Alas, Poor Ghost!
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Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 1999 Alas, Poor Ghost! Gillian Bennett Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Cultural History Commons Recommended Citation Bennett, G. (1999). Alas, poor ghost!: Traditions of belief in story and discourse. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Alas, Poor Ghost!” Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse “Alas, Poor Ghost!” Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse by Gillian Bennett New, Expanded, and Extensively Revised Edition of Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 1999 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 Typography by WolfPack Text design by Chantze Kin Cover Design by Barbara Yale-Read Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bennett, Gillian. Alas, poor ghost! : traditions of belief in story and discourse / by Gillian Bennett. p. cm. New, expanded, and extensively rev. ed. of Traditions of belief, 1987. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87421-277-4 (pbk.) ISBN 0-87421-278-2 (cloth) 1. Folklore—Great Britain. 2. Occultism—Great Britain. 3. Ghosts—Great Britain. 4. Women—Great Britain—Folklore. I. Traditions of belief. II. Title. GR141 .B55 1999 398’.0941—dc21 99-6558 CIP In Memoriam Frederick George Lawley, 5 September 1916–26 March 1991 Contents Introduction 1 Background 1 The Structure of This Book 6 Chapter 1. Belief and Disbelief 9 Is Belief in the Supernatural Declining? 9 Telling It Slant 14 Patterns of Belief 17 Order in Chaos 25 Family Love 28 Competing Cultures 31 Chapter 2. Contact with the Dead 39 Life after Death 39 Ghosts and Hauntings 42 Visitations 49 Cause, Consequence, and Lack Liquidated 51 Delving 66 Summary 75 Chapter 3. Witnesses, Bereavement, and the Sense of Presence 77 (with Kate Bennett) Witnesses 77 Bereavement 81 The Sense of Presence 95 Conclusion 111 Chapter 4. From Private Experience to Public Performance 115 Supernatural Experience as Narrative Belief and Disbelief: Patterns of Narration 118 Story Dialectic: The Imaginary 124 Judge and Jury In Brief 137 Chapter 5. “Alas, Poor Ghost!” 139 Case Studies in the History of Ghosts and Visitations The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father 139 The Cock Lane Poltergeist 145 The Clodd/Lang Debate 150 The Vanishing Hitchhiker 159 A Brief History of “Witnesses” 167 Appendices 1. Collecting the Data 173 The Manchester Study 173 The Leicester Study 178 2. Transcribing Spoken Texts 183 3. The Manchester Respondents 189 4. Linguistic Clues to Belief and Disbelief 193 5. Word Lists Showing Story Patterns 195 in Memorates Notes 199 References Cited 207 Index 221 Contents vii Introduction Hamlet: Alas, poor ghost! Ghost: Pity me not/But lend thy serious hearing/To what I shall unfold Hamlet, act 1, scene 5 Background By successive stages folklorists have moved away from the idea that folklore is a body of old-fashioned leftovers from some shad- owy pagan past which still survives among some special group called the “folk.” They recognize too that, like every other body of knowledge from physics to philosophy, folklore may be true or it may be false, so they no longer subscribe to the popular definition that equates folklore with old wives’ tales. Nevertheless, serious scholars remain very wary about studying supernatural folklore, so there is little opportunity to revise popular stereotypes or counter- act educated prejudice. Where it is not campaigned against by religious groups or sneered at by rationalists, the supernatural is often trivialized by the mechanisms of commerce. It has been taken over by TV, films, and ghost hunters in such a big way that shows and books can almost provide a classification system for popular notions about ghosts. So we find, for example, that ghosts may be allowed to exist on what we might call the “Scooby Doo” level, where they are either tameable or friendly or turn out to be frauds and fakes. They are also allowed existence on the “Haunted Inns of England” level, where they are regarded as tourist attractions, a specialty of the house, synthetic (and profitable) thrills. Alternatively, they may appear in “Stephen King” mode, where they are allowed to be threatening, but only to those deliberately seeking to be (safely and temporarily) threatened. So the supernatural has been offi- cially demoted to the nursery, commercial, or fantasy worlds. 