The Rest Is History - 66. Ghosts

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Settle down by the fire and prepare to be haunted. Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts, joins Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook to wonder whether ghost stories evolve to reflect the age in which the apparition appears. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In the first century BC, the philosopher Athenodorus was looking for a house to rent in Athens. He found one at a remarkably good rate, given how large it was, and he soon realised why. On the very first night he was working late, when a ghost appeared with a long beard and bristling hair, clanking its iron fetters. The ghost led him outside and indicated a spot in the courtyard. And the next day, when Athenodorus had the spot dug up, his men found a pile of old bones.

And after the bones had been laid to rest, the house was haunted no more. Tom Holland, that is a great story, isn't it? It's a fabulous... It's from Pliny, isn't it, from Pliny? It is, the younger Pliny. But I remember it from childhood.ny it is younger plinny um but i remember it from um childhood i had a the bumper book of both ghosts and that was the very first story in it and it had a fabulous um black and white illustration of athenodorus and the ghost with the manacles

and the beard creeping up behind him so i i remember it very very vividly um and the ghosts have have always i've always loved stories about ghosts um and in fact over the course of the lockdown one of my activities was to go on ghost hunting walks across london so i did two huge walks you know up to the tower across london back down again and i went right right the way up to um highemetery, which boasts perhaps the most haunted road in Britain. It's got the Highgate vampire. It's got a kind of strange psychic blob that creeps up on people and then leaps away.

All kinds of terrifying things. But at the top of that road, there is Pond Square, which boasts perhaps my favourite ghost of all time pond square is where francis bacon in 1626 attempted to deep freeze a chicken by killing it plucking it gutting it and stuffing it with snow so you remember that story and and bacon gets he gets a chill and ends up dying and so people always remember bacon but they don't remember the chicken. It's the chicken who haunt the area.

Well, nothing was seen or heard of it until the Second World War, when firefighters reported seeing a large bird unable to fly because its feathers had been plucked, running round in circles and pathetically flapping the stumps of its wings. It is still occasionally seen dropping outlapping the stumps of its wings. It is still occasionally seen dropping out of the sky with a squawk. It is always shivering. Wow. So I don't think we're qualified to pronounce on the supernatural. I mean, we're barely qualified to pronounce on the natural.

That's true. So I think, do you have a guest for us today? I do. And I have the best guest we could possibly have. It's Roger Clark, who wrote what I think is the best book on ghosts that I've ever read. And it's a book not just about ghosts, but about the history of ghosts. So absolutely perfect. Ghosts, a natural history, 500 years of searching for proof. And I read it this Christmas, because obviously at Christmas, you should read a ghost stories and things. And my wife had bought a kind of chair you get in a gentleman's club.

She bought it on eBay or something. I put it in front of the fire, glass of sherry, Roger's book. One of the great, great reading experiences of my life. And we'd begun the podcast then and I thought we have to get him on and we have to talk ghosts. So Roger, thank you so much. Such a pleasure. And yes, every day at five o'clock, I was sort of rapt to see which peculiar story you would pick out. And yes, I do throw in a few strange ones. Well, there are so many peculiar stories, isn't it? Because essentially you are... Let's actually begin with a question which has been sent in by rob long and he says how much does background matter are british

ghost sightings different say to french how much do the events of the time seem to affect what people report and that essentially is your thesis isn't it that ghost stories evolve to reflect the assumptions and the beliefs and perhaps the tensions and the paranoias of the age in which these ghosts appear yes and i didn't really realize this until i started reading the writing the book and uh i had this sort of childhood obsession with ghosts and i wanted to see see a ghost and uh and then uh as i went to university and so forth i got rather embarrassed by my interest in it and uh pitched pitched the book it got written and i i noticed there was a definite shift in what people wanted from ghosts and um not so much do i found the question do

ghosts exist not really very interesting i wanted to find out what people wanted from ghosts. And I realized that you could see definite shifts in what the ghost experiences over about every hundred years. And the other thing from my childhood is that in the 70s is that, you know, we were the poor man of Europe. We were terrible at everything, but we were terrible everything but we were really good at ghosts and and and we were the most we were the most haunted country in the world and it was just uh this was a marvelous and an involving thought and so i i wanted to go back and look at that and why were there so many ghost books and famous ghost hunters in the 70s i actually wrote them as a school boy and um got sort of involved in discussing ghosts and there were different kinds of ghosts clearly

i worked out there about 10 or so varying kinds of ghosts um and it all sort of went went from there and i i noticed that there was some specific issues about uh britain and the UK, and it involved the Civil War and, to quite a big extent, the suppression of Catholicism, the comeback of Catholicism in the 1780s and so forth, and this fear of resurgent Catholicism. But also the sprinklings of German belief, which came in with the various members of the royal family, obviously all the Celtic stuff. And it's a very specific mix of belief.

