Intermediate to Advanced: Too much information! (but fun!)
In 1800’s and 1900’s Europe and America, ghosts seemed to be everywhere. Everyone had seen one, talked to one, gotten a message from one–or knew someone who did. Even the Queen of England sent out invitations for “tea and table tipping”–a type of seance where ghosts supposedly made tables wobble when they showed up for a chat. Ghosts were not just spooky papier maché figures in the 1800’s! They were departed loved ones come back one last time to give advice, reassurance, and sometimes a hint that life after death wasn’t so bad after all.
Ghosts sightings got so ubiquitous** that scholars started to question what was happening. Why were so many intelligent, respectable people seeing something that shouldn’t be there? Why were spirits who had passed on suddenly speaking through sensitives (mediums), or tapping coded messages on tables? Why were they making furniture levitate, sounding trumpets in the dark next to seekers, or spelling out names on Ouija boards? Spiritualists (who made a religion of ghost encounters), fraud hunters (who figured all ghosts were hoaxes), and scholars in groups like the Society for Psychical Research (who tried to use the scientific method to research the phenomena) collected and analyzed thousands of ghost encounters to figure out what it all meant.
They weren’t afraid of no ghosts. They pursued them!
This is not as crazy as it seems. The 1800’s was a time of continual innovation, development, and rethinking assumptions. Amazing–and horrifying–things were happening that seemed to suggest we weren’t aware of everything that was around us.
The telegraph (1837) and the telephone (1876) sent invisible messages through the air. We could read telegrams if an operator with the right knowledge and technology pulled them out of the air and reproduced them on paper. We could hear far-away people on the phone even if we couldn’t see or touch them. Were other types of messages swirling around us, if we only knew how to access them?
Silver coated glass mirrors (1857) upgraded telescope lenses so that we could see things in the sky that had been invisible to earlier technology. What else was out there, that we just didn’t have the ability to see?
The stethoscope (1819) and X-rays (1895) allowed doctors to hear and see the invisible world inside the body for the first time.
Pasteur 1861 and Koch 1884 convincingly argued for germ theory, the idea that hidden, invisible entities could cause sickness. This was a little less scary than the earlier idea of miasma —an unhealthy vapor that hung around certain places and caused sickness–but this took the invisible battle inside.
The unconscious was also a new concept. The new “field of mind” (psychology wasn’t a thing until about the mid-1800’s) began to explain supernatural-seeming events as hidden–invisible–mental processes. Scarily, they would seem real–coming from outside you–but they were coming from within. So now thoughts were as stealthy and unpredictable as ghosts. Which was scarier– a ghost or our the hidden parts of our own minds calling the shots?
Photography developed (yes, I said it!) throughout this era (camera obscura 1814, stereoscope 1832, calotype 1835, daguerreotype 1839, wet plate technique 1861, dry plate 1879, film 1884, 1885).***
By the mid to late 1800’s photographers were stunned to see ghosts showing up behind living people on their wet glass photographic plates. (We would call this a “double exposure.”) The most famous of these spirit photographs was a shadowy Abraham Lincoln standing behind his grieving widow. His hand was on her shoulder, as if to comfort her.
This site has lots of great “spirit photographs” (and takes a decidedly skeptical view of the whole thing):
https://allthatsinteresting.com/spirit-photography
Magic lantern shows (mid to late 1800’s) provided an early form of special effects that could project painted images into the darkness of theaters–even making them seem to move and dissolve into one another. Today, we (with our daily exposure to movies, phone cameras, and apps) would easily identify these images as fake. But these shows had people running screaming from theaters thinking their dead had come back and weren’t too happy with them. The portable motion picture camera and projector–the Cinematographe–was invented in 1895 and images that moved became available to the astonished public.
For people living in this time of marvels and wonders, it probably seemed as though invisible, imperceptible things were happening all around them, all the time, but they just didn’t know it. Until now. Until ghosts.
Add to all that the fact that many people had lost sons in seemingly endless wars, especially the Brit’s Indian “Rebellion” and the Boer Wars.**** Women and infants often died in childbirth. Thousands of children died each year from smallpox, polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, and mumps. Poor people, even in big, sophisticated cities, didn’t have clean water. This left a lot of ghosts around, and a lot of mourners who wanted desperately to talk to their dearly departed. People were clinging to the ones they’d lost to death so much that many displayed memorial photographs of the dead bodies of loved ones in lifelike poses in their parlors as a remembrance.
People wanted contact, and ghosts gave it to them.
Folklore had a long history of explaining the eery and the unknown as connections with the spirit realm. Many times, this was a spirit that needed to fix something or take vengeance on whoever had harmed him/her. 19th century fiction writers built on that theme and the ghost encounters that everyone seemed to be experiencing. So, we got some really wonderful ghost stories out of the whole questioning and investigation of other worldly encounters. They helped us sort out “what it all means”–to be human, to live in a body, to deal with loss. The Victorian ghost became a celebrity in many works of fiction and that’s mostly what we think about today when we think of ghosts.
Notes
*The title here is a line from the series of 1984 Ghostbuster movie, which also treated ghosts as thinking entities that needed to be dealt with. Of course, the grammar is very informal. It’s used to emphasize the main points: We are NOT afraid of ANY ghosts. The slang sounds better, doesn’t it? (Also, the 1980’s Ghostbuster movies were the best. Don’t waste your time on the remakes that don’t use the original actors and characters.)
**ubiquitous — everywhere, omnipresent
***Here’s a quick history photography during this era if you’re interested: https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2020/05/14/19th-century-photographic-processes-and-formats/
***Here’s a list of British conflicts during this time: https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/victorian-wars-when-what-crimean-indian-boer/