1 Yet people continue to have experiences which demand explanations that science as we define it today cannot provide; and they continue to need more than merely material things. Neither our formal culture nor our popular traditions can ade- quately meet these needs. People turn, therefore, to unofficial channels—to New Age beliefs or alternative religions perhaps; but more usually, to informal belief systems created and expressed through a network of interactions. They reinvent tradition through the folklore they offer each other in their personal experi- ence stories, discussions, and exchanges of ideas. At this informal level, there continues to be a very wide- spread belief in the supernatural. Many people still believe in pol- tergeists, fetches, wraiths, and warning ghosts, more or less as they did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is also a heartfelt popular tradition that the souls of the family dead con- tinue to exist somehow, somewhere, someway. Commentators who have claimed that supernatural belief is “obviously” much dimin- ished in the Western world today have, I would suggest, been deceived by the official rationalist world view into not recognizing the existence of a rather different, unofficial one. When we know where to look and how to ask, it is easy to find plenty of evidence for the existence of a substantial supernatural folklore. However, few folklorists have been prepared to enter this minefield. In Britain, only Andrew Lang (1844–1912) has had the courage and vision to challenge the dominant rationalist cul- ture. His Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894) is probably the best book on the subject written in the English language. It is in part a historical review of the history of ghost traditions, and in part an energetic argument that the evidence for ghosts is as good as the evidence for anything else. In succeeding generations of folklorists there have unfortunately been few to follow Lang’s robust line. In Britain I can think of none. In America the record is rather better: the last forty years have produced a handful of scholars who have recognized the interest and value of studies of folk belief and have written about the supernatural without sneers or whimsicality. Among these, one should obviously mention Lynwood Montell and Wayland D. Hand (see especially Montell [1975] 1987; Hand 1976); but the name that principally comes to 2 “Alas, Poor Ghost!” mind is David Hufford, whose work on “Old Hag” traditions resulted in the “experience-centered” approach to the study of folk belief (Hufford 1976, 1982a). Followers have adopted this approach and used it to triumphant effect in their own work (see especially the contributions to Out of the Ordinary, edited by Barbara Walker, and the special edition of Western Folklore “Reflexivity and the Study of Belief”). This approach also signifi- cantly influenced the doctoral thesis from which my Traditions of Belief was drawn (Bennett 1987), especially the notion that researchers should not disbelieve their informants on the basis of their own beliefs. My work was also undertaken to explore the relationship between narrative and belief. For some time I had been uncom- fortable with the commonplace assumption that legends are ade- quate guides to the nature of vernacular belief, so I wanted to put people in a position where they had to affirm or deny belief in an important, but controversial, matter and see how they responded. Would they tell stories—and, if so, what genre of stories would they tell? Nothing could be a more important but more disputed idea than that the dead can interact with the living; so it was this topic that I chose for my research. My plan was simple: to find a situation where I could conduct interviews, talk to people and ask them to answer a few questions about ghosts, and see what form their answers took. (Nothing, of course, is as simple as that: my fieldwork trials and errors are recounted in appendix 1.) The studies that form the basis of the discussion in chapters 1, 2, and 4 below are based on material from this work, which was conducted during the 1980s in Manchester, a large commercial city in northwest England (see chapter 1 and appendix 1 for details). It became obvious very early on in the original work that people do customarily respond to questions of belief with narrative answers. The more controversial the topic, the more likely it is that the conversation will include a lot of narrative. People who give positive answers in discussions about the supernatural are par- ticularly likely to tell stories. These stories, however, are probably not legends in the sense of “traditional” legends. Most commonly they are records of personal experience, the narrator’s own or that Introduction 3 of a close friend or family member. The content is traditional, but the story text is almost always individual. It is a matter of some debate what these sorts of informal per- sonal stories should be called. There are those, among whom Linda Dégh is chief, who would argue that their traditional subject matter and their belief-related intention makes them “legends” and that our understanding of the legend genre should be expanded to include these little stories (see especially Dégh 1996).