And also we seem to have this specific idea that ghost stories are sort of comforting, which is quite, you know, relatively unusual in in well in world culture you know why would we why would we want to have this alarming subject so as a comforting midwinter thing in particular and if you were to boil it down um roger do you think that so i found your book fascinating and particularly the stuff about religion and ghosts, sort of linking the two. I mean, you have a line in your book about belief in ghosts as a sort of decayed form of religion in a secular age or something. But you talk a lot about the influence of the Reformation, so breaking with the Catholic Church and then the Civil War and so on. And do you think it's because of the Reformation that England specifically has this tradition of ghost stories and so many kind of monks

and nuns and sort of haunted Jesuitical figures and stuff like that. Yes, the walled-up monks and so forth, they're all essentially regency, what I call off-the-shelf ghosts. And it's the same with headless carriages and headless horsemen and that sort of thing. And again, with acephaly, the headlessness, you can go almost straight back to, you know, the saints, the, what do you call them, cephalophores, the headless saints,

which is a long tradition, as you both know. And I was very interested as to, you know, Anne Boleyn being quite a, I mean, she's seen in popular culture as a sort of, you know, a bit of a sort of dizzy creature. But as far as I understand, she was quite a fearsome Protestant believer. And the idea that she would come back on an anniversary,

a bit like a saint, she was almost like a saint's day, these anniversaries, with her head. And where was she coming from? Was she coming from purgatory? Yeah. And if she was, that means that her whole belief system, if she was coming from purgatory, was incorrect. There was a while where to believe in ghosts

marked you out as a Catholic, which was a dangerous business. Well, so Roger, I mean, obviously there's an echo there of perhaps the most famous ghost in English literature, which is the ghost of Hamlet's father. Yes. And that sense that Hamlet, who studies at Wittenberg and therefore presumably is a good Protestant, has as a father a ghost who's in purgatory

and who therefore presumably is Catholic. I mean, that's a kind of buried element of the play, isn't it? Yes, and there's a lot of theories that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic and so forth, which I find quite slightly convincing, in the same way that maybe M.R. James had high church leadings that he wanted to conceal from his father, which is why he didn't become a clergyman. And you notice that a lot of M.R. James' ghosts are to do

with pre-Protestant guardian spirits and so forth. Yes, so M.R. James, for those listeners who don't know, is the sort of the supreme exponent of the classic ghost story, isn't he? He's writing at the sort of – when's he writing? Early 20th century, I suppose. But his stories are always backward-looking, aren't they? And they have that gothic element, which I get the impression from your book that you think the gothic element in i get i get the impression from your book that you think you you think the

gothic element in ghost stories well well yeah i'm not going to put words in your mouth and say that you think it's fraudulent but that you think you talk about things being folkloric yes um which you generally mean i don't get the sense that you mean that approvingly and you think that folkloric elements of a ghost story mean that it's as it were true but you think that that's kind of people have brought a lot of baggage to the story if you like oh yes no i don't mean folkloric elements of a ghost story mean that it's, as it were, true. But you think that that's kind of people have brought a lot of baggage to the story, if you like. Oh, yes. No, I don't mean folkloric disparagingly at all.

I'm in some sense a folklorist. You know, I think you tend to be with ghost belief a bit more on the folkloric side or the science side. And the science side has sort of reached a kind of cul-de-sac for one reason or the other. It was very active for over 100 years. And I think we're now much more seeing ghost stories and things as constructions of all sorts of complicated social mores.

And I also talk in the book about the British class aspect of ghosts. But going back to the Catholicism thing, I mean, you've got the birth of the castle of Otranto and Walpole is round about the whole time all of the Catholic Emancipation Act and so forth were trundling through. There were several of them. And you can see this and this, you know, the Gordon riots and this genuine alarm that Catholicism was like crawling back out of the ground, you know,

and would bring ghosts with it. And, you know, that's why you get these sort of spectral and satanic monks in Gothic literature. M.R. James, who's sort of my hero, very much disapproved of a lot of Gothic literature for one reason or the other. He thought it a bit distasteful and he what's interesting about mr james is he's routinely held up as our greatest ghost story writer of fictional ghost stories and yet what he does is not actually traditional ghosts at all they're either these sort of dead alive medieval type walking dead who's a definite thing uh that and the animated corpse or or as i say these kind of guardian spirits as a result of sort of versions of black magic and occult practice

