Alas, Poor Ghost!: Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse

by Gillian Bennett

"Bennett interviewed women in Manchester, England, asking them about ghosts and other supernatural experiences and beliefs. (Her discussion of how her research methods and interview techniques evolved is in itself valuable.) She first published the results of the study in the well-received Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural, which has been used internationally in folklore, women's studies, and other courses. "Alas, Poor Ghost!" thoroughly revises and expands that work. In addition to a fuller presentation and analysis of the original field research, the author has updated the text to incorporate more recent studies and assisted by Kate Bennett, a gerontological psychologist, analyzed new research with a group of women in Leicester, England. This last addition focuses on the role of bereavement and witnessing in contact with the dead.".

Genres: Ghosts, Nonfiction, Folklore, Death, Read For School

232 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

Reviews

[Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kolejna przydatna i ciekawa książka do licencjatu

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This non-fiction book was something of a scholarly read; it is mostly conclusions made from oral interviews with women in two locations in England about “weird happenings”. As such, it is a fun read, and opens up the whole question of things that go bump in the night.

Most of the women interviewed by the author in the early 1980s were in their sixties or seventies, and a smaller selection interviewed by her daughter in the 1990s were widows of the same general ages. When asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” the answer was almost always “No”, but if asked, “Have you ever been aware of the presence of something from the other world?”, the women had stories of something that had happened to them, or to a family member. Mostly, the “something” was a deceased loved one, who had appeared either with reassurance or a message. At the same time, these women all rejected the idea of seances or reading tea leaves, as being unwarranted meddling in the other world. There were also stories of houses that either felt “right” or “wrong”. And there were the occasional stories of malevolent entities. The whole book is fun reading, even the appendixes on how the data was collected and tabulated; Chapter Five includes discussions on The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father and on the well-known stories of The Vanishing Hitchhiker.

I very much enjoyed reading this book; I found that it opens up discussion of what ghosts are (and are not), and how spirits have been viewed throughout history. And even in this modern age, I am not going to dogmatically state that there are no things that go bump in the night.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bennett's book is part of what might be called--in honor of Bill Ellis--the Fortean turn in folklore, along with some others that are still on my shelves. This work really was a response to (or continuation of) David Hufford's groundbreaking "The Terror that Comes in the Night," which took seriously the stories told about "old hags" and even proposed a medical reason for these events. Bennett follows in this tradition by accepting the possibility of ghosts. She is not an advocate, but she is willing to entertain the idea and see where such a starting point takes her.

Such acceptance does some interesting work for her, but the book as a whole never really comes together. A lot of that is because Bennett covers way too much ground in what is really 170ish pages of text. (There are a lot of appendices.) She wants to investigate the discourses in which ghosts are talked about, the way that individuals negotiate these topics, the stages of bereavement, the performance of stories, and write a brief history of the cultural meaning of ghosts since Shakespeare's time. Nothing really ties these together, and the result is a series of uneven essays.

Start with the last first, the cultural history of ghosts. This chapter feels tagged on and is (obviously) not especially deep. The only real reason it is here is to show a historical lineage in which ghosts were taken seriously by the learned.

The fourth chapter is on legend-telling as performance, which is interesting, I guess, and important to folklore scholars (as well as oral historians) but, in my opinion, dead ends as intellectual investigation. Such analyses become so tied up in the local details and the small meaning that it is hard to ever push them to connect with broader strands of culture or history. That's probably why the fifth chapter feels so tagged on--Bennett does not explain how to get from the micro to the macro, and so the studies talk past each other.

The third chapter continues here general project of looking at ghosts as real (if unknown and unexplained) phenomena, rather than reducing them to sociological or psychological causes. But it takes an odd turn with Bennett (and the chapter's co-author Kate Bennett) arguing for a new understanding of bereavement based on the common feeling the living have of still sensing the presence of the dead. The folklore parts were worthwhile, I did not really care about the psychological aspects.

The second chapter is the meat of her argument. Bennett interviewed widowed women who visited her father's podiatry clinic about their experiences with ghosts and visitations, and shows that such experiences are common, but not usually expressed in a language that is easily accessed by scholars. The women did not like to talk about 'ghosts' or 'revenants' but experiences--and even were reluctant to say they were 'strange' (ominous music) experiences. They were just experiences. This goes to the heart of questions about belief in the supernatural, which some studies have shown is declining, but hers shows is not: it depends upon how you ask. People have subtle and complex understandings of the supernatural, and view it not as opposed to modernity and rationality, but look for ways to connect it. Supernatural beliefs not pre-modern or anti-modern, but invented to fit within the modern world.

Bennett touches on this issue in the first chapter, which is really the take home from the book. She had to negotiate the terms of the discussion with her interviewees, and could not just jump in with 'Do you believe in ghosts?' She would get all "no's." But by probing more carefully she uncovered this vast amount of experience which is not explicable by known science.

She argues that these experiences are commonly discussed in terms of two kinds of discourse--belief and disbelief. This is where her approach does some interesting work, for in this way she can see 'skeptical' and 'rational' dismissals of ghosts as their own sets of folkloric belief. These are, she says, competing cultures.

This approach presents a real problem for some of the terminology of folklore, which bennett points out but does not really resolve. One of the key terms to come out of folklore int he 1970s was 'legend,' which was, in Gary Fine's definition, a proposition for belief. That's fine and good when talking about supernatural events that are generally disbelieved. Sure, a ghost story is a proposition for belief--one could believe it or not, debate about it or not.

But if skepticism is itself just another discourse--with access to some truths, but not all of them--then a legend becomes anything anyone says: Electrons are part of an atom. This, too, is a proposition for belief--thus a legend, right?

There's also the question about what to call these small tales of personal experience, especially since they are not traditionally structured, the way many legends are. Memorates is the usual term, but, again, linking memorates to broader culture is difficult.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book by either a believer or a die-hard skeptic, apparently, but by a folklorist, less concerned with whether people's beliefs are true, than the fact of their belief in the first place. As such it's a look at how individual tales of encounters with the deceased tend to appear, what shapes they take, what beliefs about the afterlife and ghosts these tales reveal. Interesting book, compiled from a series of interviews with women predominately over 60. One of the more interesting finds was that the women tended to be reluctant to assign the label ghost to a deceased family member, as, in their eyes, ghosts were malevolent. No, instead these were, as one woman referred to them, 'witnesses.' As a whole the book is a bit dry, but there's some gold contained within for those prepared to mine for it.

[James Rose · Rating 1 out of 5]

The best thing about folklore to me are the stories themselves; it can be interesting to see how the stories relate to the cultures around them. This book, however, was more of a case study of a group of woman and the supernatural experiences they had, but instead of focusing on the stories and their cultural impact, the author spent most of the time describing the contextual information about how the stories were recorded

[Catherine McClelland · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting study of people's belief and experience with ghosts/spirits. It talks about the role of grief in these experiences and also the role of folk belief in ghosts. A short read but very interesting.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting topic, slow read.