Alas Poor Ghost debunks the idea that contemporary people lack a belief in the afterlife, and that rational people never encounter ghosts. The book explores the way individuals interpret encounters with the dead through familiar arguments of belief and disbelief. It is a great reminder that our experiences do not really exist, even for us, until interpreted using some sort of culturally acceptable format that we and others will understand.
A majority of Bennett's late 20th-century subjects in Manchester, UK reported some experience with ghosts. Bennett doesn't comment on whether her subjects' experiences are true in a factual sense, but focuses on how the stories are told, in ways that reveal the storytellers' own internal arguments about their experiences. I felt the stories were a stunning reminder of how much we fit our own experiences into stories consistent with our beliefs about how the world works. Of course, if this process were not universal, there would be nothing called folklore, but reading about women from Manchester in the 1980s brings this process close to home.
It turns out there are two primary types of late 20th century ghosts: strangers who return on frightening errands having to do with the injustice of their death, and the beloved dead who appear to family members in various helpful and comforting ways. The first type are the least common, and their presence is amenable to media accounts of haunting, and to all the tests shown on tabloid TV designed to establish the presence and persistence of ghosts among the living. (Interestingly, it is the sinister strangers that are labelled as ghosts, while the beloved dead are spoken of by name as returning or visiting.)
The second type, dead family members, take up most of the book. These stories are related to personal grief, individual experiences, and the continuity of family relationships. Bennett demonstrates that the rhetoric of disbelief in experiences with the beloved dead is as much a centuries-old folk logic as the traditions of belief that the dead return to help the living. She shows that believers anticipate the arguments of disbelievers in order to preempt attacks on their credibility, and that disbelievers use arguments in an attempt to categorize their experiences as something other than the return of the dead loved one. The dialogue about what vision, sound, or a sense of the loved one's presence really means is internal, and the storytellers tend to present both a belief rationale and a discounting rationale in their stories.
Bennett connects the tales of the elderly women in her study to issues of bereavement, showing that a medical model of the grieving person needing to quickly get over grief, as one would an illness, doesn't fit with the decades of encounters with the beloved dead. She believes that most encounters tend to become more infrequent after the first year, but often persist for close to a decade.
Bennett rejects the model that grief should be short-lived and that people should recover quickly, in favour of the idea that the death of a partner or family member will affect the person for years. Several of the stories reveal that widows, especially, felt alienated from friends and family who expected them to "recover" quickly, and that it was during these times of isolation that the felt presence of a loved parent or husband was most comforting. In one story, a dead husband's presence is felt when the widow is learning new tasks that he had done during his lifetime -- she hears him giving her instructions on how to complete the project. In another, a brother gives a couple a burst of energy to repaint his house.
Bennett calls experiences with the beloved dead a "witness" tradition, based on a biblical phrase that says "we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses." I found that label distracting, because family members were experienced in comforting and helping roles, which doesn't fit my idea of a witness, who observes but does not interfere. I would have liked a label that reflected the relational aspects of these experiences.
Bennett winds up her discussion of the "witness tradition" by looking for its existence in earlier centuries. She concludes that there has been a transformation in how we view the dead who return, along with a decline in the belief in purgatory, because of the rise of Protestantism in the United Kingdom, and because of a general belief that any death is tragic.
I wonder why Bennett does not look for links between today's experiences with dead relations and folklorist accounts from the 19th century, such as those reported by Evans-Wentz in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, or Anatole le Braz's Celtic Legends of the Beyond from Brittany. Both of these works contain stories of dead loved ones, although in Brittany the dead seem to come back to help the living die, at least historically.
Personally, I think Bennett is correct in that people experience the beloved dead around them at various points in their lives, and the popularity of Spiritualism among her subjects, as well as contemporary beliefs in reincarnation, point to a continuation of these beliefs as traditional folk wisdom in the Anglo-American sphere. Each century has its own overlay from literary media and religious dogma, but the experiences are uncannily similar over time.
Today's stranger ghosts, like the hitchhikers trying to get home on the anniversary of their death, are the victims of crimes, rather than criminals wandering the earth in pursuit of restitution, as in the 17th and 18th centuries. I could not help but wonder if this belief in the inability of victims to move on, which began in the 19th century, is part of the foundation for today's overwhelming sympathy for living victims of crimes. Bennett provides detailed accounts of how educated folklorists and gentlemen scholars have pursued ghost stories though the ages, creating the rhetoric of disbelief that is as old as many of the folk stories.
Reading this caused me to wonder about the role of listservs in creating uniform accounts of experiences and beliefs across the cyber void today. Are participants in discussions of the afterlife creating modern folklore, or are they the heirs of 19th century folklorists putting an educated spin on the folk traditions?
If you are interested in what we believe about encounters with the dead, apart from media accounts, this is a great book. It is written partly for an academic audience, and is heavily influenced by Bennett's scholarly articles, so readers should expect discussions of how the subjects were interviewed, and how the interviews relate to medical and psychological theories of bereavement. However, this discussion does not dominate the book, which is primarily an interesting look at how the personal becomes part of a cultural repertoire of folk wisdom and folklore.
