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 BennettUtah State University Press
Copyright © 1999 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-277-8Contents
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 disparate. In 1926 a British national newspaper, the Daily News, invited readers to send in their personal experience accounts of ghosts. The result filled four volumes (one of which is still available in the Folklore Society library in London, see Giraud 1927). In the 1950s, British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer conducted a survey through a national newspaper for his Exploring English Character, which included questions about palm-reading, horoscopes and ghosts (1955). In 1968 and 1974 the Institute of Psychophysical Research appealed for firsthand reports of apparitions; approximately three hundred people responded to the first appeal, and fifteen hundred to the second (Green and McCreery 1975). More recently, the Department of Sociology at Leeds University conducted a study into what they call "common" religion (folklorists would call it "folk" religion, or perhaps "vernacular" religion-see Primiano, 1995). They asked questions, among other things, about life after death, ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, fortune-telling, and horoscopes (Towler et al. 1981-84). More recently, extensive survey work has been undertaken by anthropologist and theologian Douglas Davies into popular attitudes towards all aspects of death and burial. Two of his surveys in particular have provided very useful information about popular attitudes to supernatural traditions. These are the Rural Churches Project, the report of which was published in 1990 (Davies, Watkins, and Winter 1991), and a very much larger survey of 1,603 individuals (Davies and Shaw 1995). In Switzerland, in 1954-55, the popular fortnightly Schweizer Beobachter initiated an enquiry into prophetic dreams, coincidences, premonitions, and apparitions, and received fifteen hundred accounts (Jaff 1979).
In the U.S., Louis C. Jones surveyed young Americans and included an account of their responses in his very readable Things That Go Bump in the Night (1959). In the 1970s a couple of questions about psychic experiences were included in a survey of basic belief systems commissioned by the Henry Luce Foundation, and 1,460 replies were obtained (Greeley 1975). Two researchers at the School of Public Health, UCLA, interviewed 434 people from four ethnic groups in greater Los Angeles asking them had they "ever experienced or felt the presence of anyone after he had died?" (Kalish and Reynolds 1973). Also in the 1970s, two very important collections of local ghostlore were published, William Lynwood Montell's Ghosts along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills ([1975] 1987) and Ray B. Browne's "A Night with the Hants" and Other Alabama Folk Experiences (1976). In the fall of 1986, The Skeptical Inquirer printed a survey of "pseudoscientific beliefs about the past" among college students (see Harrold and Eve 1986, table 1, p. 67). A study of "Paranormal Experiences in the General Population" in the psychiatric Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease surveyed a random sample of 502 people in Winnipeg, Canada (Ross and Joshi 1992).
One consistent conclusion from all this research is that popular belief in supernatural cause and effect is higher than one would have thought possible in predominantly rationalist cultures and that it has been consistently underestimated. In the U.S., Richard Kalish and David Reynolds obtained an average of 44 percent positive answers to their "presence" question (1973); Francis Harrold and Raymond Eve found that 35 percent of people thought "ghosts exist," 59 percent believed some people could "predict the future by psychic power," 38 percent thought "communication with the dead is possible," and 67 percent believed "heaven exists" (1986, table 1, p. 67); and Colin Ross and Shaun Joshi found that 15.6 percent of their respondents claimed experiences of telepathy and 5.8 percent of precognition; 5.2 percent had had contact with ghosts, 2.2 percent with poltergeists and 4.4 percent with other spirits (1992 [the results were attributed to dissociative disorders]; and see David Hufford's reply [1992]). Andrew Greeley found that the "majority" of his American sample had had some sort of psychic experience, and a "respectable proportion" had had them frequently. Twenty-seven percent of his sample reported they had had contact with the dead, 3 percent saying this was a frequent occurrence (1975). In the U.K., Geoffrey Gorer found that 30 percent of his respondents believed in palm reading, 20 percent in astrology, and 17 percent in ghosts (1955); Celia Green and Charles McCreery found that "about a third" of their respondents reported having seen an apparition (1975, viii); and the Leeds team found that 14 percent of their respondents believed in astrology, 35 percent in fortune-telling, 36 percent in ghosts, 54 percent in clairvoyance, and 61 percent in telepathy (Krarup 1982). Davies's survey for the Rural Churches Project not only found a range of beliefs in an afterlife, but discovered that 19 percent of Anglicans and 29 percent of other denominations believed in ghosts (1997, 156). The survey also uncovered substantial evidence that a significant proportion of the population (just under half of the people surveyed) believed they "had gained some sort of experience which they believed involved an encounter or communication with a dead person." Commenting on this, Davies added: "By and large they involve a sense of presence ... but for a significant minority the visitation is visual ... on some rare occasions a voice is heard or some sort of communication is felt to take place." "Far from being secular," one British scholar of religion has noted, "our culture wobbles between a partially absorbed Christianity biased towards comfort and the need for confidence, and beliefs in fate, luck and moral governance incongruously joined together" (Martin 1967, 76).
My own study conducted in Manchester (U.K.) confirms these findings. The information was collected from women who attended my father's podiatrist clinic in the 1980s. Over the five-month period I worked there, I interviewed a total of 132 people-13 men, 3 women between eighteen and twenty-five years old, 20 women from age forty to sixty, and 96 women over sixty. From these I selected a study group of 87 whom I knew, or judged, to be over sixty years old. I was not able to find out the age and domestic circumstances of 6 of these women. Of the other 81, 29 were between ages sixty and seventy (of whom 6 were single, 14 married, and 9 widowed); 44 were between ages seventy and eighty (of whom 9 were single, 10 were married and 25 were widowed); 8 were age eighty and over (of whom one was single, 2 were married, and 5 were widowed); the eldest lady was ninety-six. Forty-three of them lived alone, the rest lived with family or friends. Most of the respondents said they were church-goers or professed some sort of religious conviction /adherence. A small minority were Jewish; the majority were Christians, with Methodists predominating and a handful each of Anglicans, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics; only one professed to be an atheist. Unless otherwise stated, all illustrative material is drawn from interviews with these 87 women. Readers will find a little basic biographical information about each one in appendix 3.
As a guide to the way I wanted conversation to develop, I compiled a checklist of topics around which to focus questions and discussion. Originally it had been my intention to encourage talk only about the possibility of interaction between the dead and the living, but in practice I found that this was far too intimidating, so I widened the scope of my research to include less alarming and delicate matters-extrasensory perception, omens, premonitions, fortune-telling and horoscopes, and the possibility of life after death. In practice, I usually began with questions about horoscopes or life after death and worked round to the more difficult matters as and when I could. I even asked questions about life on other planets if I felt that the respondent needed a long run-in to the topic. Conversely, I found that questions about telepathy made a convenient exit point when the patient's treatment was drawing to a close. Though it had not been my original intention to do any research in these areas, in the end I was very glad that I had done so, because I came to believe that all these subjects form a sort of background or context to more serious beliefs. It also gave me responses on a wide range of topics that are likely to come up in discourse with others and gave me a point of comparison with previous studies.
The women's scores on all the "deeper" and more delicate topics were very high, even higher than previous studies suggested. Almost two-thirds of the 87 women said they believed that some sort of contact with the dead was possible; nearly half with conviction and several others with only slightly less certainty. They were less likely, however, to believe in poltergeists and haunting ghosts, though even here the figure was higher than might have been expected (some expressing convinced belief, others thinking the phenomenon possibly really occurs, yet others speaking in this context about "happy" or "unhappy" houses). In addition, a large proportion of them said they thought it was possible to be forewarned that "something's going to happen"; nearly half of them were certain of it and believed themselves to be "a little bit psychic." Even more believed in omens of death-mysterious noises, the scent of flowers, broken mirrors, dreams, visions, and so on-and half of them could cite personal examples. Slightly fewer were convinced telepathy was possible, though many of them had experienced it themselves. Several others thought it was at least likely, and only a minority thought it did not and could not occur. The results are given in graphic form below on pages 19-23.
It must be stressed that these women were not ignorant or ill-educated; nor were they socially or geographically isolated. They were dignified, sensible, experienced women, living in a middleclass suburb in a large city. Neither were they in any way eccentric; on the contrary, they were pillars of their church and local community, essentially "respectable" in even the narrowest sense of that unpleasant term. Figures such as these do not at all give the impression that belief in supernatural cause and effect is declining. It would seem that the world view of quite a substantial proportion of the population is probably decidedly less materialistic than scientists and historians imagine.
Telling It Slant
One of the many problems of any research into supernatural beliefs is the slipperiness of language and the fact that people often want to express themselves with face-saving ambiguity. In Emily Dickinson's phrase, they "tell the truth but tell it slant." Under these circumstances, it is easy for researchers to misunderstand or misrepresent the views of their respondents.
The first sort of unwitting error is to ask a question in such a way as to get a misleading result. In my own fieldwork, for example, I found that the choice of terminology was crucial. I quickly found out that I had to adapt the wording of my questions and prompts to fit in with the phraseology the women themselves used. For example, terms like "supernatural" had to be abandoned altogether; for my informants, it was not the neutral nor factual term it is for me-its connotations were wholly evil and taboo. As long as I said I was doing research on "the supernatural," I had only negative reactions, ranging from denial to hostility and even real fear. As soon as I took to speaking in vague fashion about "the mysterious side of life," people relented; they began to show decided interest and were eager to talk. Similarly, when I started out, I had simply followed the practice of sociologist Geoffrey Gorer (1955) and blankly asked, "Do you believe in ghosts?" And everybody had promptly said, "No." Luckily, I was soon put on the right track by a woman who said she didn't believe in ghosts, but she knew that a house could be "spirited" and in fact she had once lived in a house that "wasn't right." On the same day, an old lady said she didn't believe in ghosts, but "funnily enough, whenever someone's going to be ill in my family, my mother comes TO me." Following these linguistic clues, from then on I talked about "things in houses" and experiences where dead parents and husbands "come to" the living. Douglas Davies and his colleagues similarly had to adapt their terminology for the Rural Churches Project. Discussing their attempts to frame a meaningful question about reincarnation, Davies remarks: "It may be that those using the word do so by placing their own meaning upon it.... Accordingly, we decided that the expression `coming back as something or someone else' would be more meaningful" (1997, 150). Formal surveys and written questionnaires do not allow this sort of negotiation and so are fertile ground for misrepresentation. This may be one of the reasons why the strength of the belief tradition is consistently underestimated.
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