When someone dies, the space they once occupied does not become empty. It does not buckle, collapse, and recede into the background hum of our lives. Perturbingly, the space itself—bristling with memory, with the echoes of distant moments and fragments of conversation, with the irrevocable vanishment of familiar sounds, sights, and scents—persists, though the person does not. Perhaps in truth we are haunted by spaces, not spirits—the residues of life, tinged with the dull, pertinacious ache of loss and the terror of universal dissolution, which conjure a disquieting sense of presence in the midst of utter absence. Perhaps possibility haunts us. In the aftermath of a death, we are often wracked with visions of alternative pasts and futures. We tortuously consider a kaleidoscope of potentialities we could not fathom before our bereavement, an event which almost always effects within us a kind of constitutional alteration. We remember, and we regret. This series of phenomena, which might be entirely dissevered from the implication of life after death, constitutes the mechanical and emotional heart of most ghost stories, one of the most ubiquitous modes of fiction the world over.

            The association of ghosts with superstition and the preternatural, however, is undoubtedly part of a powerful and venerable tradition. In curious and crucial ways, these ghosts—the spirits of the dead who transcend the bonds of physical reality, persisting diaphanously in an afterlife with which our world holds tenuous connections—can serve to alleviate, rather than to induce fear. The apparent contiguity of the spiritual and the actual, the semblance of a life beyond life mitigates the horror of our attempts to conceive the meaning of emptiness, of absolutely nothing. In connection with the apparitions of individuals, the ghost of history, the oppressive spectral weight of it which one feels in quiet and ancient places, also instills us with a sense of value about our own ephemerality. Its presence and our recognition of it can sometimes act as a palliative for the fear of meaninglessness. I, for instance, have developed something of a habit of inspecting group portraits from the 19th-century to help awaken this sensation in myself. One looks into the faces of an entire familial network of the long-dead and considers the complex relationships which they must have shared with one another, the triumphs and the tragedies which they must have seen one another through, and, in the end, their complete reduction to this single monochromatic echo of an instant in the irretrievable narrative of how their lives tangled, clashed, and intersected. That only such a fragile artifact remains to mark the evaporation of a story as intricately human and meaningful as any of ours genuinely fills me with a sense of awe and worth. Many of us will take our stories with us in a period of time which can seem unsettlingly fathomable, but we ought to be satisfied, even thankful that our impermanence will protect them from the perverse gazes of distant and disconnected future observers who cannot know us but by our faint and disappearing legacies, the images and words we leave in our wake. Ghost stories often allow us to confront these realities in a space which allows for the experience of anxiety and terror but ultimately directs our attention, our inherent inquisitiveness toward the mysteries of and beyond human life.

            Modern incarnations of the ghost story seem increasingly obsessed with graphic and absurd depictions of violence, though I must confess, being disinterested in what I see as the crude filmic perversion of a once great genre, I am not exceedingly familiar with the works that inhabit this category. Violence has frequently been employed or implicated in ghost stories as a kind of narrative device. How many apparitions which wander the pages of Victorian and Romantic novels represent the foul, vengeful, or malingering spirits of the victims and perpetrators of gruesome murders? In these stories, the often implied violence serves to agitate the narrative’s spirits, to create context for their appearances, and to facilitate their connection with living protagonists or villains. 19th-century ghost stories in which specters effect anything more than a kind of metaphorical violence through the excessive perturbation or physiological frailty which their mere presence evokes in those before whom they deign to appear is incredibly rare. Such scenes of violence are indeed so uncommon that instances in which the living perform acts of staggering savagery against the spirits of the dead might well outnumber them. A moment in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in which the otherwise aloof and imperceptive narrator, Lockwood, brutally drags the wrist of Catherine’s ghost across broken shards of glass stands out in particular relief. What precisely the reversal of this trope in modern times speaks to, I am uncertain. Perhaps, living in the aftermath of more than a century’s bewildering scientific and cultural advancements, we perceive our environment and our history as more innately hostile to us than our ancestors did. Perhaps, where they felt a compulsion to move forcefully beyond the constraints of the various historical conditions and inheritances which bound and constricted them, we conceive of ourselves as in some measure psychologically victimized by the past, able only to flee some ill-defined pursuer in spectacular paroxysms of fear.

            Nevertheless, great horror literature has certainly continued to appear in recent decades, though the thematic bent of ghost stories as a literary genre has tended toward the more cosmically oriented fiction of turn-of-the-century writers like Lovecraft, Blackwood, and Bierce. These stories variously metaphorize a sensation of being overwhelmingly beset by forces far outside the realm of one’s capacity to perceive or understand, of being one of countless fatalities in the inexorable march of the universe into an unknowable future, a victim only of one’s own smallness and radical inconsequentiality. Perhaps the ghosts which now haunt us are no longer the spirits of departed friends and relations, but the specters of futures so monolithic or boundless that they are dead to us before we have ever had a chance to matter. Whatever the case, the anatomies of ghost stories reveal much about the anxieties of the cultures that produce them. Perhaps these narratives deserve a greater degree of veneration than we presently afford them, uniquely possessed as they are of a singular virtue: through them we confront not only death and loss, but the ever-collapsing limits of our tiny, brief, and mercifully mortal existences.