and so they're really not at all you know lonely spirits and things like that they're quite they're quite fearsome and and inhuman and unpleasant so before we start to look at in more detail at the way that the british understanding of ghosts has evolved from the reformation and onwards can we just broaden the camera back out again because you you mentioned medieval ghosts yeah that that they are kind of subtly different to the ones that we now know and then of course before that there's the example of the classical ghost and from you know the ones that we now know. And then, of course, before that, there's the example of the classical ghost. And from the story that Dominic narrated at the head of the show, you've got clanking chains. You've got people who need to be buried. So there are clearly elements there that do feed into the kind of the mainstream. And also the Greeks and the Romans thought that ghosts

vanished on cock crows and that they appear at midnight and at midday and kind of various elements like that so how different are say classical ghosts to the ghosts that we recognize today and to what extent do those classical stories have an influence on the ghost stories we know it if you go all the way back to this you know Sumerian dead and things that what ghosts were, were again sort of half demonic. They weren't really quite people and they weren't really quite ghosts as we understand it. And this idea of the hungry dead or the dead being unhappy about the way that they'd been buried,

which is what you get in the Greek story you mentioned earlier, is like an abrogation of burial procedure. It's very problematic for all of the archaic ghosts but as soon as ghosts are seen as sort of people a bit like you and i all that which so that didn't really happen until totally until the 1950s where ghosts were just seen as people uh they you know you get this gradual procession of this archaic idea of the troubled dead, the unburied dead, who wanted proper observance made, proper burial made. who were really just being prepared for the afterlife and were coming back to warn people to live better lives and to be, well, just to lead better lives, really. And they were often warnings of their imminent death and they need to get their act together, that sort of thing.

Because my sense of, say, Roman ghosts, and for starters, they don't really have a word equivalent to our ghost. I mean, they have kind of various different qualities of shade that might appear. Some are ancestral ghosts, some are more malign. And then the kind of very weird one. So the weird one I remember is Brutus, the murderer of Caesar on the eve of the Battle of Philippi, which he will end up committing suicide, kind of seeing himself and saying, you know, I am your, what is it? I kind of, I am your fate.

I have come to warn you. And it's kind of a ghost, but it's not quite, is it? And I suppose you have the sense that we're dealing with with things that kind of look familiar but but are strange in ways that we can't quite put our fingers on well that story is quite interesting because one of the great revelations of the society of cycle research which was this incredibly august body created in 1882 full of prime ministers and poet laureates and uh you know extremely eminent scientists, some of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes.

And one of the first things they discovered is called phantasms of the living. The most common ghosts were ghosts of living people, and that people were still alive. And this really threw the cat among the pigeons, the idea of what ghost could possibly be um surely if they were still alive then they weren't ghosts in the classical sense there was some kind of other emanation uh possibly to do with the science as let as yet unknown which is where this whole science trajectory kind of began uh and sort of ended relatively recently

i guess looking for for scientific you looking for ghosts that can be explained scientifically, I mean, that is as much a reflection of our age as a Catholic ghost in Protestant England or a Sumerian ghost in Sumeria. Also, I mean, battle ghosts and battlefields are famous sites for ghosts. It's like the Battle of Edge Hill and so forth. It was seen in the night sky, you know, afterwards and so forth.

And this idea of prophecy and, you know, kingship and great men is all part of that romantic mix of power, I think. I've got a question from one of the listeners asked, just picking up on Tom's point about classical ghosts. I think we have a good time to do this. We'll also give Tom a chance to talk about his favourite subjects. So it's about the New Testament where Jesus says, he comes back and he says, I'm not a ghost. Is there any tradition of people thinking that Jesus was actually a ghost?

That actually, you know, the fellow who pitches up after the crucifixion is actually not the reborn Christ, but is just a bog-standard, just an ordinary kind of Jewish ghost. Yes, I think Tom will know more about this than I do. But yes, I mean, I suppose you get into the whole matter of the Trinity and the Holy Ghost and how that fits in, which has always been the result of some mockery from other religions, to what extent, what is the Holy Ghost and so forth. But yes, as far as the Jesus resurrection,

