Ghost Hunting: A Short History

England is a haunted country. – Peter Ackroyd, The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time

A Reminder

The very first blog I posted here was all about hauntings in the South East of England, including a story about my own family going ghost hunting. But why are we, as a nation, not only obsessed with ghosts, but insistent on going looking for them?

Well, here’s a short history of Brits going ghost hunting.

Did it start with the Victorians?

Well, that’s what I thought, all ectoplasm and table-knocking and creepy daguerreotypes. But actually, it seems our love of communing with the dead dates further back. According to Tim Prasil, there are records of paranormal investigative teams in 1534 and 1762. Not only that, but Pliny the Younger recounted a story of a ghost hunt. That’s the Pliny whose uncle (the aptly-named Pliny the Elder) died when Vesuvius devastated Pompeii.

And after all, hauntings were being reported all the time for centuries, it’s just that there wasn’t much investigating going on. So what changed?

Spiritualism: The Spectral Boom Years

By the mid-Nineteenth Century, we’d been through the Enlightenment and rationalism was the way forward. Except people kept reporting supernatural phenomena and those pesky Romantics kept writing about ghosts and ghouls too. So, with serious technological advances (especially around recording aural and visual evidence), a new question arose: could these beliefs be either validated or disproved for good?

Official organisations started popping up in the UK, such as The Ghost Club and the Society for Psychical Research, all aiming to investigate the paranormal using modern methods in a systematic manner. It helped that Spiritualism was booming in, first, the United States, and then the United Kingdom. When you think of mediums and séances, that’s Spiritualism. And in this country, we had the strange mourning that Queen Victoria modelled, that fin de siècle mood, and then the horror of the Great War. It wasn’t about spotting the ghost of a headless monk or a notorious highwayman or Anne Boleyn screaming her way down a corridor anymore. It was about contacting our loved ones, desperate to hear their messages from another side that the living could only imagine. Even famous authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling had (complicated) involvement in the movement.

This is also the era of classic paranormal investigations like Harry Price’s of Borley Rectory, which was publicised in the Daily Mirror.

And now?

Well, although the turn of the century were the boom years, there were other cases such as the Enfield haunting in the 1970s and in the States, the Warren investigations (see: The Conjuring films for very fictionalised versions of these events, varying from alright to genuinely scary). Weirdly enough, we had another ghost hunting boom around twenty years ago, with the likes of Most Haunted (originator of the iconic ‘Mary loves Dick’) and various other ‘reality’ series following paranormal investigators going around haunted sites with night vision cameras and a resident psychic. Even Girls Aloud went ghost hunting. Why these shows were suddenly so popular, I don’t know – I guess they were frothy but also thrilling, and as a preteen, I watched Most Haunted a lot on ftn and sometimes it did put the wind up me a bit.

There aren’t just ghosts in Coldharbour…

We haven’t heard from Matthew for a while, have we? Well, this is what he’s up to before Christmas 2000:

How was he stood in front of him? His dog collar all askew, his neck crooked, the broken ribs bulging under black rags and mottled skin.

Matthew had never seen his ghost before when he still had Power, and now?

In the gloam?

As the witching hour was ending?

He couldn’t have even been a ghost, not after what that thing had done to his soul, and Matthew may have reached out first or perhaps he did, but did it matter, really, when he understood that he was here for him—

Yellow light punched through the darkness. Matthew reeled away from the doorway, the phantomless doorway, the doorway with a yawning teenager pointing at the remains of a teacup Matthew had actually quite liked.

No ghosts. Just ruined tea.

Coldharbour II: The Dead Land comes out on Halloween. Read the first in the series, Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death, now.

If you want to read more about ghost hunting, check out:

Ghost Hunting before the Victorians

Ghost Hunting in the 19th Century