A.N. Donaldson's Blog
October 29, 2013
Times are tough - read ghost stories!
"We have nothing to fear but Fear itself”. So said Franklin Roosevelt in the depths of the last global depression. The trouble is that Fear is very frightening. It is our most powerful emotion. And, economically or personally, it has a nasty habit of being self-fulfilling.
Try as we might to suppress it, Fear finds weird ways to manifest itself. That is one reason why people encounter the supernatural. It is no surprise that ghost sightings are more common during recessions. People see more ghosts when the economy is zombified and our own ‘animal spirits’ are depressed. Supernatural experiences also reflect political neurosis. The UFOs and Body Snatchers of 50s America were part reflex against the collective subconscious fear of Communism ‘taking us over’.
The repressed and anxious English are very prone to seeing ghosts, even when times are good. A MORI poll in 2003 found that 19% of us claim to have seen a ghost, with twice that number believing they exist. This prevalence of a belief in ghosts is no doubt why the English love ghost stories. It’s estimated that 98% of ghost stories are written in English, and 70% of them by English writers.
But you don’t have to believe in ghosts to find ghost stories interesting and cathartic. Quite the reverse. The fact is that horror stories are a safe outlet for our repressed (economic, political, sexual, social, and existential) anxieties. And we repressed English may have more of those than other nations.
Ghosts project personal and national psychology – that’s why they change as our culture and anxieties change. Medieval ghosts in purgatorial chains give way to nineteenth century spectres in winding sheets. Victorian readers, dealing with the implications of Darwinism and a loss of belief in religion and of life after death, turned in droves to clever shockers by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle to help them make sense of such changes.
And, of course, English ghosts are notoriously linked to property, perhaps because the proprietorial English think of their homes are their castles, even after they die…; which makes us peculiarly uneasy about having to share them with all the people who lived there before us, particularly if they are the sort of entity that might be bad for house prices.
In the twentieth century - certainly since Freud and really since Henry James’s ‘Turn of the Screw’- the uncanny has been linked with repressed sexual unease. This was a powerful insight and goes a long way to explaining the effectiveness of the great ghost stories of M R James, who was one of the most repressed men in the history of English literature. But it is also, I believe, an argument that has played itself out. We are simply not now anything like so sexually repressed as we once were. And while Vampires might provide safe ravishment fantasies for teenage girls, the rest of us have things as well as sex to worry about.
Social & professional settings constantly produce in us emotions we should recognise as types of fear. They do so for good reasons. These personal fears - sexual, social and economic - are particularly dangerous and self-fulfilling as they can lead to depression, paranoia, social angst. For most of our history, mistakes in our social or livelihood contexts have been potentially damaging to our reproductive success and indeed our very survival. No wonder our nightmares – often involving non-rational or supernatural elements or metaphors - are at their worst when we are anxious about our social or professional lives. In the same way, these are the times that we are most vulnerable to an apparent eruption of the numinous.
But fears of the supernatural are surely also manifestations of a deeper existential fear. It may be that we worry about the wrong things because what we really should be worried about - the potential meaningless hostility of life and the inevitability of death – is too terrible consciously to confront. Ghosts are an obvious metaphor for such fears.
Ghosts may not exist objectively. But that in itself is troubling. It implies that we don’t have souls, won’t have an afterlife, and that there won’t ever be a reckoning for any of the unresolved things that happen to us in this life, or a reunion with our loved ones.
Regardless of whether you believe in ghosts, a good ghost story or horror film will produce a physical reaction; of disgust or fear, of ‘fight or flight’. This is surely part of the reason for their popularity. Horror fiction is in a sense sublime and cathartic. It safely satisfies our prurient desire to observe, without directly experiencing, violence and death. It is a safe test-run of these powerful emotions and a satisfying exorcism of our deepest fears. It is an escape valve for our real subconscious fears and desires. A version of religious guilt in a Godless World. The victims of the supernatural in a story are a sort of vicarious victim or scapegoat for us. They alleviate the unease of a mind that secretly knows that we’re all just a heartbeat away from something terrible, waiting for Fate to tap us on the shoulder.
Unpleasant, harmful, and potentially self-fulfilling fears, whether economic, political or personal, will out. We all feel the need to purge them. This no doubt explains the enduring popularity of horror films. People like to scare themselves safely, in a context where they can then switch off the TV and switch on all the lights. This is why the ghost story, despite a certain sniffiness from the literary establishment, will not go away.
It performs a vital role – perhaps as important as that of Comedy and Tragedy. But Horror is distinct from Tragedy as it deliberately rejects the cathartic resolutions that are so notably absent in real life. Horror confronts the lack of satisfactory resolution in a scientific universe head on. In this respect, supernatural fiction is a crucial part of modern humanity’s artistic response to our world.
So now, more than ever, it’s time for us anxious English to resurrect the ghost story from the clutches of critical snobs. At times like this we need our ghosts.
