The decline of the English ghost
A decline in the refinement and quality of the English ghost story has been observable for many years. In the early 1960s psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, heard distinguished philosopher Professor CD Broad complaining the spirit world of the mid-20th century was losing its colour. “Not that spirits as such had finally gone to rest… but it seemed that these modern spirits no longer cut the dash they used to do. Their activities were becoming – dare he say it – increasingly vulgar. Only the previous day he had heard of a poltergeist which was shifting caravans around a holiday camp near Great Yarmouth.”
The location of this haunted caravan site remains unidentified, but I note a few years later in June 1971 (and three months after Broad’s own death) a disturbing presence, strange temperature drops and a feeling of being suffocated prompting a family named Dunford into fleeing Caravan B77 at Seashore Caravan Park, Great Yarmouth. (‘Straw Ghosts’ by Nicholas Humphrey in the London Review of Books, 7 Oct 1980; Sun, 5 Jun 1971; Our Haunted Kingdom, 1973, by Andrew Green)
Broad’s lament upon the decline of English ghost stories came back to mind this summer, when comparing a classic fictional ghost story ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, my Lad’ (1904) by M R James with a contemporary ‘true ghost’ encounter that received national coverage in June 2020.
For those not familiar with the plot of ‘Oh Whistle’, it involves a learned professor who takes a seaside break. He discovers an ancient, inscribed whistle that he recklessly blows, sounding a note “with a quality of infinite distance in it”. Inadvertently, he summons up an evil spirit that manifests first as a gust of wind, then as a shape bobbing
