It wasn’t until 1828 that what is generally considered the first modern ghost story appeared: Sir Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber,” included in this volume. Mary Shelley cited a volume of such stories as the inspiration for her to “think of a story,” resulting in the creation of her immortal classic Frankenstein. These tales, which, like The Castle of Otranto, typically involved aristocratic families enduring melodramatic plot twists in isolated, haunted castles, were translated into French and English. Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun produced not one, but a remarkable five volumes of their ghost story anthology Gespensterbuch between 18. While the Brothers Grimm were collecting orally-transmitted folktales, eventually published in 1812’s Kinder und Hausmärchen, other German anthologists found success in updating these old stories for adults. Like “Sweet William’s Ghost” (sometimes known under the alternate title “Clerk Saunders”), presented below, these ballads and their numerous regional variants still retain a surprising amount of pathos, eeriness, and even a touch of gruesomeness.Īs the Enlightenment brought a new belief in reason to Europe, formerly popular superstitions were reconfigured as fairy tales, intended as simple morality tales mainly for children. Ballads were the preferred way of telling stories (at least in the British Isles) up until the nineteenth century, and many of them were ghost stories. Ghosts were a key ingredient in the great Gothics, even when-as in the works of Ann Radcliffe, the undisputed queen of the Gothics-their manifestations were eventually revealed to be the work of deceitful mortals.īut perhaps the real precursor of the modern short ghost story was the ballad. Published in 1764, Walpole’s work also inaugurated the Gothic novel, a genre that waxed and waned over the next fifty years. The first major work of ghostly literature is usually considered to be Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Prior to that time, ghosts had either been confined to dramatic presentation (going all the way back to the haunted house comedy Mostellaria, penned by the Roman playwright Plautus several centuries before the birth of Christ) or tales that were presented as true, including mythological epics like Gilgamesh and the Iliad. Both Spiritualism and the acknowledged, fictitious ghost story evolved out of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It’s no coincidence that the ghost story experienced a rebirth of popularity at about the same time.
![ghost story ghost story](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440944007l/26193147._SY475_.jpg)
The Spiritualist movement had no less a figure as its international spokesperson than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wife Jean was also a medium.
![ghost story ghost story](https://happyeiga.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ghost-story.jpg)
By the time the Foxes were debunked, they’d helped to inspire a new religion, Spiritualism, which was popular in both America and Great Britain, that held as its central tenet that the spirits of the dead continued to exist on another plane and could be contacted by human mediums. The young ladies held public séances, underwent “tests,” and inspired copycat mediums around the world. The Fox sisters (along with a third sister, Leah, who acted as their manager) soon parlayed their rapping skills into celebrity. The communications took the form of rapping noises in answer to questions asked aloud. Before long, daughters Kate and Margaret claimed to be communicating with the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered in the house. Although the house had an odd reputation (the previous tenant had vacated because of mysterious sounds), it wasn’t until March of the following year that the family’s troubles began. Fox moved his family to a house in Hydesville, New York.