A Ghosting we will go!

Creating the horror genre in early 18th-century England

As Halloween approaches, the TV and the internet alike are loaded with horror films while bookstores display novels with covers featuring decaying mansions, vampires, and witches. And even when Halloween is miles away, we still have plenty of horror to choose from.

The idea of ghosts, apparitions, witches, and demons, of course, is hardly new. These entities have occupied the human imagination throughout the centuries in nearly every part of the world with variations.

Yet prior to the eighteenth century, there was little in the way of horror writing in the West: that is, writing designed specifically to whet the appetite for horror itself. There was even less in the way of fiction — no counterparts of Stephen King, Richard Matheson, or Neil Gaiman.

So just as any paranormalist asks “how and why did this ghost appear,” we might ask how and why did the horror genre materialize in the West?

I. Augustine Calmet and his Dissertations upon the apparitions of angels, daemons, and ghosts

Long before The Amityville Horror, Paranormal Activity, the Netflix Haunting series, or any other so-called authentic accounts of the supernatural, priests and historians recorded strange incidents they had heard from others in their manuscripts. There was the 12th-century English monk, John of Worcester, who described a ghost in The Life and Miracles of St. Edmund.

Three centuries later, a Cistercian monk in Yorkshire filled a manuscript volume with supernatural encounters that he had heard from the locals. And in 1569, a Swiss theologian by the name of Ludwig Lavater published a treatise on ghosts which attempted to deny the existence of ghosts–but without denying them altogether. Indeed, these reflections on the existence of ghosts would trigger learned debates that lasted over the following centuries.

But it wasn’t until the early 18th century, that writers began to compile these accounts for popular consumption. Publications such as John Beaumont’s An historical, physiological, and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, and witchcrafts and other magical practices (1705), Augustin Calmet’s Dissertations upon the apparitions of angels, daemons, and ghosts, and concerning the vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (1759) and Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727) began to capture the imagination of readers with their tales of hauntings, possessions, wizardry, and witchcraft. Since copyright laws were fairly lax, writers had no qualms about pilfering materials from other sources.

Of the three volumes, Calmet’s Dissertations was probably the most popular. This is perhaps unsurprising since he had a wide range of resources to draw upon as a Benedictine philosopher, theologian and writer of Biblical commentaries and exegeses.

What is most immediately apparent to the modern reader — apart from the 18th-century penchant for long sentences and paragraphs — is its quasi-scientific tone as Calmet claims:

When the philosophy of M. Descartes appeared, what a vogue it had! The ancient philosophy was despised; nothing was talked of but experiments in physics, new systems, new discoveries. Newton appears; all minds turn to him….A sort of convulsion had seized on the French. In this age, a new scene presents itself to our eyes, and has done for about sixty years in Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland; men, it is said, who have been dead for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use both men and beasts, such the blood of their near relations.

In other words, the days of rational enlightenment were now being replaced by a more mystical age: a curious assessment from our 21st-century perspective since the discovery of electricity and the inventions of the steam engine and power loom had not arrived just yet.

What is interesting is how Calmet takes various turns at proving and disproving the existence of the supernatural. At one point, he hints that so-called “diabolical magic, is nothing but natural magic, or art and cleverness on the part of those who perform things which appear above the force of nature.”

Similarly, he raises the subject of pretended hauntings, designed to hide crimes that frequently crop up in the Gothic novel of the 1790s: for instance, robbery, minting coins, or smuggling.

But Calmet also turns around to argue that the appearance of the supernatural is not always a sham, “because men will not take the trouble to examine into causes. It is far easier to deny everything than to enter upon a serious examination of facts and circumstances.” Here, he uses an ostensibly scientific, rational rhetoric, emphasizing the “examination of facts and circumstances.”

There is also a constant shifting between a denial and acknowledgement of the supernatural throughout much of his work. On one hand, he occasionally attributes accounts of witches’ Sabbaths to the influence of drugs, narcotics, and booze — or as he puts it, “a disturbed imagination, with mind misled, and foolishly prepossessed, and, if you will, a few drugs which affect the brains”: all of which inevitably “excite the humours, and produce dreams relative to impressions already in their minds.”

As such, ointments administered by magicians are designed to “send them to sleep, disturb their imagination, and make them believe they are going long journeys while they remain profoundly sleeping in their beds” just as “beverages calculated to inspire impure love lead the impressionable to believe that they wield magical powers.” In other sections, he delves into other possible physiological problems that cause hallucination.

On the other hand, Calmet manages to grant just enough room for the existence of the otherworldly — even if it is more inclined towards a theological interpretation:

There is no difficulty in believing that God may allow the demon to mislead men, and carry them onto every excess of irregularity….and impiety; and that he may also permit him to perform some things which to us appear astonishing, and even miraculous, whether the devil achieves them by natural power, or by the supernatural concurrence of God, who employs the evil spirit to punish his creature, who has willingly forsaken Him to yield himself up to his enemy.