I don't really know what to say about that. Is he a ghost? But he's all things at once. Well, I guess, I mean, I guess the insistence that, you know, Thomas feel his wounds. Exactly. The physicality of the body. Yes. Is set against a background of a world in which it is pretty much

taken for granted that the dead can rise up. And you just have this, you know in in in the classical world you just have this incredible array of specters every conceivable kind and so it's really really important i think for the for the writers of the gospel to insist that he you know the risen christ is not one of these various specters yes and I mean, what's interesting is there's clearly the mortal damage there, and yet he is somehow sustained. And maybe this is the basis for

this great medieval tradition which M. R. James loved of the walking dead, the ambulatory people who were sort of... But you're right, I mean, Jesus was obviously a special case, so you can't really extrapolate on general ghost belief from Jesus. I think that's a perfect note, perhaps, on which to take a quick break. Jesus was indeed a special case, I guess, if we're talking ghost lore. And maybe when we come back, we could look at some of the greatest ghost stories, ghost stories that anyone with even the vaguest familiarity with the subject will know, Bawley Rectory and so on.

Because your retelling of those classic stories is really quite something. So, guys, don't go away. It's worth hanging around for. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about ghosts with Roger Clarke and having sort of faffed around with some Roman ghosts and with Jesus in the first half, how can I get stuck into some of the great classic ghost stories of sort of English,

of the English folkloric kind of ghost tradition? So, Roger, why don't we start with one of the stories that you kick off with, really, in your book. It's the house that was haunted to death, isn't it? What's it called? Hinton? Hinton Ampner. Hinton Ampner. I think it's a National Trust house now, isn't it? It is indeed.

It's got a relatively modern house there. It's burnt down several times. It's where the River Itchen arrives. Yes. I got taken there by Fergal Sharkey to walk it. Very creepy it was too. Yes. He's amazing.

I follow him on Twitter. Yes, it was really knocked down. It was considered to be so haunted it was unliveable in. And it was knocked down. It was considered to be so haunted that it was unliveable, and it was knocked down. I mean, but one of the interesting cases, one of the interesting aspects of Hinton is that there was a huge amount of written down family documents about it by people who were really not fools. And it has, for me, one of the best witnesses of any ghost case there,

which is Lord St. Vincent, who later became Lord St. Vincent, who was the famous admiral. Yes. And basically, you know, HMS Victory was his ship and so forth. He was the famous man who put down the Spithead Mutiny and so forth. He was absolutely the essence of no-nonsense, you know, naval authority. And he was just...

And to the end of his days, apparently, he flew into a rage whenever the ghost was mentioned because he experienced it firsthand and could not explain it. So give us the story. Give us some of the story for those listeners who don't know it. So in the sort of 1760s, this woman called Mary Ricketts rented a house with her children in Hampshire and went there.

And her husband was sort of away on business in the West Indies, so she was very much on her own. She took her own servants down there. It was a pretty old, decayed house. And pretty soon, nuisance started, which was lots of banging doors, and it seemed like people were coming in and out of the house and nobody could work out what was going on, and the London servants all left, and there were problems keeping servants,

and then they put up a reward notice because they thought, you know, they're offering quite a lot of money, like a year's labourer's wage, rural labouring wage, for information on who was breaking into the house. And it just sort of cascaded on and on and on. And these apparitions of a man were seen around the house and then the sound of a woman rushing through. And what we have is a first-hand, almost diary account from Mary Ricketts, which is lodged in the British Library.

And I've sat there reading this day by day, often day by day, account of trying to deal with what was going on. It's pretty much on her own and being terrified that her children will eventually see the ghost. So it's the opposite of a modern ghost story, where it's the children who see the ghosts and the adults don't here the adult is trying to shield that you know the children from the ghost and she a bit about

mary ricketts you know she was extremely well educated uh woman with a powerful intellect who was very highly thought of by a lot of members of the clergy who kind of came to her aid and eventually they had to leave the house they couldn't they couldn't live in it and they went back after i don't know where they were all these awful experiences and midday ghost goes in the middle of the day and the door being bangs and i mean you read about it and you see her handwriting deteriorate it's really quite striking and she eventually fled to the bishop's palace in in winchester where she was given sanctuary by some of her clerical friends and that's how i think the story got eventually relayed to bishop Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who then told it to Henry James, who turned it into, in my view,

it's the source story for Turn of the Screw. And I just actually found out something recently, that M.R. James, as an undergraduate, actually went to stay with Bishop Benson in the sort of 1880s and spent Christmas with the same Bishop Benson, who was then bishop before he became Archbishop at Canterbury. And I have this sort of lovely idea that maybe M.R. James was told this story

and maybe he got first dibs on this story and turned it down. It's amazing that two people called James. Yes, yes. I can't help thinking that elements of his ghost story called Lost Hearts may have sort of some buried elements of Turn of the Screw. But I really wanted to crack the mystery. For me, that was a big mystery. What was this story that Bishop Benson told?