Try as we might to suppress it, Fear finds weird ways to manifest itself. That is one reason why people encounter the supernatural. It is no surprise that ghost sightings are more common during recessions. People see more ghosts when the economy is zombified and our own ‘animal spirits’ are depressed. Supernatural experiences also reflect political neurosis. The UFOs and Body Snatchers of 50s America were part reflex against the collective subconscious fear of Communism ‘taking us over’.
The repressed and anxious English are very prone to seeing ghosts, even when times are good. A MORI poll in 2003 found that 19% of us claim to have seen a ghost, with twice that number believing they exist. This prevalence of a belief in ghosts is no doubt why the English love ghost stories. It’s estimated that 98% of ghost stories are written in English, and 70% of them by English writers.
But you don’t have to believe in ghosts to find ghost stories interesting and cathartic. Quite the reverse. The fact is that horror stories are a safe outlet for our repressed (economic, political, sexual, social, and existential) anxieties. And we repressed English may have more of those than other nations.
Ghosts project personal and national psychology – that’s why they change as our culture and anxieties change. Medieval ghosts in purgatorial chains give way to nineteenth century spectres in winding sheets. Victorian readers, dealing with the implications of Darwinism and a loss of belief in religion and of life after death, turned in droves to clever shockers by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle to help them make sense of such changes.
And, of course, English ghosts are notoriously linked to property, perhaps because the proprietorial English think of their homes are their castles, even after they die…; which makes us peculiarly uneasy about having to share them with all the people who lived there before us, particularly if they are the sort of entity that might be bad for house prices.
In the twentieth century - certainly since Freud and really since Henry James’s ‘Turn of the Screw’- the uncanny has been linked with repressed sexual unease. This was a powerful insight and goes a long way to explaining the effectiveness of the great ghost stories of M R James, who was one of the most repressed men in the history of English literature. But it is also, I believe, an argument that has played itself out. We are simply not now anything like so sexually repressed as we once were. And while Vampires might provide safe ravishment fantasies for teenage girls, the rest of us have things as well as sex to worry about.
Social & professional settings constantly produce in us emotions we should recognise as types of fear. They do so for good reasons. These personal fears - sexual, social and economic - are particularly dangerous and self-fulfilling as they can lead to depression, paranoia, social angst. For most of our history, mistakes in our social or livelihood contexts have been potentially damaging to our reproductive success and indeed our very survival. No wonder our nightmares – often involving non-rational or supernatural elements or metaphors - are at their worst when we are anxious about our social or professional lives. In the same way, these are the times that we are most vulnerable to an apparent eruption of the numinous.
But fears of the supernatural are surely also manifestations of a deeper existential fear. It may be that we worry about the wrong things because what we really should be worried about - the potential meaningless hostility of life and the inevitability of death – is too terrible consciously to confront. Ghosts are an obvious metaphor for such fears.
Ghosts may not exist objectively. But that in itself is troubling. It implies that we don’t have souls, won’t have an afterlife, and that there won’t ever be a reckoning for any of the unresolved things that happen to us in this life, or a reunion with our loved ones.
Regardless of whether you believe in ghosts, a good ghost story or horror film will produce a physical reaction; of disgust or fear, of ‘fight or flight’. This is surely part of the reason for their popularity. Horror fiction is in a sense sublime and cathartic. It safely satisfies our prurient desire to observe, without directly experiencing, violence and death. It is a safe test-run of these powerful emotions and a satisfying exorcism of our deepest fears. It is an escape valve for our real subconscious fears and desires. A version of religious guilt in a Godless World. The victims of the supernatural in a story are a sort of vicarious victim or scapegoat for us. They alleviate the unease of a mind that secretly knows that we’re all just a heartbeat away from something terrible, waiting for Fate to tap us on the shoulder.
Unpleasant, harmful, and potentially self-fulfilling fears, whether economic, political or personal, will out. We all feel the need to purge them. This no doubt explains the enduring popularity of horror films. People like to scare themselves safely, in a context where they can then switch off the TV and switch on all the lights. This is why the ghost story, despite a certain sniffiness from the literary establishment, will not go away.
It performs a vital role – perhaps as important as that of Comedy and Tragedy. But Horror is distinct from Tragedy as it deliberately rejects the cathartic resolutions that are so notably absent in real life. Horror confronts the lack of satisfactory resolution in a scientific universe head on. In this respect, supernatural fiction is a crucial part of modern humanity’s artistic response to our world.
So now, more than ever, it’s time for us anxious English to resurrect the ghost story from the clutches of critical snobs. At times like this we need our ghosts.
Haunted London Pubs
Writing in the Evening Standard after the War, George Orwell famously described the qualities of the perfect London pub. Today we’d still agree that fresh beer, good food, old furnishings, a roaring fire, and a welcoming attitude to men, women and families, all help create the best atmosphere. But we can’t help thinking there was something missing from his list. For surely no self-respecting public house can claim to be perfect if it isn’t home to at least one ghost.
