Review by New York Times Review
CLOSE TO THE end of Roger Clarke's "Ghosts: A Natural History," the author mentions "silent phone calls from people who have been buried with their phone in their coffin." Who are these people? He doesn't say, but he claims there's a whole genre of "apparently true" mobile phone ghost stories, including "texts from the dead." There are even haunted spell-checks. When the name "Prudentia" was highlighted on a document during a 1998 investigation in Britain, the alternative spellings that reportedly came up were "dead," "buried" and "cellar." We're not told if investigators dug up the cellar, and if they did, whether they found Prudentia. There is much else here that touches the contemporary world, including an intriguing connection between quantum physics and ghosts, by way of Einstein's difficulty with "spooky action at a distance" (spukhafte Fernwirkung) and John Stewart Bell's "Interconnectedness Theorem." There are references to ghost-belief in the ancient world, and a few to supernatural events in America, such as Abraham Lincoln's seeing a double image of himself in the mirror, which he later took to be a premonition of his assassination. But Clarke, a film critic, contends that England is the most haunted country in the world, writing that "belief in the paranormal has become a form of decayed religion in secular times: Ghosts are the ghosts of religion itself." Haunted churches and parsonages figure large, Borley Rectory in Essex being described as "a vortex of unnerving pathologies." Crumbling manor houses and stately homes are seemingly riddled with pathologies of their own. One in particular, whose haunting during the 1760s Clarke recounts at length, was Hinton Ampner. The story was apparently told to Henry James by the archbishop of Canterbury, and is thought to have inspired "The Turn of the Screw." Poltergeists and apparitions were the dominant horrors at Hinton Ampner. A stranger in a "drab-colored suit" is seen wandering the corridors, and a tall woman in dark silk enters a kitchen where four people are sitting at the table. She then vanishes in plain sight. There's "walking, talking, knocking, opening, slamming of doors," and one night a shriek "like someone being dragged to hell." Staff members begin to leave. The mistress of the house, the redoubtable Mary Ricketts, confesses herself "harassed and perplexed." The only explanation on offer concerns an unsavory character named Isaac Mackrell who years earlier had been the steward there. Mackrell may have been involved in the murder of a bastard child in the house, its tiny corpse buried under the floorboards. Henry James's ghost, Peter Quint, has much in common with this Isaac Mackrell, and Miss Jessel with the lady in dark silk. Roger Clarke tells this and many other gloriously weird stories with real verve, and also a kind of narrative authority that tends to constrain the skeptical voice within. There's simply so many of these accounts, each unique to its own setting but having much in common with the rest, particularly poltergeist activity and ghostly apparitions. What prevents the reader from casually dismissing it all as the delusions of disturbed minds is the frequent presence of some unflappable English person unlikely to be rattled by a mere bump in the night. In Hinton Ampner there are two, Mrs. Ricketts and her brother, John Jervis, a distinguished naval officer and mentor of Lord Nelson, who spends many nights under her roof and takes her predicament very seriously indeed. He urges her to gather her children and just get out. AS IS PROPER in a natural history, Clarke categorizes his objects of study. The taxonomy employed includes time slips, such as the case of the two ladies, English academics, who encountered mysterious figures in Versailles in 1901, on the anniversary of Marie Antoinette's being carried off to prison by a revolutionary mob. They later speculated that they had "inadvertently entered within an act of the queen's memory when alive." Also included in the taxonomy are traditional ghosts, ghosts of the living and "haunted inanimate objects," which presumably include phones in coffins and morbid spell-checks. In the 19th century the English developed a passion for séances. These were "very much about one thing: sex," Clarke writes. The mediums tended to be attractive young girls, whom he calls "the flirtatious teenage sylphs of Victorian London." He gives a long account of an extraordinary man named Daniel Dunglas Home, a medium who so enraged the poet Robert Browning by apparently interfering with his wife's underclothing during a séance that "an almost implacable hatred" was born, and contributed to the downfall of this spiritualist. Many dramatic hauntings have occurred in wartime. Clarke looks closely at the famous case of the Angels of Mons, and here discovers not an authentic instance of supernatural intervention in human affairs, but rather a case of what's elsewhere referred to as "fiction reversing into reality." The "angels" were winged figures in some accounts, and in others English archers from the Battle of Agincourt of 1415. They appeared in the sky as British soldiers retreated from a larger German force during the Battle of Mons, early in World War I. There were few actual witnesses to this miraculous