The supernatural, then, may ultimately be a means for God to convey subtle (or not-so-subtle) messages.

Now let’s glance over at the actual narratives of the supernatural. Perhaps in keeping with his quasi-scientific approach, Calmet delivers his accounts prosaically — even if we make allowances for its translation into English. Take, for instance, his depiction of a witches’ Sabbath:

The empire of the devil nowhere shines forth with more luster than in what is related of the Sabbath (witches’ Sabbath or assembly), where he receives the homage of those of both sexes who have abandoned themselves to him. It is there, the wizards and witches say, that he exercises the greatest authority, and appears in a visible form, but always hideous, misshapen, and terrible; always during the night in out of the way places, and arrayed in a manner more gloomy than gay, rather sad and dull, than majestic and brilliant. If they pay their adoration in that place to the prince of darkness, he shows himself there in a despicable posture, and in a base, contemptible and hideous form; if people eat there, the viands of the feast are dirty, insipid, and destitute of solidity and substance, they neither satisfy the appetite, nor please the palate; if they dance there, it is without order, without skill, without propriety.

Few would consider this frightening at all. If anything, the sing-song phrases sound silly especially when adjectives are piled on unconvincingly.

For instance, how is the devil “hideous, misshapen, and terrible?” Does he sport three noses with an extra eye or two? Covered in gray fur? Black? Blue? Here, too, the images end up disappointingly mundane; we feel more than a tad deflated that it is a “sad and dull” affair rather than “majestic and brilliant.” Similarly, the description of the less than appetizing food — “dirty, insipid, and destitute of solidity and substance” — border on the absurd with its fecal connotations.

No less bland is the account of the meetings themselves where every fact is delivered in a most methodical, dry-as-dust manner so that the cabbalistical affair is rendered more like an everyday account of a corporate meeting. The reader learns that the witches can congregate anytime and anywhere (not unlike an online class?); that their favored modes of transport includes broomsticks, clouds, and goats; that they generally prefer to meet on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and that ointments and spell powders are distributed. Not least, we learn that the Devil (like any educator) frowns upon unexcused absences:

People are carried thither….sitting on a broom-stick, sometimes on clouds or on a he-goat. Neither the place, the time, nor the day when they assemble is fixed. It is sometimes in a lonely forest, sometimes in a desert, usually on the Wednesday or the Thursday night; the most solemn of all is that of the eve of St. John the Baptist: they there distribute to every sorcerer, the ointment with which he must anoint himself when he desires to go to the Sabbath, and the spell powder he must make use of in his magic operations. They must all appear together in this general assembly, and he who is absent is severely ill used both in word and deed. As to private meetings, the demon is more indulgent to those who are absent for some particular reason.

In short, we have the extraordinary made ordinary, if not entirely anti-climactic.

On more than a few occasions, the dryness of the narration and description with its plodding matter-of-fact tone lends some unintentional humor. For instance, in the following story of a philosopher encountering a ghost, the latter could easily be a friendly neighbor, asking for a cup of sugar:

The philosopher Athenodorus, having arrived in the city, and seeing a board which informed the public that this house was to be sold at a very low price, bought it. As he was busy reading and writing during the night, he heard on a sudden a great noise, as if of chains being dragged along and perceived at the same time something like a frightful old man loaded with iron chains….Athenodorous continuing to write, the spectre made him a sign to follow him; the philosopher in his turn made signs to him to wait, and continued to write; at last, he took his light and followed the spectre, who conducted him into the court of the house, then sank into the ground and disappeared. Athenodorus, without being frightened tore up some of the grass to mark the spot, and on leaving it, went to rest in his room.

The mystery is finally solved when Athenodorus pays a visit to the magistrates, after which they in turn arrive to dig up the spot and find a corpse with chains. The latter is then properly buried and never haunts the philosopher again. End of story.

From the perspective of a modern horror reader, there is something amiss. Notice the lack of atmosphere that we are accustomed to: no preternatural eeriness like howling wind and lightning. No flickering lights and shadows or a dog walking in circles. In short, nothing to alert us that something terrible is about to happen.

But perhaps even more astonishing is the reaction of the protagonist, Athenodorus: certainly, most people would be more than a little disturbed or surprised upon a sudden noise or the sight of a “frightful” man. In all likelihood, we’d get up and run immediately!

Instead, Athenodorus sits there preoccupied with his work, treating the incident as any other ordinary occurrence so that the haunting strikes us as unrealistic, if not comically inadequate. Since we as readers tend to side with the protagonist, our sense of fright is lost. This set-up leaves us feeling almost as complacent as the protagonist — and hence not in the least terrified.

