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Ghost — Description

Like zoinks Scoob, the spooky season is upon us! And the scariest part of it is that I've committed to the absolutely horrendous idea to kick it off with a summary of the history of ghosts. Why gods? Why do I do this to myself? I didn't even get any Scooby Snacks for this. See, the problem is that pretty much every culture on the planet has a concept of a creature which is compatible with our English word “ghost”. If we break down the definition into its barest bones (ha) as a sort of detached incarnation of a dead person's animate soul with some degree of influence over the mortal realm, you're going to find some reference to that idea no matter where or when you go on Earth. All the way back in ancient Sumeria, you've got the gidim (or “etemmu” in Akkadian), the slightly annoying remnants of slightly annoying ancestors often buried quite literally under your floorboards. It's safe to say that the notion of a ghost is therefore prehistoric, probably as old as Homo sapiens itself, and hell probably even older depending on how speculative you wanna get about hominin evolution.
These sorts of superstitions actually make a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint. For one, we humans, for as much as we like to place ourselves at the top of some great chain of being, are fundamentally a prey animal. In the wilds of Africa, if you hear a bump in the night or see movement in the shadows, it's more advantageous to assume there is some undefined malicious predator than to shrug it off. Sure, it may actually be nothing, but the monkeys who let their guard down the one time out of a hundred that it is actually a lioness don't get their genes passed on. This is why, as I'm writing this in bed at night, I'm constantly casting a side eye towards the ominous dark of my open bathroom door, because monkey brain is still programmed to file “lion in my studio apartment” as a possibility. Of course, humans also have to contend with the trials of sentience and all the crazy shit that comes with that. From an existential standpoint, ghosts can provide a certain comfort to our emotional woes. Grief, I firmly believe, is one of the most difficult emotions to process. Humans are cripplingly social creatures. We literally need one another or else the mental deterioration will kill us. It hurts like hell when a loved one dies. It doesn't compute because we don't have the sort of wires in our brain that can comprehend someone so crucial to your life and heart will never interact with you again. The idea that the lost must still be here somehow somewhere is just easier. Hell, the only reason I believe in an afterlife is not for myself (hell nah I'm ready to just sleep already man) but because my dogs need to be somewhere being looked after for all they've done for me. The idea that they're out there alone in the dark not understanding what's going on is so overpoweringly sickening that dwelling on it too long has made me need to put this blurb down and go throw up.
So okay, in order to keep this blurb somewhat comprehensive and for the sake of my own sanity, I'm gonna narrow it down to ghosts from an English-speaking context, you know the ones that can walk through walls, disappear and fly. I couldn't confirm what the oldest attestation of the word “ghost” used in literature is, but the oldest source cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is Bede’s Death Song, a short poem allegedly composed by the eponymous monk on his deathbed in 735 CE. Here the old English form “gast” is recorded, though in the context of the poem it's more so used to broadly mean a person’s soul or spiritual essence. In fact, this is the word Old English scribes saw most appropriate to translate the Latin “spiritus”, hence why “Spiritus Sanctus” is often rendered in modern English as “Holy Ghost”. Oxford's oldest cited use of the word to mean a sort of detached supernatural entity comes a bit later, from the Old English Martyrology, a compilation of the lives of saints (who are often said to show up as apparitions to help guide the faithful) written anonymously sometime around the reign of King Ælfred. In either case, this Old English form “gast” descends from the same Proto-Germanic root “*gaistaz” which also gives us German “geist” and Dutch “geest”. This root in turn is descended from Proto-Indo-European “*gʰeis-”, which seems to mean something like “frightful”, “agitated”, or “angry”, because it also gives us Avestan “zaesha-” meaning “horrible, frightful” and Sanskrit “hedah” meaning “wrath”. A ghost therefore is literally a thing which causes fright. It's actually quite akin to how in modern English we often euphemise a stereotypical ghost as a “spook”, because it's… you know… spooky.
