Ghost Stories, Winter Evenings and those marvelously weird Victorians

Halloween is a special time for ghost stories, and right throughout the winter we just love the idea of huddling up by the fire, or cosying up at home with friends and family keeping the dark at bay with soft lights and candles - and sending shivers down our spines with ghost stories. 

Whether we believe in the existence of ghosts, spirits or the after-life in general is utterly irrelevant. We love to explore our deepest fears in the safety of our homes, in the security of other human company, and that is what ghost stories are so good at doing for us. It is part of being human.

While ghost stories have been told all over the world in all cultures and communities since time immemorial, it is in Victorian times that these became an obsession. In art, in literature and music, we find ghosts. In Victorian middle class gatherings, in working class pubs - everyone loved a good ghost story, especially in winter. Who can possibly forget the enduring magic of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol? 

As a writer who enjoys both telling and reading ghost stories, I was intrigued as to why Victorians loved ghost stories to the point of obsession - they were a huge commercial success for magazine, newspapers and mass published fiction. After all, Victorians were an industrious, technologically advanced, highly socially aware, astute business people. The world changed during Victorian times because they were rational people, embracing advances in science,exploring new places, new concepts, new ways of thinking things, pushing out the boundaries of knowledge. Why would they be so fascinated with tales of mystery and fear, with the spiritual and the unexplained rather than the corporal and the rational?

My first thinking on this leads me to consider how dark winter must have been in Victorian times - as it was in the millennia before that. It wasn't until the later Victorian period that electric lighting was installed in more housing; street lights were gas lights and not everywhere but mainly in cities and large towns. Gas lights, of course, emitted carbon monoxide and in poorly ventilated rooms could certainly have provoked hallucinations and may well have caused many an unwitting death. 

Houses were build with bricks but also with timber and as the warmth of winter fireplaces subsided during the nights, many a house would have creaked and groaned and frightened those living in it. Urban areas in particular were wreathed in the smoke of thousands of chimneys, including factory chimneys as the growing industries were coal fired. Even under the gas-lit street lamps, the streets and alleys of the towns were plunged into darkness for hours and hours.

Added to darkness and how so many people, especially the working poor were still very superstitious, there was the phenomenon of death. The mortality rate was high with incurable diseases that now would be cured by antibiotics or we prevent through vaccinations, and the spread of diseases like cholera through poor hygiene was fast and fierce. Victorian families were accustomed to death, especially among their children, and among young women, many of whom died giving birth.

Coming face to face with death was part of daily life in Victorian times and yet Queen Victoria added fuel to the fire of the Victorian obsession with death when she went into  more or less lifelong mourning after the Prince Consort, her husband, died at only 42 years of age. With the Queen always dressed in mourning, fashion houses cashed in on mourning fashions, and along with these the hat-makers, veil-stitchers, jewellers (Whitby jet mourning jewellery became very fashionable), florists, coach-men, gravediggers, stone masons and funeral directors.

Poor health was a particular concern for many Victorians, who were also among the first to research mental illnesses and experiment (quite cruelly, perhaps) on people considered insane in order to find cures or remedies. People who heard voices, or spoke in tongues - were they mentally ill, or 'possessed by demons' as earlier generations might have thought? Yet this research and the huge advances in the printed  media, as well as better education and greater numbers of people reading, all combined to create a much greater awareness of some of the mysteries of the human mind and the human body - all fodder for story tellers with vivid imaginations.

It didn't help, of course, that so many Victorians resorted to medicines that were more likely to make them sicker than to cure them. Syphilis, for example, was rife during Victorian times, and was treated with mercury which poisoned the poor victim. Laudanum was widely available and taken to 'calm the nerves', yet was highly addictive. Meanwhile, gin for the working classes and opiates for those who could afford it were drugs of choice and may well have contributed both to many early deaths and to many 'sightings' of things unreal. 

Technological advances may even have added to the fascination with ghosts. Victorians of all classes - but especially the middle and upper classes as they  had more money, time and energy for these diversions - were interested in exploring the spirit world, with seances and visits to mediums a popular pastime. There were, of course, all sorts of scammers, but the level of interest was fueled by the new technology of photography, especially when photographers discovered that they could easily create hoax ghostly figures so that a family photograph might suddenly include the shadowy shape of what appears to be a ghost in the background. There was also the invention of morse code might have encouraged the ideas of ghosts tapping tables and other items of furniture to make their presence felt during seances.

But it was in story-telling and the creation of some of the world's classic works of literature that the Victorian fascination for ghosts has become most memorable. If there were a Victorian ghost hall of fame, perhaps some of these might be included:

The Bodysnatcher (by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Ghost of Kathy (Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte)

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

These happen to  be some of my particular favourites. Enjoy finding some new favourites for yourself, reading Victorian ghost stories during the dark nights of Halloween!