And so what was going on? Because there is the Battle of Cheriton in the English Civil War that is fought basically on the grounds of Hinton Amner. Well, there's this incredible sort of soundscape of this haunting. It's a very, very noisy haunting. And so I think there was noise really of the battle, which I think came up almost to the windows and the door of the house. And it was like it was being replayed, really.

But that wouldn't explain people going, I mean, nothing would explain it. But usually when you have hauntings, there's somebody comes up with some story to explain why there are these presences or what's going on. Is there any story? Yes, there were various stories about that there'd been an affair between a member of the household and a senior servant. Again, turn of the screw sort of thing.

And that they were probably the apparitions seen. But I think this is what you'd call a sort of a. And that it was probably, they were probably the apparitions seen. But I think this is what you'd call a sort of a multiple haunting, that there are a lot of different ghosts doing different things, you know. Because it's unusual that there's, it's not quite a poltergeist story, is it? There's a banging,

but there's not stuff being thrown. Am I right? And the children who are often, as you say, almost always in the classical kind of, well, what we think of as the kind of classic ghost story, the children can see the ghost or they're possessed or they're somehow involved.

But the children are completely oblivious. Is that what's going on? For me, that's such an interesting twist. It's completely opposite of how Hollywood would tell a story. It's actually much more interesting. And just this idea of this embattled woman and i think i think it's a sort of it's sort of like a house invasion story it's like an aversion of a violent house invasion and i think that's it's really the sort of a bit like the tedworth

drama i suppose uh which tom knows all about having grown up near there yes so so that's another poltergeist. And a poltergeist, I was intrigued. Do I remember this right, that Martin Luther is the first person to use the word poltergeist? He is supposed to have made the compound word, yes. So not only did he cause the Reformation, but he came up with poltergeist too.

So that's quite a roster of achievements. When there is a strange connection between Germany and poltergeist too so that's that's quite a roster of achievements and then when there is a strange connection between germany and poltergeist anyway and so you get before world war two people saying well of course nazism fascism is there because it's all about noisy inchoate spiritual forces and of course it would come from germany because it's like poltergeist central. Poltergeists in a way seem that the strangest stories to explain, but also the ones perhaps because of that, that hold a mirror up most intriguingly to kind of religious currents. And you see that in the 17th century gay stories,

poltergeist stories like Tedworth Drummer. Yeah. And you see it in this one um and you also see it in um perhaps the most fascinating of all the stories because it basically we know that it's a fake which is the story of the cock lane ghost yes which features none other than dr johnson so can you just tell us a bit about that because that that's a great story. Yes. So in the 1760s as well, a chap and his wife had nowhere to stay and they stayed with this family in Cock Lane. And then they fell out with the family in Cock Lane and the wife died. And suddenly this news came around that the wife was haunting the house and tapping out a condemnation of her husband,

that her husband had murdered her. Now, the husband was from an educated gentleman class, and the chap whose house he was in, the Parsons family, were just basically working-class people associated with running the nearby church, St Sepulchre's. And he then realised that he could charge money, and it was all centred around the two little girls, and they'd lie in bed and these knocks would come,

and they worked out certain amounts of raps for yes and one for no. In fact, I think it was the other way around, unusually. Later on, it became one for no. And people would come round and suddenly, because there was a rather feverish atmosphere going on, because there was a lot of recently launched newspapers, there was a huge expansion in newsprint and newspaper titles it became a sort of big scandal and people crowds would gather hoping to hear the ghost and then

members of the royal family would turn up like in their coach to hear the ghost and and it became a sort of scandal because they had to work out, are we going to treat this as a murder story and what's going on? And so it was sort of investigated. Dr. Johnson was on one of the teams investigating it. And pretty soon the whole thing fell apart, that the father was a drunk. And it was basically a sort of pub joke that went wrong. But everyone thought that they knew. It was a complete conspiracy theory.

Everyone thought they knew what was really going on. There was a very sort of feverish feeling. There was a lot of drunkenness. This is really a ghost story about the effect of drink. It's about gin, isn't it? They're all drinking gin. They're all absolutely bladdered on gin so and and and in fact i discovered subsequent to writing this book there was also another scandal as a sort of uh in the pub another few doors down just a little

bit earlier which was to do with a kind of gay sex scandal. And so that had also happened on the same street just really months earlier. So everyone was just going crazy. The Lord Mayor got involved. There was eventually a court case. It's a shame that it turned out to be a fake because I do love the idea of Dr. Johnson as a kind of agent moulder.