Some of the details in these accounts are also just bizarre — for instance, this account of Sancho the ghost:

Pierre D’Englebert being one night in his bed wide awake, saw in his chamber, by the light of the moon, the spirit of a man named Sancho, whom he had several years before sent at his expense to the assistance of Alphonso, king of Aragon….Some time after, he fell sick and died at his own house.

Four months after his decease Sancho presented himself to Pierre completely naked. He set about as if to wake himself, or in order to shew himself more distinctly.

Inquiring minds want to know…why is Sancho standing there stark naked? One gets the impression that these writers of the stories were more concerned with conjuring up a string of the most unexpected images.

But perhaps in a world haunted by none too distant memories of witch hangings (the last had been executed in 1684) and one which did not yet draw definitive boundaries between the world of the living and that of the dead, the apparent possibility of the supernatural felt sufficiently threatening — and as such arguably too daunting for writers to make even more frightening than necessary.

Graveyard Poetry

If early 18th-century real-life accounts of the supernatural can be regarded as one parent of the Gothic novel, the so-called School of Graveyard Poetry which flourished in the 1740s, can be regarded as the other. Again, it is difficult to determine the reason for the rise of this genre of poetry, although it is possible that the very popularity of these accounts may have spurred the growth of such imagery.

Let’s begin with a look at Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743). One significant difference from the “true accounts” — including Calmet’s — is the rich atmospheric detailing; it’s also a characteristic that distinguishes it from the more formal and stylized poetry of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Invoking “the gloomy horrors of the tomb” at night when “nought but silence reigns,” Blair imagines a “sickly taper… glimm’ring thro’ thy low-brow’d misty vaults”; it’s a place full of “supernumerary horror.”

And unlike the “true” accounts, there’s visceral realism in the “mouldy damps and ropy slime.” This is also where we begin to discern the sound and visual effects that we associate with Halloween recordings of “spooky sounds” and amusement park haunted houses: “The wind is up — hark! how it howls!/ Doors creak, and windows clap, and night’s foul bird ….screams loud.” He pictures the rising of “grisly specters” that “grin horrible” — as if in anticipation of the grim grinning ghosts in Disneyworld/land.

But even more striking are the short vignettes that point at a possible story in the making:

Strange things, the neighbors say, have happened’ here; Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs; Dead men have come again, and walk’d about; And the great bell has toll’d unruly, untouch’ d.

Another vignette features the image of a frightened boy passing through a graveyard at night:

Sudden he starts, and hears, or thinks he hears The sound of something purring at his heels; Full fast he flies, and dare not look behind him

As he overtakes the other boys, he tells them of a “horrid apparition tall and ghastly.”

Tension arises not only from the mysterious settings, but from the pronounced emphasis on the fear experienced by the witness.

In fact, there is a dawning recognition of “fear for fear’s sake” Here is an excerpt from Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), possibly inspired by Blair’s Grave and published only a year later :

Hence, finally, by night The village matron, round the blazing hearth, Suspends the infant audience with her tales, Breathing astonishment! or witching rhymes And evil spirits: of the death-bed call Of him who robbed the widow and devoured The orphan’s portion; or unquiet souls Risen from the grave to ease the heavy guilt Of deeds in life, concealed; of shapes that walk At dead of night, and clank their chains…. At every solemn pause the crowd recoil Gazing each other speechless, and congealed With shivering sighs: until eager for the event, Around the beldame all arrect they hang, Each trembling heart with grateful terrors quelled.

Yes, long before Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Stephen King was the village matron, governess, or nurse — an “authoress” in her own right, waiting until the evening to tell her tales of horror to an audience hungry for tales of “unquiet souls.” Perhaps back then, they already knew that “no one can resist the evil of the thriller” in the words of the late Michael Jackson and Vincent Price.

(The following installment will explore the birth of the Gothic novel.)

Select Further Readings:

Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the Gothic Imagination, ed. Martin Myrone. London: Tate Publishing, 2006. Great sampling of Gothic art from the late 18th century.

Susan Owens, Ghosts: A Cultural History. London, Tate Publishing, 2017. This is a solid, readable account of the history of writing on ghosts.

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: the Gothic Tradition, vol. 1, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2014.

© Frances A. Chiu, October 26, 2023. All Rights Reserved.

Frances A. Chiu is currently completing her second book, Reading the Gothic: Matthew Lewis’ Monk for Manchester University Press. She is also writing a book on cat loss, “It’s Only a Cat”: A Guide to Grieving the Loss of a Cat. She will be teaching Haunted Nations: Politics and Horror next term at The New School.