Medieval Ghost Stories

Ghost stories have haunted conversations since ancient times, from the Mesopotamians to the Romans to the Vikings. The medieval period was particularly awash with ghost stories - after all, it was an era of great plague, piety and corporal punishment. Ghost stories served as useful tools to uphold hierarchies and manipulate the masses - live in accordance with the bible or be visited by a restless spirit... or become one yourself. To delve into some of the most popular ghost stories of medieval Britain and what the restless dead can tell us about the anxieties of the living, Dan is joined by Dr Eleanor Janega, historian and host of the Gone Medieval podcast. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Natasha Hughes. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:23Dan Snow?

  Ghost stories. They've haunted our conversations since the dawn of time. Ancient stone records from Mesopotamia, etchings of how to deal with demons and the ghosts of the dead. The Vikings, the Romans, all partial to a good ghost story. And of course, you won't be surprised to know the medieval era was riddled with them. But medieval ghost stories, well, they're not for parties and scaring kids. They had a very serious message. Live in accordance with the proper way of doing things, with the Bible. If you don't, you'll find yourself visited by a restless spirit, or indeed, become a restless spirit yourself.

• 2:02Dan Snow?

  So to wade through the phantasmagoria of our forbears, I am being joined by the iconic YouTube sensation, Dr Eleanor Janniger, as we uncover what the restless dead tell us about the anxieties of the living. Enjoy.

• 2:23Dan Snow?

  Dr Eleanor Janniger, good to see you.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  So good to see you.

• 2:27Dan Snow?

  So spooky, yeah?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Oh, woo.

• 2:29Dan Snow?

  Yeah. How persistent are ghosts? Is a ghost a thing where humans meet and tell stories?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that fundamentally, the thing about ghosts is it's just people telling stories. And indeed, the oldest thing that has ever been written that we still have by anyone is ghost story.

• 2:46Dan Snow?

  Really?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  And it comes to us from the epoch of Gilgamesh. It's called Gilgamesh, Inkeydo and the Underworld. And basically, Gilgamesh's best friend, Inkeydo, goes down to the underworld. He sees all the dead people. He comes back and tells stories about them.

• 2:58Dan Snow?

  Fascinating.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  So the minute humans could write about anything, they're like, I gotta tell you about ghosts, right?

• 3:04Dan Snow?

  And ghosts, let's just clear up the easy stuff. It's what happens to people when they die. They become ghosts? Everyone becomes ghosts or not?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Not necessarily. So as a general rule of thumb, what most ghost stories are going to centre on is the idea that ghosts are sort of people with unfinished business. Something's gone wrong. They're here to clear something up. What that is can be all sorts of things. A real common one is like, you didn't bury me right. A real common one is, I want to make sure that my inheritance is going the right way. I was a bad guy, please pray for me. You know, there are certain things that will come up over and over again. But as a general rule of thumb, they're real unhappy with the way people are doing things.

• 3:44Dan Snow?

  It's so interesting, their persistence across cultures, different times and places. So you, I mean, you've gone, you have gone ancient Sumeria.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:52Dan Snow?

  To present day.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:54Dan Snow?

  In every society you can find, and there's ghosts.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's just one of the ways that we sort of organise the way we think about, I guess, human interrelationships and what we owe to other people. And this is what I'm really interested in when we talk about ghosts and ghosts as a history, because people bring them up all the time. So they show us what societies value, right? You know, the older something is, the further back in time it is, the harder it is to get to us, right? And so when we have a ghost story survive, it's very clear to us that the people here really value it and that it is doing some kind of load-bearing social description, right? So one of my very, very favourite ghost stories is actually a Roman one.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  And it was written in about the second century of the common era by Pliny the Younger. And it is about a Stoic philosopher called Athenodorus. Okay. And this is, this is a ghost story that I'll tell you and I bet you, you can figure out what the, what the moral is, okay? So Athenodorus gets to Athens and he needs to rent a house. And he notices that there's a very beautiful mansion that is on rent for very cheap. And everyone says, he's, well, why is this on for such a cheap price? And they say, oh, it's haunted. You don't, you don't want to rent it because it's got this really terrible ghost in there. And Athenodorus says, no, I'm gonna go, I'm going in there, right?