The Catholic stance on ghosts has been pretty flopsy over the centuries. As far as I can tell, there's no “official” doctrine about these spooks, and different church fathers have proposed different and often conflicting theological arguments over the centuries. On the one hand, ghosts are plentiful in both the Old Testament (such as when the Witch of Endor calls up the spirit of the prophet Samuel) and the New (such as Moses and Elijah pulling up alongside the big JC like it's Return of the Jedi), so that in itself isn't really an issue. How to interpret contemporary hauntings, meanwhile, everyone has a different take on. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was a certified Boogara who believed ghosts were real souls with the power to appear to the living at will. This is in direct opposition to Shaniac Augustine of Hippo's calling of bullshit nearly a thousand years earlier, as he questioned why the hell ghosts wouldn't just appear to the living 24/7 if they had the power and will to do so, just in case you thought this dynamic was an entirely modern debate. For the sightings that weren't just written off as mistaken identity or straight up cons, a middle ground was usually considered where ghosts were more of an astral projection God granted temporary leave from one of the three primary afterlives of Catholic cosmology, usually Purgatory, as that place by definition was full of a lot of people with unfinished business and unresolved sins. Of course, all of this bickering goes out the window with Protestants who don't believe in Purgatory. Their rejection of all those Catholic compromises is what led to Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavater to publish his supernatural manual De Spectris (literally “On Ghosts”) in 1569. His significantly less creative explanation for all things that go bump in the night is that they're all just demons trying to fuck with people and you'll never actually see your loved ones again until you die, which is the view expressed by my mom’s old creepy Jehovah’s Witnesses clique and one which even as a kid I thought “well damn that's bleak”. That ambiguity of being hounded by something with a loved one's face is, however, just begging for stories to be written about tragic protagonists who need to convince themselves that they did what they had to do. The GOAT William Shakespeare played with this trope extensively, most famously resurrecting Hamlet's father and great Caesar's ghost for this exact reason.
But, if we really wanna get to the heart of modern ghost lore, we gotta skip ahead a few centuries to the Victorian period and the emergence of the Spiritualist Movement. While it's possible to trace the roots of the movement to 18th century figures Emanual Swedenborg, famous for talking to dead people, and Franz Mesmer (the guy we get the word “mesmerize” from), who basically hit on an idea identical to the Force, most summaries really begin specifically on March 31, 1848. Following a month of spooky sounds gently rapping, tapping on the bedroom walls of New York's Fox Sisters, Leah (age 34), Maggie (aged 14) and Kate (aged 11), the girls tattled to their mother, who sent them to relatives in Rochester to get some peace and quiet. Not only did the mysterious rappings follow them, however, but the sisters demonstrated that they could routinely communicate with the responsible spirits by answering questions and getting a predetermined amount of taps as the answers. This blew the minds of all the stuffy Victorian saps of the day, attracting in particular one Andrew Jackson Davis, a mystic who turned the Sisters’ abilities into a fully fledged and extremely profitable séance business (séance being a ritualized communication with the dead through a clairvoyant medium, derived from the French word for a sitting). This business model became the standard for psychics and mediums all the way up until the modern day, which is ironic, because the Sisters themselves came right out and said they bullshitted the whole thing. Maggie and Kate, struggling with alcoholism due to losses in the family and Leah's suspiciously arduous emphasis on the money-making side of this spiritualism business, booked an interview at the New York Academy of Music on October 21, 1888 to bring the entire thing crashing down. Thousands of supporters and critics alike attended to see their explanation of how their ghostly rappings were just painfully obvious misdirection using strings, sticks, and their weirdly crickable toe joints, how it all just started as a couple of dumb kids wanting to prank their mother before the much older Leah saw dollar signs and forced them to continue the ruse at the exploitation of grieving customers for several decades. It was damning, but people are going to believe what they already want to believe, so it was hardly the death knell of spiritualism. Believers came up with all sorts of excuses that the confession was itself driven by a desire for money and attention or even, ironically, evil ghosts. The sisters recounted their confession the following year, once again oppressed into obedience by popular demand.
