I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood....
Shakespeare, Hamlet: Act I, Scene V
A common attribute of ghosts in virtually all cultures is that they are spirits of the deceased who are unable to achieve peace in the afterlife, either due to something they did, or something that someone else did to them. This certainly is the case with what arguably is the most famous ghost in Western literature, Hamlet's father:
Some of the greatest novels, plays and short stories in the English language have been concerned with ghosts. Among several that come immediately to mind are Horace Walpole's somewhat overwrought The Castle of Otranto (1764), Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820, based on a German folktale), Charles Dickens' much beloved A Christmas Carol (see our post of 22 December 2009), Henry James' much-filmed Turn of the Screw (a novella first published as part of The Two Magics in 1898 and very likely the best ghost story ever written), and (in our own time) plays such as Noël Coward's comedic Blithe Spirit (1941):
While the above have at least some claim to literary merit (as does virtually anything written by that greatest of all ghost story writers, M. R. James)...
...most fiction published about ghosts since the first great wave of such fiction (during the Victorian era) has been of the more formulaic variety. This genre fiction, and numerous collections of "ghost stories" based on local myths, legends and folklore, is what one most often will encounter in one's efforts to build a private library around this topic:
And, lest we forget, not all ghostly fiction is written for adults....
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