Yes. Investigating ghosts. There's a great series of novels in that or a sort of TV series, Dr. Johnson Ghost Hunter. Yes, heer. Yes. He's investigating ghosts. There's a great series of novels in that, or a TV series. Dr. Johnson, Ghost Hunter. Yes, he'd be very... Waiting to be written. Well, there's this fantastic scene where he goes down...

I mean, I live in Old Street, not far from Clerkenwell. There's this marvellous scene of him going down the staircase into the crypt of the church there. I think it's St Anne's, I'm not sure. And because the ghost has promised to knock on the lid of her coffin in the crypt and they're all there craning to hear and nothing happens. And interestingly, that area is also almost certainly

where Swedenborg had his vision. It's also, it's just around the corner from St uh saint bartholomew the great the parish church that was founded originally as a priory by rahir supposedly the um the jester of um of henry the first and apparently um some workmen in the 19th century were working on his tomb and one of the workmen stole his sandal and ever since rahir appears on the day that his sandal was stolen, demanding it back. So I throw that out. Tom, I've heard that story in a churchyard in Moscow.

And it's one of those portable stories. So Stalin had... I'm glad you've debunked Tom in front of all our listeners. It's great. Anyway, can we just... Me and Dr. Johnson both. Can we just unpack that story? No, that was... Yeah, so...

The cock lane story. Because there's a couple of elements of that that come up again and again in your book about ghost stories. One of them is the media and the way in which ghost stories are literally mediated. And the other is technology.

Because you talked about the new newspapers. Yeah. And you talk a lot in your book about... You talk about magic lanterns and about photography and x-rays and the cinema and so on, all in different ways kind of seen as ghostly and involving. And it's almost as though ghost stories, well, it's obviously ghost stories take on the elements of the society they are about. But there are particular things that come up again and again. So do you think almost that the cult of the ghost story, if you like, or the phenomenon of the ghost would be impossible without the kind of mass media and all that stuff?

I see it all the time now because I spent 10 years as a film critic. And so I saw a lot of movies. And you see how a movie like The Exorcist will completely bring back the whole idea of possession which was virtually dead in America until that film came out and then the Amityville horror so-called Amityville Ghost which sort of created you know the Enfield Poltergeist and things like that. And it's just, as soon as, you know, the influence of the media and the film and everything is not to be underestimated. It's absolutely universal now.

It's quite extraordinary to follow. And then, so the ghosts that people are seeing or believe they're seeing are, they are reflections. They're almost always reflections of a wider cultural story. Is that fair? Yeah, and going back to technology, in the 1890s, you've got this extraordinary period in Regent Street where you could walk into a place and have an X-ray done,

and people would just, they blew their minds they could walk in front of a machine and see their bones moving, you know. And at the same time, it was more or less when the Lumiere, the first cinema was being made. And there's this like sort of six months where X-rays, who were not immediately used for medical reasons, but used for a while

very horrifically for uh entertainment purposes there was a sort of brief six months where cinema and x-rays were right rival forms of entertainment and you can see in sort of george mellier doing a sort of basically skeleton film as a result of the whole x-ray thing and uh it it said i put it in a footnote in in my book that apparently when they tested uh marie curie who by the way was an investigator a ghost investigator in her spare time um they found evidence that her cancer and so forth was caused by x-rays and not by what the radium and so forth she worked on so yes so that was how dangerous it was but of course also you get photographs don't you and so the appearance of ghosts on photographs yes is and it's again

as a big cultural thing so quite early on photography was used as a way to debunk ghosts actually to do debunkers look how easy it is to fake photographs you know and so there's this famous photograph of York Minster, the facade of York Minster, people moving out, and they would be very ghostly. And indeed, again, when the first moving cinema was seen, it was considered to be, people remarked, there's a very famous review in Russia about how ghosts,

all these people would be dead at one point, but yet they'd still be moving around. And the whole idea of radio was so fantastically spooky, these voices coming out of the ether. And the idea of mental radio as an adjunct was pretty quickly. And I think that lasted right up until the 60s, the idea of mental radio. So just to dip back into the 18th century again, before we come back to the third great story, I tell you one of the things that I found so surprising in your book was about Methodism, because I'd never put Methodism

and ghosts together as sort of interlinked phenomena. But John Wesley, am I right, was a great believer in ghosts and belief in ghosts in the 18th century was a kind of a marker of being a methodist now that is that have i got that right yes uh i think boswell talking of dr johnson was in scotland and he mentioned about ghosts and and his his extremely aristocratic ghost said i I fancy you are a Methodist. So you were talking about the class distinctions of ghosts. Yes, yes. Even in the afterlife, the British class system.