Then as now, not everyone was sucked in by hoaxes and hauntings. Charles Dickens, author of one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, 1843's A Christmas Carol, believed that all alleged instances of otherworldly phenomena have a rational explanation if only one goes looking for it. This was why he helped found the Ghost Club in 1862, dedicated to exposing frauds. Members could still believe in ghosts, but they all still agreed that every incident they've heard of was faked and deserved to be called out as such. This is honestly my take on ghosts. In principle, sure, I can accept ghosts being real, but in all my study of history, I've yet to read a single account that's ever convinced me the writer truly interacted with one. This is in direct opposition to Victorian London's other most famous author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, the man who created Sherlock Holmes, the most rational detective in all of literature, was an ardent spiritualist who believed anything you put in front of him, from the Fox Sisters to the stop-motion dinosaurs in the original 1933 King Kong film. Yeah motherfucker was gullible. He was so adamant about the existence of the supernatural that it ruined his friendship with one Harry Houdini. Houdini became completely disillusioned with clairvoyants after he hired one to check on his beloved mother, who died in 1913. The medium produced a pamphlet guided by Houdini's mother informing Harry that she was in a better place… in English… a language which his extremely Hungarian mother never learned to speak or write. She also never called him Harry. That was his stage name. His mother called him Erik. This, frankly, infuriated Houdini, who dedicated his life to debunking these frauds making money off of the grieving living. Besides, he was an illusionist, a magician, and while we may think of that as a fundamentally supernatural career, they do not. Misdirection is a passion, an artform that requires intricate study of the human animal's blindspots to pull off for an audience. Houdini really got sick of Doyle's insistence that all of the showman’s tricks could only be done by real magic. Like no motherfucker, this is my craft and I'd prefer if you'd appreciate the earthly work and planning I have to put into this.
Maybe if the ghost people had more evidence than literal creaking noises and confirmed con artists, they could show those pesky science nerds just how super serial they were. What if ghosts left their essences behind, something tangible we could snap a picture of with these new fangled camera doohickies. Enter ectoplasm, a term first coined by French physiologist Charles Richet in 1894. Today, we tend to envision ectoplasm as some kind of gross glowing green Nickelodeon jizz, but that apparently is an invention of the 1984 film Ghostbusters, which I'm shocked I haven't made reference to yet. Historical ectoplasm is a lot less aesthetically appealing. The most famous ecto-artist was Scottish medium Helen Duncan, who teamed up with photographer Harvey Metcalf in 1928 to snag some great shots of her puking up some nasty crud with human faces in it during her sessions. You can take a look at these photographs yourself, and you'll likely end up joining me in the camp of wondering how the fuck anyone fell for this shit. It's so obviously a set, the “goo” obviously a cloth, and the faces made from paper mache and magazine cut outs. It really shouldn't even have been worth famed skeptic Harry Price's time to come around and debunk it, but hey someone's gotta do it. Taking a sample of Duncan's “ectoplasm” in 1931 and shipping it off for testing, Price revealed that her ghost goo was actually just a cheesecloth slathered with egg whites in order for her to easily swallow it and regurgitate it on command. Sweet Jesus Christ, I'm sure that must've been just an… incredibly pleasant mouth feel. Duncan was charged with fraud in 1933 and fined 10 pounds, but she just packed up shop and found suckers in another town. In 1941, Duncan was hosting séances for Navy officers held up in Portsmouth when she started loudly announcing she'd conjured the ghost of a sailor who died aboard the sunk ship HMS Barham. The news of the Barham’s sinking was still being kept confidential from the public at the time, only revealed to loved ones of the deceased. The British government looked at this blabbermouth and instead of seeing a clairvoyant medium saw a threat to national security smack in the middle of World War II. After catching her in the act of yet another fraudulent séance, the police arrested Duncan. Realizing that charging her with violating the 1824 Vagrancy Act would just let her get away with another fine, the court instead charged her with the harsher Section 4 of the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which counter to what you may be led to believe, actually could convict people for purporting to be witches, not try them as witches. Duncan was thrown in the slammer for nine months, making her among the last people to be tried under the Witchcraft Act in Great Britain.