When almost 40% of English people believe in ghosts, it is hardly surprising that so many strange rumours have attached themselves to the places we go to get squiffy. But it is not just the flow of alcoholic spirits that explains there being so many haunted London locals. The capital has, in its hundreds of historic inns, a cultural heritage richer than anything else like it anywhere else in the World. Many of our pubs have been pouring Londoners the good stuff on the same premises for centuries. And of course in that time they’ve served most of the city’s criminals and murderers as well as their victims. So it is understandable that so many have also had macabre tales associated with them over the years.
As the nights draw in even those of us who don’t believe in the supernatural like ghost stories told about our favourite watering holes. They remind us of how lucky we are to be able choose from so many beautiful old boozers where generations of Londoners before us drowned their sorrows.
If you fancy a swift one somewhere spooky this Halloween, here are some famous haunted London pubs.
The Prospect of Whitby (Wapping): Originally called ‘The Devil’. Haunted by the ghost of ‘Hanging’ Judge Jeffreys, who used to sit here and watch pirates and smugglers he had condemned being hanged at Execution Dock until they were drowned by the rising tide.
The Flask (Highgate): Home to the ghost of a man shot in the bar (the ‘bullet hole’ is still visible), and of the World’s first deliberately frozen chicken, which Sir Francis Bacon killed here and stuffed with snow to prove the effects of refrigeration. The chicken had the last laugh: Bacon caught cold and died a few days later.
The Ten Bells (Spitalfields): Haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper, who here picked up not one but two of his victims.
The Grenadier (Belgravia): Originally the officer’s mess for the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. Haunted by one of his subalterns, who was flogged to death by his fellows after they caught him cheating at cards.
Ye Old Cock Tavern (Fleet Street): The disembodied head of the Oliver Goldsmith appears and laughs at unwary customers. His tomb can be found behind the back door.
The Spaniards Inn (Hampstead): Haunted by several ghosts, including Dick Turpin. Also a favourite of Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula. The pub is mentioned in the book.
The Morpeth Arms (Pimlico): Built over cells which held convicts bound for deportation. Still home to the ghost of one of them, who killed himself rather than go to Australia.
The Rising Sun (Smithfield): Supposedly haunted by the victims of the body-snatchers who used the pub as a base when they provided specimens for nearby St Bart’s Hospital.
The John Snow (Soho): Named after the man who discovered the cause of cholera after investigating the poisoned pump outside. He was presumably too late to save one man, whose ghost is sometimes seen scowling at customers.
The Viaduct Tavern (Holborn Viaduct): Its cellars were once connected with Old Newgate Prison, where prisoners were held before being taken for execution. They are claimed to be home to a poltergeist.
When almost 40% of English people believe in ghosts, it is hardly surprising that so many strange rumours have attached themselves to the places we go to get squiffy. But it is not just the flow of alcoholic spirits that explains there being so many haunted London locals. The capital has, in its hundreds of historic inns, a cultural heritage richer than anything else like it anywhere else in the World. Many of our pubs have been pouring Londoners the good stuff on the same premises for centuries. And of course in that time they’ve served most of the city’s criminals and murderers as well as their victims. So it is understandable that so many have also had macabre tales associated with them over the years.
As the nights draw in even those of us who don’t believe in the supernatural like ghost stories told about our favourite watering holes. They remind us of how lucky we are to be able choose from so many beautiful old boozers where generations of Londoners before us drowned their sorrows.
If you fancy a swift one somewhere spooky this Halloween, here are some famous haunted London pubs.
The Prospect of Whitby (Wapping): Originally called ‘The Devil’. Haunted by the ghost of ‘Hanging’ Judge Jeffreys, who used to sit here and watch pirates and smugglers he had condemned being hanged at Execution Dock until they were drowned by the rising tide.
The Flask (Highgate): Home to the ghost of a man shot in the bar (the ‘bullet hole’ is still visible), and of the World’s first deliberately frozen chicken, which Sir Francis Bacon killed here and stuffed with snow to prove the effects of refrigeration. The chicken had the last laugh: Bacon caught cold and died a few days later.
The Ten Bells (Spitalfields): Haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper, who here picked up not one but two of his victims.
The Grenadier (Belgravia): Originally the officer’s mess for the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. Haunted by one of his subalterns, who was flogged to death by his fellows after they caught him cheating at cards.
Ye Old Cock Tavern (Fleet Street): The disembodied head of the Oliver Goldsmith appears and laughs at unwary customers. His tomb can be found behind the back door.
The Spaniards Inn (Hampstead): Haunted by several ghosts, including Dick Turpin. Also a favourite of Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula. The pub is mentioned in the book.
The Morpeth Arms (Pimlico): Built over cells which held convicts bound for deportation. Still home to the ghost of one of them, who killed himself rather than go to Australia.
The Rising Sun (Smithfield): Supposedly haunted by the victims of the body-snatchers who used the pub as a base when they provided specimens for nearby St Bart’s Hospital.
The John Snow (Soho): Named after the man who discovered the cause of cholera after investigating the poisoned pump outside. He was presumably too late to save one man, whose ghost is sometimes seen scowling at customers.
The Viaduct Tavern (Holborn Viaduct): Its cellars were once connected with Old Newgate Prison, where prisoners were held before being taken for execution. They are claimed to be home to a poltergeist.
