Dead Men's Parties

Peter Ackroyd, The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time, 2010
This is a short and enjoyable collection of diary entries, newspaper clippings, anecdotes and oral stories revolving around ghost sightings in England. The English are, apparently, the people who most see hauntings and Ackroyd goes some way to explain this in his introduction. Still, I wish there was more meat to these bones: many of the anecdotes deserved some commentary or notes, and quite a few didn't really stand out. Some of the sightings are clearly from people with a strong imagination. Others are hard to explain away, especially the ones with more than two witnesses.

Ghost sightings are in decline and this collection made me wonder if our increasily atomised lifestyle has something to do with it. Can you really notice a ghost if you are so caught up with your Nintendo DS or iPod? Another thing that struck me about the very old sightings was that people seemed to be hearing ghosts from the future instead of the past (i.e. the sound of a crowd trampling through a Victorian sitting room reminded me of a group of tourists which would visit that sort of house a few centuries later.) My favourite anecdotes in this collection: a woman who becomes unnerved by a young man who shares her train carriage and the poor bastard who is chased by a figure in black that then proceeds to scratch hay bails.