While that is a fascinating story for another day, let's rewind a smidgen to that Harry Price guy. This Englishman was actually one of the first archetypal “celebrity ghost hunters”. Everyone who knew him described him as a rancid asshole, but man that guy knew how to put on a show. Price had been a member of the Society for Psychical Research, an organization founded in 1882 with the aim of scientifically testing claims made by mediums and victims of hauntings, since 1920. While working for the organization, he uncovered hoaxers like William Hope, who made bank off of faking spiritual photographs of people's dead loved ones, as well as another ectoplasm scammer named Eva Carrière. His first “patient” as it were was a nurse named Stella Cranshaw, an amateur whom he got to agree to come down to his lab and perform séances in a controlled setting littered with Price's custom trinkets and gadgets for measuring the “ghostly” effects on the room. These gizmos usually amounted to lights which could supposedly only be activated by ghosts, a lot like the sort of shit you see ghost hunters flailing around on TV today. By far, it was Price's investigation of Essex’s Borley Rectory from 1929 to 1943 that was his most famous endeavor. This old hovel was supposedly host to all sorts of horror movie tropes like scary noises, objects getting thrown, and ominous scribblings on the walls. Reportedly, the poltergeist only got worse when Price arrived and set up his equipment and then died back down to mundane ghost shit after he left. This extremely convenient coincidence should probably be viewed through the lens that Price, though a skeptic, was above all else a showman who understood that ghosts sell better than no ghosts, and he was often accused of using his real illusionist training to stage evidence just for him to document. Gee, good thing people still don't fall for this kind of thing to this day.
There were two individuals above all others that you were gonna call when there’s something strange in your neighborhood, though. It started in 1970, when a nursing school student named Donna was given a Raggedy Ann doll as a gift from her mother, because there are some absolute freaks out there who actually like dolls. Donna and her roommate Angie paid for their insolence when the doll started teleporting and using the Force to tear up people's flesh. A psychic was contacted about this haunted doll (all dolls are haunted, you can't convince me otherwise), and the medium revealed that it was possessed by the spirit of a dead little girl named Annabelle who was just lashing out because she was lonely. Dumb motherfuckers felt bad for the kid and let the doll stay, but of course the inherent evil of dolls cannot be so easily cleansed. When the attacks and strange phenomenon continued, Donna called in the big guns: a couple of extremely Catholic ghostbusters from Connecticut named Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Warrens had been making house calls since 1952, and they were firmly of the “most ghosts is demons” persuasion. They believed Annabelle was one such possession, so they took the doll of the unfortunates’ hands and locked it in some kind of magic glass case which you can still go visit at the Warren Occult Museum today.
Oh yeah, I kinda buried the lead there but the Warrens were uh… "controversial” with how they handled their cases. It really should've been a red flag when they charged a price for the doll instead of lighting it on fire, but that's pretty run of the mill when compared to the other shit which inspired the Conjuring and Amityville Horror franchises. I don't have room in this blurb to go over all of the famous cases, so I'll just focus on the one with the most interesting legal ramifications. In 1980, an 11-year old boy from Connecticut named David Glatzel was living with his sister Debbie and her boyfriend Arne Cheyenne Johnson, which sounds pleasantly suburban, except that David alleged that the Devil himself was taunting him. The Warrens were called in to get an exorcism performed on the boy, and when it wasn't working, a desperate Arne demanded the demon take him instead. Supposedly, this prompted an immediate personality shift which eventually bubbled over into Arne stabbing his landlord Alan Bono to death on February 16, 1981. When he was arrested and put on trial, his lawyers pled not guilty not just by reason of insanity, but specifically tried to argue that Arne was in fact possessed at the time of the murder, summarized by the famous line, “the Devil made me do it”. This was the first and only time in US history that demonic possession was used as a defense, and it was such an asinine claim that the judge refused to accept it. The Warrens believed the story, though. They believed it a little too much actually. In fact, David's brother Carl alleges that they made the whole demon story up for profit. After the trial, the Warrens convinced the Glatzels to sell their story to author Gerald Brittle, who when confronting the Warrens about the false information they gave him during his research for the book, was told by Ed to just “Make it scary. People come to us. They buy scary”. Brittle seemingly shrugged, published The Devil in Connecticut in 1983, and made absolute bank. The Glatzels got $4500 and a completely ruined family dynamic for selling their story, while the Warrens made a whopping $81,000 off their book deal. You can probably see why not everyone is as pulled in by the charming New England ghost hunting couple characterized in their film adaptations. That's not even to mention the allegations of sexual abuse levied against Ed by his then-underage assistant Judith Penney, but that, like all of their antics, is a story too big for this blurb.