heavenly host, whose purpose seemed to be to protect the British from being overwhelmed by the enemy. The accounts were almost all secondhand but were widely believed. In fact, the writer Arthur Machen published a short story around the same time called "The Bowmen," in which he imagined just such a force of Agincourt archers helping Englishmen in danger on the battlefield. The relationship between that story and the rumors then circulating is problematic, further complicated by the interests of the newspaper that published Machen's story and implied it was factually true. No less interested in promoting the story was the British government, which badly needed to boost morale at a time of early reversals in a war it was supposed to win quickly and was desperate to recruit more cannon fodder. The Angels of Mons may have been a mass hallucination inspired by a short story, but the vast number of fatalities in that war could in itself have produced supernatural phenomena. Clarke writes that the poet Robert Graves thought it "almost a commonplace to see ghosts of the freshly killed still stumbling around, as if they hadn't quite grasped their predicament." The book ends with Harry Houdini, who knew all about creating illusions. He told his wife, Bess, that if, when he died, he discovered there was an afterlife, he would somehow let her know. Every year on the anniversary of his death, Oct. 31 - Halloween, of course - she organized a séance. After nine fruitless years Bess decided to make one last attempt. The séance was broadcast live on radio, and America listened in. Finally Bess broke the news: "Houdini did not come through. My last hope is gone. ... The Houdini Shrine has burned for 10 years. I now, reverently ... turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Harry!" A fitting end to this erudite and richly entertaining book. PATRICK McGRATH is the author of "Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now" and, most recently, "Constance," a novel.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 19, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Although the book's subtitle might lead some readers to expect an investigative book along the lines of Joe Nickell's The Science of Ghosts (2012), this one is considerably less rigorous. The author begins by telling us this isn't a book about whether ghosts exist, but rather about what we see when we see a ghost, and the stories that we tell each other about them, which certainly makes it sound like an investigative piece. In fact, though, the book is slanted heavily toward the anecdotal: about 30 pages are devoted to the history of a certain haunted house, for example, but there is virtually no analysis of the various stories about the house and hardly any discussion of the scientific or psychological bases for the stories. Still, the text offers an interesting history of ghost stories and ghost hunters, but a more rigorous approach to the subject, with some discussion of the reasons why some people believe so strongly in the existence of things others say are purely imaginary, might have made it a more balanced book. As it stands, readers of skeptical literature might find it wanting, even if fans of ghost stories and TV's Ghost Hunters might enjoy it.--Pitt, David Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ghost-hunting gets a gentlemanly makeover in this meticulous history of hauntings.Clarke indulges his lifelong interest in the paranormal in this well-documented look at ghost stories and the people who have told them throughout history. As the youngest person ever to become a member of the Society for Psychical Research, the author has pursued his passion since childhoodand it shows. He covers everything in loving detail, from Victorian mobs congregating at haunted houses to Harry Price's 1920s radio show, which helped launch modern ghost-hunting. Excerpts from letters, illustrations of experiments and many complex family trees ground in reality what could be dismissed as fantasy. Clarke's discussions of geography also lend realism. England is the focus throughout: The English countryside, class distinctions and small-town gossip feature nearly as prominently as the ghost stories themselves. The author relates all of this information in the same smooth, careful style, presenting them truly as natural history and not necessarily as spine-tingling stories, although some are spooky enough even when viewed through Clarke's objective lens. This objectivity cuts two ways in the narrative: The author's open-mindedness is admirable and suitable to a work billed as a "social history," but the attendant ambiguity saps the sense of direction sorely needed in such a detailed book. When Clarke touches on the cultural history of ghost storieshow their social classes, gender and even fashions have changed with the timeshe begins to invite readers to consider the reasons behind these oft-told tales, but then he quickly changes direction. The book will be more useful as a reference than an afternoon's entertainment, and Clarke also provides a useful index, a chronology and a reference list that will serve other paranormal researchers well. An informative but surprisingly sedate tour of haunting's storied past. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
