts or of actual resurrection” (19:242:3b). Such
stories and tales have been common all over the world and have been told in a good variety of
narrative forms: often these elaborate horrific stories are set in mysterious spaces “enhanced by
darkness or thunderstorm” (5:242:3b), in medieval setting such as castles or monasteries, which
may have secret rooms, thus creating suspense, mystery and gloomy atmosphere. Telling such tales
has been fashionable throughout the ages as we can see in the frame narrative of James’s The Turn
of the Screw:
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the
obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a
strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody
happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation
had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just
 such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a
dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking
her up in the terror of it; (115)
Generally speaking a ghost appears as a projection of a character’s internal struggle, for example

in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In Irish texts, however, the
apparition of ghosts is entirely acceptable since - according to Irish belief they populate the worldly
space like any other human being. Csilla Bertha, in her article
The Harmony of Reality and Fantasy: The Fantastic in Irish Drama presented in a conference
which took place in Debrecen in 1989, argues that the ghosts are accepted because: “They [The
Irish] could always naturally incorporate the fantastic in their literature because it has been part of
the people’s way of thinking, part of their reality. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, one of Ireland’s most

distinguished young poets […] says that the Other World is ‘no big deal’ for the Irish” (30).

Analyzed historically, the motif of ghosts appeared first in Greek literature, in Aristophanes’

comedy The Frogs, Euripides and Aeschylus’s shadows. Aristophanes’ comedy is considered an
exception because the Greek believed that ghosts were part of the underworld, therefore they could
not return into the living world. Ghosts also appear in the Tudor period, in Shakespeare’s works.
Then in the Enlightenment era ghosts became less frequent characters of literary works since the
emphasis was placed on the individual, on the belief in the possibility of improving human
minds through education and reading. At the end of this period, that is at the end of the eighteenth
century, “probably as a counter-reaction to the obsession with the reason of the Enlightenment, there
was an increasing demand for the supernatural in fiction” (Pieldner, 209). Therefore, the ghost who
usually appeared in medieval castles was transformed into the key element to create the mystery
and gloomy atmosphere. The gothic novel of the Pre-Romantic period and such examples as The
Castle of Otranto operates with such “ghostly” motifs, but with Realism and Naturalism the ghost
was rejected once again. Modernism revives this motif once again: Henry James in The Turn of the
Screw employs the ghost as structural element to play with and to trick the reader.