Well… shit. Writing this was really depressing. I went into this thinking oh, maybe I'll get a better perspective on the spooks and ghouls of All Hallow’s Eve and get some worldbuilding elements along the way. Instead it's… one hell of a slog through a lot of willful ignorance, blatant manipulation, and exploitation of the frightened, confused, and grieving. Maybe that actually does teach us more about ghosts than we realize. Ghosts, at their core, represent an inability to let go, not on the part of the spirits still clinging to this godsforsaken rock, but on us left behind. Like I said at the top, grief is the most difficult emotion. We’ll look for any means of asserting that our lost friends and family are still here with us, still holding our hands, even if it means putting your wallet at the mercy of a predator. I have to ask, to all of us who are still grieving, is that what they'd want? Would your grandfather want you to hemorrhage money just to hold off another breakdown for one more day? Would your stepmother want you to hold on to such exhausting levels of anger and resentment? Would your dogs want to assault your broken heart like a festering tick after all the years of love they devoted to you? Or would they want you to move on, to forgive yourself and the people around you for being human, to be strong because this is what they trained you for? Are you the one that's truly keeping ghosts tethered here? Are you the restless spirit in your house? Maybe we'll all see each other again, and maybe we won't. I have my beliefs and I'm sure you have yours, but I don't pretend any of us truly know the answer.
I do know this: 100,000 years ago, a body was laid to rest in Qafzeh Cave. We don't know their name, we don't know who they were. We don't know what they dreamed or who their friends were or what gods they worshiped, but we do know this: they meant something to someone. They were someone's child, someone's sibling, someone's parent. Maybe they were imperfect as we all are, but they deserved a burial. Their community believed that they should have a quiet place to sleep, and when the next one succumbed to the fate we all must confront some day, they buried them too. Then the next, and the next. Everyone had something different to put in the grave, everyone remembered something about someone, and they passed down those abstract memories generation after generation until here we are burying our dead millennia later, all because that tradition meant something to someone we will never remember again. The nameless and forgotten, they do live on, not as themselves, not as ghosts, but as you. Death is not a dropping of the baton, but a passing of it. One day it will be your turn. So go, friends, live, live for the dead, lay the ghosts to rest. Do not slow down on this track we're stuck on, but hit the asphalt with a fury, and shake the Reaper's hand at the finish line knowing you did him proud. And to you monsters in the corridors, who exchange trust for fortune and dignity for fame, give up your spirits. They do not belong to you.
Design notes, okay I've gotten my optimistic nihilism off my chest for the day XD How'd I come up with this creepy fucker? Well there's two pop culture images that spring into my mind when I think of ghosts: transparent floating apparition of the person who died, and the sort of Halloween costume that gets you rocks in your candy bag. I wanted to experiment with splitting the difference and/or taking it in a different direction entirely. When I looked into it, I was surprised that the sheet ghost actually has historical precedent going back to at least 1584, inspired as it was by the burial shrouds most folks got wrapped in and its universal recognition in stage plays as a cheap and easy way to convey a character is dead. I ended up wanting to lean more into the sheet ghost as a result, to see how creative I could get with the silhouette without it breaking the mold. While the end result ultimately amounted to wrapping a glowing corpse in a toga (I took a lot of inspiration from the Dance Macabre illustrations created during the Black Plague) and draping its wailing skull with something comparable to a Victorian mourning veil, I'm still quite happy. I think the simplicity of the composition actually goes a long way in this case. Really the biggest pain in the ass was getting my scanner to cooperate with that glowing Slimer green. It reeeeally didn't know how to handle the gradient, despite my best attempts to clean it up. That's why the arms look kinda messy, but idk looking at it now, I think the graininess actually works a little bit in its favor.
Also, anyone who recognizes my secret throughline with this month's round of drawings gets a brownie point.