Ghosts: A Natural History

Close to the end of Roger Clarke’s “Ghosts: A Natural History,” the author mentions “silent phone calls from people who have been buried with their phone in their coffin.” Who are these people? He doesn’t say, but he claims there’s a whole genre of “apparently true” mobile phone ghost stories, including “texts from the dead.” There are even haunted spell-checks. When the name “Prudentia” was highlighted on a document during a 1998 investigation in Britain, the alternative spellings that reportedly came up were “dead,” “buried” and “cellar.” We’re not told if investigators dug up the cellar, and if they did, whether they found Prudentia.

There is much else here that touches the contemporary world, including an intriguing connection between quantum physics and ghosts, by way of Einstein’s difficulty with “spooky action at a distance” (spukhafte Fernwirkung) and John Stewart Bell’s “Interconnectedness Theorem.” There are references to ghost-belief in the ancient world, and a few to supernatural events in America, such as Abraham Lincoln’s seeing a double image of himself in the mirror, which he later took to be a premonition of his assassination.

But Clarke, a film critic, contends that England is the most haunted country in the world, writing that “belief in the paranormal has become a form of decayed religion in secular times: Ghosts are the ghosts of religion itself.” Haunted churches and parsonages figure large, Borley Rectory in Essex being described as “a vortex of unnerving pathologies.” Crumbling manor houses and stately homes are seemingly riddled with pathologies of their own. One in particular, whose haunting during the 1760s Clarke recounts at length, was Hinton Ampner. The story was apparently told to Henry James by the archbishop of Canterbury, and is thought to have inspired “The Turn of the Screw.”

Poltergeists and apparitions were the dominant horrors at Hinton Ampner. A stranger in a “drab-colored suit” is seen wandering the corridors, and a tall woman in dark silk enters a kitchen where four people are sitting at the table. She then vanishes in plain sight. There’s “walking, talking, knocking, opening, slamming of doors,” and one night a shriek “like someone being dragged to hell.” Staff members begin to leave. The mistress of the house, the redoubtable Mary Ricketts, confesses herself “harassed and perplexed.” The only explanation on offer concerns an unsavory character named Isaac Mackrell who years earlier had been the steward there. Mackrell may have been involved in the murder of a bastard child in the house, its tiny corpse buried under the floorboards. Henry James’s ghost, Peter Quint, has much in common with this Isaac Mackrell, and Miss Jessel with the lady in dark silk.