Of course, the Methodists, and there was a Methodist clergyman involved with the Copley and Ghost, and he very much pushed it forward. And it's a sort of hangover of this sort of Joseph Glanville 1680s idea that even though ghosts were not God, they were part of a supernatural process which ended up in God. So it was like a very crude domestic example of supernatural power. And that was quite a powerful idea in the 1680s it sort of fell out of fashion and then the methodist almost revived it and they very very over the years they kind of very quietly dropped it and pretended it never happened but their founder uh who was of course involved in well he wasn't directly involved but his family was involved in a famous poltergeist case again

and he really really thought that ghosts existed and so I think the argument he used well madam you may not have seen a murder but they've still happened whether you've seen it or not

and that was weirdly his equivalence about murder not have seen a murder, but they've still happened whether you've seen it or not. And that was weirdly his equivalence about murder. But after the death of the Wesleys, it was quietly dropped. But there was a very active belief that because of the Witch of Endor and things like that, that supernatural things were part of a divine panoply and showed that there was much more going on than the basic everyday life worries, you know. Well, Roger, obviously we're recording this in the dead of night, but I sense that dawn is approaching and that cocks may soon be crowing

and we will have to melt upon the coming of the sun. But before that happens, and on the subject of clergymen, can we just talk about perhaps the most famous ghost story in England that involves a clergyman, which is the haunting of Borley Rectory, which in the children's book that I mentioned right at the beginning, which had the picture of Athenodorus and the ghost in Athens, had a whole chapter on Boreley Rectory with ghostly writing on the walls and white ladies and the rectory going up in flames. And I thought then that it was an incredibly odd story, but that was before I read your book. And I realized it was odd to the power of 20. Yes. I mean, it's a spectacularly odd story.

So if you just sketch out what was going on in Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in Britain. It was, so it's this house in North Essex, which was a rectory, and it was built. It's early 20th century. Early 20th century, yes. So in sort of late Victorian times, Reverend Bull went there

and he had a big family and his son took over the living. And what was originally a rather nice house became slowly and slowly more decrepit. But by the sort of 1920s, they couldn't basically get anyone to live there. So you had to be a pretty low-rent clergyman to get the living there. And people went there. And the people who went there, and it already had been established there was a nun

that walked through the garden and the Bull sisters, so there were sort of quite a few unmarried sisters who basically felt that the place was very haunted, and then it passed on, the living passed on to another man called lionel foster and he he had this sort of there's no other way of saying it kind of crazy wife and who was and there was possibly bigamy going on and she adopted sons and then children then abandoned them and then fled and uh and it was it's absolute psychodrama and harry price the famous investigator went basically hard it was six months i did almost like a closed uh a very famous

investigation using all you know absolute tip-top technology of the time uh and he was this famous ghost hunter who was a sort of very interesting character who was basically a paper bag salesman who wanted to be accepted by all the knobs at the SPR. And they all looked down on him. And so he went from being a sort of professional skeptic to a professional believer because he realized that he could do better. He was just going to make money. There's more money in the belief, isn't there, than the skepticism? Yeah, so he famously said people prefer the bunk to the debunk. Wow. And so, yeah, and so he investigated it for a while,

and there's a huge amount of interesting stuff. Again, very controversial. He appeared to study, he appeared to find all sorts of inexplicable events happening sort of spontaneous fires and things like that and then eventually sort of come the end of the 30s uh the church of england sort of sold it off really and it was um it was bought by a black shirt and because um who did you see that's the bit i didn't get in my children's he used to do uh black shirt village fates in the garden and then it sort of caught fire and there's a wonderful uh wood print of it in again one of my children books of the rectum fire and you can see all the

the ghostly figures in the flames it's almost certain that he set it on fire as a kind of insurance thing but um and then the ruins were haunted too and there was a famous photograph of a floating brick and i love that that the original photograph shows a floating brick but that was actually just a cropped version of another photograph in which you can see a builder throwing bricks in the corner. Dominic, you and your relentless scepticism. Yes, yes. It cost a lot of money to reproduce that picture, yes,

from the Underwood Estate. So, yes, but again, it's sort of one of these sort of – and to this day, you just get dozens of paranormal tourists just going there, camping out, sort of to the great bother often of the locals who don't really necessarily like it. And there was a dramatisation on TV about it. So it's sort of of sometimes in ghost stories, the people are much more interesting than the ghosts.