• 5:13Dan Snow?

  Come on, of course I am.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  So here he is, big Stoic philosopher. He's up night, oh, he's writing. He's writing and he's writing his philosophy. And out of the mists behind him comes scary ghost, scary ghost rattling a chain, woo. And Athenodorus says, hey, you need to calm down until I'm done writing. You go wait over there because I'm writing Stoic philosophy. And the ghost is like, oh. So Athenodorus finishes what he's saying and he's like, all right, ghosty, come on, what do you need? Ghost leads him to a part of the house and kind of gestures to it. And Athenodorus goes, got it. Next day, they go dig up that part of the house. They find a skeleton that's all wrapped in chains. They then take the skeleton out of there and they go bury it in the proper place. Bada bing bada boom, you don't have a haunted house anymore. And Athenodorus feels very smug because he's got this really cheap rent.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  So what do you think that story is telling us?

• 6:00Dan Snow?

  A proper dealing with, proper burial.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:04Dan Snow?

  Proper, you've got to, you've got to bury someone with dignity. You've got to, you can't, you can't leave that as unfinished business. Can't wrap someone in chains, throw them in a shallow grave.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Like in a house?

• 6:12Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Like, we're all gonna get sick, babe. Like, you can't, like, we're in a densely populated city. We can't just have corpses buried willy-nilly, right? And if you, as a man, were doing your manly duty of being like a nice and stoic, you wouldn't even get scared of ghosts.

• 6:28Dan Snow?

  Well, that's what I like about that story, because there's that trope you get in Hollywood movies, the modern movies, where you're not scared of the ghost. That people are like, just hold on a second, ghost. Then the ghost gets annoyed, so they're not scaring you.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:40Dan Snow?

  That's like a real, that's a trick.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  That's a real thing, yeah.

• 6:42Dan Snow?

  That's from Pliny.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  That's from Pliny.

• 6:44Dan Snow?

  But you're right. The other lesson is ghosts are there for a reason. They're not there to kill you and suck your blood and be, you've just got to just tell it to just back down and you'll deal with its concerns.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Well, 100%, right? And what we do see, though, is that over time, the concerns.

• 6:59Dan Snow?

  The concerns.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Of the ghosts, they're going, they're going to change.

• 7:04Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  And one of the big ones that is always going to be, there is going to be this proper burial for, you know, the reasons we've just said, you have to bury bodies correctly because people are going to get sick, right? You can't just have like a body in somebody's house. You can't have a body out in a field. You don't want bodies like in the lake. We're drinking that water, right? So it stands to reason, you're gonna want ghost stories that reinforce proper body disposal, right? But one of the things that we do tend to see over time is that ghosts, when they come back for other reasons, like other unfinished business, it tends to reflect whatever it is society values at the time. Because again, like, right, when, when sources survive to us, it's because rich and powerful people value this thing.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  And the stuff that rich and powerful people often value.

• 7:52Dan Snow?

  This stuff.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 7:54Dan Snow?

  My brother took my money and then killed me and then I need to, exactly.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. So we will see ghosts all the time, who are specifically coming back for the purposes of making sure that wills are resolved correctly.

• 8:07Dan Snow?

  Debts are paid.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  100%. And then what we see a lot of time, especially in the medieval period, because one of the big groups of people that we hear from all the time are the clergy, is ghosts are doing religion things, right? So one of the big things that ends up coming in, in the medieval period, and especially in the high medieval period, is the concept of purgatory. Okay? And so purgatory is not just neither here nor there. It's not, you're not in heaven, you're not in hell. You're in hell, but you're in hell with a timer, right? So you're in hell.

• 8:37Dan Snow?

  You're working it off.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 8:39Dan Snow?

  It's the earn-out period.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's like, you're, listen, you were kind of bad, so you're just gonna have to get tortured lightly for a while, but then eventually they'll say, oh, yeah, that's enough for your bad things. So one of the big reasons ghosts come back in the Middle Ages is to say, hey, this is really too much and there are a couple of things that you could do that will earn me out of purgatory, right? And those are often good things, right? So for example, a big trope that we see in the medieval period is something called a Harlequin haunt. And it's kind of like the ghosts get together and have a parade.

• 9:13Dan Snow?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  It's nice. They come out of hell and you get to see them walk down the road and they are experiencing ironic tortures. So it's like, the ladies who are too sexy are riding side saddle on these saddles that have lots of iron spikes on them and they're lifted into the air and then they fall on them over and over again. Got it? And then you will see, for example...

• 9:38Speaker 02

  People like knights who are saying, I need you to help me. I loaned some money to this miller. And the miller paid me back a bunch of money, more than I ever loaned him. But he didn't end up still paying off the principal of his loan. So I took his mill away from him. And now I made more money with the mill than he ever owed me as well. And then I died and now it's gone on to my family. And I am crushed by the weight of this. This is, this is, as a result, it feels to me like I'm being crushed by hot wood. And unless someone goes and does something, you need to give the mill back to the miller. Because I'm suffering in hell for what I did and it just isn't fair. And like, that's a perfectly nice thing.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  To say like, yeah, baby, don't impoverish your small folk, like leave the miller alone. You know, that kind of thing. That's, that's a very nice, like, easy moral story. But fundamentally, what it does allow you to do, if you are a living person, is feel like you can still do something for your dead loved ones. So you're like, all right, well, I'm not around them now. I could never say I'm sorry for, you know, whatever, or I'll never get to see them again. But I could have masses said for their soul and hopefully it's going to hasten the process of purgatory up so that they can go hang out with God.

• 10:50Dan Snow?

  And in other periods, it's revenge. You gotta, I get men on this wandering around just going, you can, somebody please kill the people that did this to me. I'm still pissed about this.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. We see this all the time, especially in ancient ghost stories where there'll be these ghosts who want revenge. It's a really fun ghost story that the ghosts of the marathon battle haunt the marathon battlefield. And you can hear them at night. You'll hear them if you go out there accidentally and you didn't know that they were there and they're, they're fighting this battle again. And if you go out there on purpose, because you want to see them, they'll kill you.

• 11:25Dan Snow?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  And they'll tear you to pieces. And the moral of the story is apparently that they should have built a better monument to the Persians.

• 11:31Dan Snow?

  To the Persians?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Which is interesting because they're like, well, actually they did fight valiantly. And it's, it's this interesting story about like, well, what do we owe our enemies? Like, what do we, what do we owe these things?

• 11:42Dan Snow?

  I've poked around that battlefield many times and

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Have you heard the ghosts?

• 11:45Dan Snow?

  And I did not see any ghosts.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  You, you never know. You never know, right? And I mean, so like revenge is, is one of the really fun ones. And it's like one of the most common tropes now. So when we have common ghost tropes now, the most bog standard ghost at this point in time is a murder victim. Who is kind of like attempting to let you know

• 12:06Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  They've been murdered.

• 12:07Dan Snow?

  Yeah. And that's quite Shakespearean as well.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, there's like revenge notification, please bury me correctly. They, but they're doing all these important things that essentially keep society ticking over. What they are is moral messages. Right? I went to, I went to a ghost museum in Georgetown in Malaysia the other year. So they had these vignettes of local ghosts and you could dress up like the ghosts and have your picture taken. It was very fun. And next to every one of them, they would tell you what the ghost was. And then at the end of it, they would say moral lesson.

• 12:38Dan Snow?

  Oh, interesting.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  And I was like, oh my God, they're just saying.

• 12:40Dan Snow?

  So they said the quiet bit out loud.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I was like, no, I'm writing a book about this. Stop at Ghost Museum in Georgetown. Like, so

• 12:46Dan Snow?

  In fact, that's where you got the idea.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And it was, and I'll send him a book when it's done. But it is really interesting to see this play out over and over again, is that these, these are one of the ways that we patrol society, right? Like

• 12:58Dan Snow?

  Like fairy tales. So like stories for kids.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:00Dan Snow?

  Okay, that's interesting.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Sometimes adults also need to be reminded to not take the miller's mill, you know?

• 13:05Dan Snow?

  Yeah. And I'm thinking with our modern ghost, modern ghost culture, I guess that's true as well. It's people that regret things, come back, have advice for the still living. Okay, interesting.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  You know, like, very, sometimes it'll just be like, you know, your grandma's like, I loved you, Tommy, or whatever. And that's, that's nice.

• 13:24Dan Snow?

  Stop being a venture capitalist.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. Pull, pull it together. You're making Graham Graham sad, you know, that, that kind of a thing. I wish more ghosts would do that, actually.

• 13:32Dan Snow?

  And what, what's the golden age of, for you as a historian, what's the golden age of the way you can, you can get your teeth into stories that have been transmitted?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  So we have actually so many interesting ghost stories that it's really difficult, I'm writing a book about it. But okay, so one of my very, very favorite sources of ghost stories is something that we now call the Byland Abbey ghost stories.

• 13:49Dan Snow?

  Never heard of it.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so these are really fun. They're from around the 15th century, so around early 1400. And we found them at Byland Abbey, you know, yeah, big repository of stuff in Yorkshire. But it's not the fanciest. It's like a pretty, it's a pretty nice, that's a nice abbey. But it's, it's not the fanciest one in the entire world. This is kind of like a bog standard group of monks, fine. And in a very bog standard set of works, you've got like some Cicero in there. There is always Cicero. It's like Cicero and Aristotle. But then right at the back, this monk is like, I saw some real stuff. Here's, it's ghost time. And he tells us these 12 different ghost stories that are local ghost stories in Latin.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  They're later found by the master of the ghost story, M R James, who was a very talented medievalist himself. And he ends up writing all of these out for us. And they are so cool because they tell us all these different, interesting things. And the most famous and longest one is a very long thing about a guy called Snowball the tailor, who runs into a ghost while he's coming home at night. And the ghost was very bad indeed, and he was naughty and he needs a certain number of masses said for him and Snowball sorts that out. But you see all sorts of things in it where there will be ghosts. For example, there's a ghost of a woman who she gets in a fight with her husband and she signs over the deed of her land to her brother. And now she's kind of haunting the laneways around her town because she is in trouble for this.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  And so someone meets her, she says what's going on. He goes to her brother and says, look, you gotta sort this out. Your, your sister's haunting the laneways. And he says, I don't care if she haunts till doomsday.

• 15:25Dan Snow?

  I think that is the right answer, to be honest.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Well, listen, I'll tell you who did care was that guy's son. He was like, absolutely not. I'm putting auntie in the grave. And like, he ends up like doing the right thing. But then sometimes you have these completely nonsensical ones. And the nonsensical ones are actually my favorite. Because like, there's one where there's just like a chick who like finds a ghost, gives it a piggyback into a room full of guys and goes, found a ghost. Like, there's a ghost on my back. You like this? And it's like, where's the moral here? And they're just, and they're like, everyone remembers when Eliza gave that ghost a piggyback. And I'm like, we do? And so, and those ones are actually my favorite because I do think that most of them are serving moral lessons. But my favorite are ghost stories that don't mean anything.

• 16:06Dan Snow?

  That was mushroom season.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Exactly, right?

• 16:10Dan Snow?

  I think we can, I think we can tell that.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  It's like, it's so good. And you're like, okay.

• 16:13Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Um, fair enough. And it's just like, it's great. It's wonderful, you know?

• 16:20Dan Snow?

  You listen to Dan Snow's History at this welcome.

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• 18:54Speaker 04

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• 19:38Speaker 02

  And I guess that actually the thing that got me into these ghost stories was actually a ghost story. And listen, you don't get to be surprised by when I tell you this source, but the Emperor Charles IV wrote an autobiography. Okay. And he's writing this autobiography when he's kind of like pitching to be Holy Roman Emperor. And when he's kind of like saying, hey, everybody, it's fine that it's going to be me, your local Czech or whatever. And it's, it's pretty standard stuff. It is like propaganda, propaganda. I went to this battle. I did this. He's got a couple of miracles in there. It's kind of interesting. And then in the middle of it, he's like, look, I got back to Prague. And Prague Castle at the time needs to be rebuilt. It's, it's a bit of a

• 20:20Speaker 02

  shambles. So that's probably the propaganda bit, right? Is he's like, someone's got to rebuild this castle. And you taxpayers can help me do that, right? But he's staying in one of the houses on Old Town Square. And he and his chamberlain are getting ready for bed. And they can hear someone walking around the room. And he hastens to add, the fire is built up. They've got a bunch of candles. They can kind of see everything. And they can hear these footsteps. And they're like, what the hell is that? And they kind of get up and they look around, they can't see anyone. And they're like, okay, they put a few more logs on the fire and they go back to bed. And then there's a bench kind of in between the beds that has their wine cups on it. And because, you know, you know, how it is, you wake up in the middle of the night and you need some wine, right? And so

• 21:02Speaker 02

  the Chamberlain goes over there and he's like filling up his cup. And another, and he goes back to bed and another cup from the bench picks itself up and throws itself across the room. Charles and the Chamberlain freak out. They're scared as hell. They're like saying our fathers, they're doing all their Christian prayers. The next day, all the servants come in and they're like, look, do you see where that cup is? Like something came in through it. And that's the ghost story. It doesn't mean anything. Okay. And what I think is interesting about it is here's one of the most important guys to ever live, one of the most powerful men to ever walk the earth. And he's sitting here, writing out a bunch of stories for you where he's like, the things that

• 21:38Dan Snow?

  This is a public facing. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  This is something you need to know about me, right? You need to know that I got really scared one time. And that's so interesting, because it can show us that these are really personal stories to some people, even though there's no moral message, there's no nothing. Clearly, we have these examples of stories where it's just like, sometimes people think they just see something. But it's very difficult for those to survive to us historically, because of how powerful people want stories that are going to reiterate power. And so you can't have random ghost. Because random ghost doesn't fit, right?

• 22:13Dan Snow?

  Makes him feel more, I guess, although this is not a democratic era, but almost like, hey, weird things happened to me, like, like, I'm like you guys.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  I'm a normal guy. Yeah. Like, I too, got spooked out one time.

• 22:25Dan Snow?

  Yeah, I got spooked out. And there's wine flying, flying around the room. So let's, if we move on to the early modern period, if I can drag you up, I may.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Oh, no, listen, I love it.

• 22:35Dan Snow?

  Because I'm always confused by that ghosts hop from Catholicism to Protestant, even though the Protestants, I've, I've always thought, sort of set out their stall in opposition to these kind of strange, superstitious views that Catholics have. And the world's actually very straightforward. It's not, you know, we read the Bible, we commune with God. All this other stuff is kind of absurd.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Well, you are right on one count. One of the big things that happens in the era of the Reformation is Protestants are, they're saying, we need to get rid of these papist superstitions. And they're like, ghosts are something that is made up.

• 23:12Dan Snow?

  From the mists of time.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yep. There's, okay, is there a ghost story in the Bible? Yes, but you're interpreting it wrong. And all the other ghosts were just monks faking it so that you would give money to the church. And like, listen, it's a compelling argument. Yeah, it's fairly compelling. However, they aren't saying, oh, yeah, all of it is made up. And there isn't anything spooky. They're like, spooky stuff is real. And it's actually demons.

• 23:34Dan Snow?

  Oh, it's demons.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  It's demons. And it's like, I like, this is somehow worse, right? You know, especially here in what will become, you know, the United Kingdom as a result of James VI and I, right? He is your number one demons are real guy.

• 23:49Dan Snow?

  J pop demon hunter. Sorry. J. Well, he was Charles's pop.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  J Rex demon hunter. Yeah, there you go. So he writes the demonology in 1597. And it's all about how demons are real. And absolutely, like, we need to watch out for that. Also witches are real. And so

• 24:11Dan Snow?

  So the ghost, because ghosts are actually reasonably benign, I guess. But demons, no.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  But demons are not benign. So I would argue this is worse.

• 24:18Dan Snow?

  This is much worse.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Because it's like, like, what's the ghost gonna do? Throw the wine cup?

• 24:22Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Be like, hey,

• 24:23Dan Snow?

  Remind you about unpaid debts and things.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Like, oh, you say some masses for me, right? And, and it's really interesting, because you watch, for example, a big traditional place people will think is haunted is of course the graveyard, right? And that's probably a reminder of like, yo, don't go in there. There's a bunch of decomposing bodies, right? Like, it's, it's not great. And they're like, oh, yeah, well, what you're actually seeing there isn't ghosts. It's the devil himself. And because he loves corpses. And so he's just hanging. And I'm like, that's worse, right? And there's this amazing book that is written called Sardukismus Triumphatus. And it is about how witches and apparitions are absolutely real. And

• 25:06Speaker 02

  they're like, listen, here's the Protestant way that we explain this. You're not wrong. You did see that thing. It's just that it cannot be a ghost, because ghosts aren't real. And if you think a ghost is real, you're a Catholic. Yeah. So it doesn't get less superstitious. It's just the superstition is different and more violent.

• 25:26Dan Snow?

  So sort of more, more intense, more, less, less amorphous, more rigid and violent and pleasant.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. But then everyone kind of gets bored of it. It's kind of interesting. It's like, because that's like, it's not very fun. That's not fun. And I mean, we will see ghosts that are continuing to crop up, particularly in the Enlightenment period. A big thing that people kind of are doing is they're going around collecting ghost stories and arguing for the possibility of ghosts in a scientific way.

• 25:51Dan Snow?

  Okay, so, oh, maybe these things have a basis in science.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they're like, look, we're gonna get to the bottom of it.

• 25:55Dan Snow?

  Oxygen. Why not discover ghosts?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  We could discover ghosts. And we're gonna get, and we begin to ghost hunt. And people are looking around, they're trying to find the ghost. So it's not even like with the advent of science that we discard the idea of ghosts more generally. What we attempt to do is explain what they are and how powerful they are.

• 26:12Dan Snow?

  When we were discovering science, we had to work out where the borders of science were. And you probably still are, right? So

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 26:18Dan Snow?

  You go, before you discard ghosts, you have to just quickly check if they're not one of these phenomenon, because we keep, you know, we keep finding things.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  And they're like, well, maybe this is just something about time. Maybe there's particles. It's really interesting, the way that people will grapple with the concept of the ghost, because it's still very clearly for them, kind of a load bearing way that they think about the world and the way that they think about morality, or, you know, indeed, just, I suppose, the links that people have with each other, right? So part of, to them, what it means to be human, there is like this very specific thing that is kind of tied up with humanism as a movement, right? Like, as a movement for like, the conception of humanity toss and the humanities generally is like this interest in ghosts, because well, we all kind of owe each other particular things. So for example,

• 27:09Speaker 02

  like when John Locke is writing educational treaties about how we should be like raising proper young men, so that they learn things. He's like, listen, be careful with the ghost thing. You don't want the babysitters telling the ghost stories. You don't want it to be like the old wives tales, because those are bad. And then they're going to think that ghosts are just necessarily stupid. But actually, maybe there's some truth to it. And we need them to like turn scientific minds to it once they, they get older, right? The culmination of this is going to be your friends and mine, Victorians.

• 27:42Dan Snow?

  You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  This is actually the culmination of this, these ideas about scientificness, whilst you're still kind of holding on to the conception of the ghost as a useful way to organize society, because Victorians are like, we are going to get to the bottom of this. We are going to figure this out. And

• 28:06Dan Snow?

  But Dickens is still using them for moral tales.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  100%.

• 28:09Dan Snow?

  But he's, but they're also then trying to work out, should we just check if these things

• 28:13Speaker 02

  This one, listen, because it would be really helpful if they were, because it would be nice if some guys like kind of showed up and said, hey, rich people, maybe don't be total jerks. Right? It would be great if, if a Christmas Carol was real, right? Love that for us. So it's like, the Victorians also are going through a lot, I think, in terms of like industrialization, they're really kind of feeling cut off in a lot of ways from what they kind of think of as this bucolic pastoralism.

• 28:40Dan Snow?

  Being replaced by machines.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:42Dan Snow?

  Must suck.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  So the thing to them that like, well, what makes people people is that we have this possibility of like having ghosts, we have this soul, we have that we have this thing. So they really want to hold on to it. And then even when you get into the 20th century, it doesn't really go away. After the Great War, after like the influenza pandemic, people have lost so many people that they really are clinging on to these hopes that maybe they can communicate with their loved ones, which is really sad. And there are a lot of charlatans.

• 29:09Dan Snow?

  Well, there's a lot of people encouraging that.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, one of my favorite things about Harry Houdini is that he did this huge line of going around and unmasking charlatan feences.

• 29:18Dan Snow?

  That was his like side hustle.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. He was like, in his spare time, he was like, you're faking this, leave these people alone. And I'm like, get on it. I love that. I love that. But it's like, what we see within this period is a kind of like going back to medievalisms over and over again. M R James, who I've already shouted out at this point in time, he wrote a series of his own ghost stories, which are my absolute favorite. And they're kind of all from the 1920s, but they will have like lots of little appealing bits of medievalisms. My favorite M R James ghost story is Kenan Albrecht's scrapbook. And he like goes to a remote cathedral in France, and he gets like this big thing of old medieval manuscripts. And like, it turns out a bishop had sold a soul to

• 30:02Speaker 02

  like a thing. And now there's a ghostly goblin, like following him around. Great stuff. Creepy ass. Great job, M R James. So I mean, it's like, it's wonderful from a literary point of view, when people write these things, and you can really see this mashup. And I mean, still, you know, what is it when we say, oh, that place is haunted? Probably the number one thing we think of is like a castle. Right? So that's what's in there is ghosts, right?

• 30:24Dan Snow?

  Yeah, I'm astonished by how often conversation turns to ghosts in a non ironic way, when I'm with friends and we're eating, drinking around the campfire, whatever it is, it is ghost stories are, so if we are as, if we

• 30:41Dan Snow?

  You know, five, six, seven generations after, after the, you know, the, these, these advances in science that you've described in the Enlightenment period, if, if we're still as captivated by ghost stories, then of course our ancestors have been doing the same thing.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. You know, everybody has been doing this. And what they were doing, I think, is exactly the same as us. They're grappling with what to do with this, right? They're grappling with how we are going to integrate ghosts into our worldview. And by that, what they're really doing is they're grappling with what it means to be a person, and what it means to be alive. What do we owe each other? How are we going to conduct ourselves within a society? And, and ghosts are just, they're sort of patrolling the edges of that.

• 31:23Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Right? And they're also kind of giving people hope, like for something after death, or the, the idea that the love we have for people doesn't go anywhere when they die.

• 31:32Dan Snow?

  Well, it's, that's, that is a desperate wish that we all have.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  I know, I know.

• 31:38Dan Snow?

  And I can, it makes so much sense. Thank you, Dr. Elianega, for coming on. Hey, you've got a book about this. What's it called?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I've got a book. It's, it's going to be, it's going to be out, uh, next year. So get ready for, to force me to do it again, but it's called The Unquiet Dead.

• 31:52Dan Snow?

  The Unquiet Dead.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  So it's gonna be very fun.

• 31:54Dan Snow?

  Nice. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming along for this ghostly content. Make sure you like and subscribe and everything. Otherwise, I will haunt you for years after I am gone, which I will do soon, unless you do like and subscribe and everything. See you next time.

• 33:05Dan Snow?

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