And this is one of those occasions. And Roger, I know in your book and in other interviews, you've sort of said you don't really like the, you don't find it interesting, the conversation about, you know, are ghosts real? Do you believe in ghosts and stuff? But are there particular stories in the sort of english ghost tradition that you are drawn back to and you think there's really something very spooky yeah they're for me the hinton one

because that is just so relentless and over such a long time and such good quality witnesses and there's always been a problem with witnesses, also a class issue with witnesses. So until really the 1920s, the Society for Cycle Research wouldn't take reports from servants. They just would not run them, you know, because they thought they were probably up to no good anyway. So there's this huge issue.

And there are quite a lot of instances where a lot of hauntings were actually problematic. Servants either getting in boyfriends and girlfriends or, you know, or stealing or, you know, or just taking out resentments on their mistress and master. But yeah, for me, the Hinton one still, it does give me the chills, definitely. But I think a lot of the best ghost things are probably not stories.

They're just little incidents. And of course, we're in a culture that likes a beginning, middle and an end. But actually, most ghost accounts you read are not a story and they never find out who the ghost is or anything like that. Do you think there's anything of 21st century ghosts emerging? And if so, is there anything distinctive about them, do you think? Yes, definitely. Well, you're now getting ghost stories about Zoom calls.

Yeah. So ghost in the machine. Ghost in the machine. Yes, definitely. Well, you're now getting ghost stories about Zoom calls. Yeah. So – Yeah, ghost in the machine. Ghost in the machine. And people getting text messages from dead people, people being buried with their phones and carrying on sending text messages. Yeah, that's a good one. My favourite one is haunted autocorrect.

How does that work? Instead of doing the obvious word word it would say things like dead buried in cellar that sort of wow i found that quite disturbing as somebody works spends every day staring at word document well there's been a film recently too about and i think it's a lockdown ghost film and it's just about four people in a zoom call and it's a ghost story about what happens to those people on the zoom call and it's. I haven't seen it yet myself, but it's been very well received. And a lot of those Japanese horror, like Ring and everything like that, is all about surveillance cameras, that sort of thing. We've very much gone back to technology.

And one other question that occurs to me, you talk a lot in the book about national specificity. So there's a fantastic line you have, which I was dying to quote from the antiquarian Francis Grose, 18th century antiquarian. He says, dragging chains is not the fashion of English ghosts. Chains and black vestments being chiefly the accoutrements of foreign specters seen in arbitrary governments. Dead or alive, English spirits are free. Free, yes. I found that so cheering. And presumably post-Brexit,

do you think English spirits will acquire more sort of national specificity? Haven't they just dug up a Roman skeleton with manacles? Yeah, they did. Yes, in a ditch. And I saw that there was speculation from some archaeologists or historians that that may have been a way of staying them, keeping them dead. I think that's the most popular theory. Yeah.

Because the theory was initially that it's a slave and it may well have been a slave. Yeah. The fact that he's been chucked with the manacles on, which are quite expensive, suggests that there is some attempt to stop him from roaming. Well, you sort of, you know, in Venice, and there's a famous burial line in Venice, which was partly excavated, and they would find people with stones in their mouths to stop them being vampires and weights being put on the dead. And it's literally putting physical impediments on the dead.

But yes, I mean, of course, but Dickens, of course, used clanking chains for yeah uh for you know christmas carol and made it very good now producers just sent me a text message that says um european ghosts are covered in red tape not chains that tells you where our producer's coming from anyway um tom the coat the cock has crowed has? The cock has just crowed, I think. Did you just organise that on your computer as a sort of special sound effect? No, it's because, obviously, the cock outside

has woken up. You've done it especially for Roger. He doesn't normally do this on the podcast. The sun is coming, and I think that we need to get away quickly before we melt and dissolve. Oh, there it is again. There you go. Eerie.

Go. You wouldn't believe he's a grown man. Roger. Thank you so much. That's been absolutely fantastic. And anyone who wants to know more, do check out his sensational book. I mean,

I saved it up for Christmas, but I think even in the dead of June, it would, it would send a shiver down your spine. Yeah, I read it this weekend on a blazing sunny day. Were you frightened? I don't scare easily, Tom, but I was absolutely fascinated. I was really, I think it's such an interesting subject.

And the weird thing is, whether you believe in ghosts or not, it's completely immaterial, isn't it? Because ghosts are such a great window. They're literally immaterial. Very good, good yeah i'm glad you spotted that and on that great window into the past and on that note thanks ever so much uh we will be back next week thank you to roger thank you to listening uh we will see you soon bye bye bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening