The Long Global History of Ghosts

Almost two centuries ago, Irish immigrants brought a festival called Samhain to North America. Samhain had ancient pagan roots. It was celebrated as a harvest festival at the end of October, but also marked a day when the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest. The Irish brought Samhain to the New World in the late 1840s when a devastating potato famine forced millions of them to leave Ireland. They came to the New World aboard “coffin ships,” thus named for their high death rates. These folks carried with them a kinship and familiarity with death.

It is fitting that Samhain, now transformed into Halloween, should still be celebrated with pumpkins and ghosts in modern America, bearing echoes of harvests past and a historic reminder that the boundaries between life and death were indeed thin.

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In premodern times, both in Europe and the non-European world, ghosts were a fact of life. Understood to be part of everyday life, one protected oneself from ghosts in practical ways, with amulets and spells, just as one protected oneself against wild animals, with cudgels and staffs. Ghosts were feared, but unlike our modern times, they were also worshiped (the term for ghosts and gods were sometimes interchangeable), captured by humans to perform unpaid labor, and welcomed as ancestors. In other words, ghosts were part of the warp and woof of peasant society and ghost stories often expressed its lived experiences.

Premodern society’s intimacy with ghosts arose from its profound familiarity with death. Low productivity in agriculture and absence of reliable means of transportation led to chronic malnutrition, famines, and associated diseases. Societies of such high mortality were fertile ground for a variety of ghosts and ghost stories.

In the European Middle Ages, historians estimate, one-third of infants died before reaching the age of 5. The numbers were roughly the same for India, and might explain why Pencho, a ghost that took the lives of infants, was considered so powerful. The Pencho possessed newborns, causing them to turn strange colors. A dirty creature by habit, the only thing that scared the Pencho was a broom.

Epidemics were common and provided context for many tales of haunting. The Black Death that killed more than 25 million Europeans was the backdrop for Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) in which the ghost of a young woman warns the world of the dangers of not seizing love when it came knocking. A young Italian nobleman, Nastagio degli Onesti, fell in love with a woman who did not return his love. Once day Onesti witnessed a terrible ghostly tableau; a young woman who had declined the love of a knight was hunted down by the knight and killed daily at a particular spot. When Onesti brought his intended to the spot, seeing the fate of the ghost woman and the consequences of unrequited love, she quickly consented to marry Onesti.

Similarly, in colonial Bengal where malaria and cholera epidemics ravaged the countryside, ghost stories abounded about necropolises. A famous tale was about the ghost of Gadkhali, a small village which had been devastated by cholera. The story went that a man had returned to the village, only to find it deserted. When he reached his own house, his wife welcomed him home and served him dinner. But disturbing things began to happen as dinner progressed. As soon as he thought of a favorite dish, his wife somehow produced it before him. Finally, he asked for a lime and as the wife moved to the kitchen, he secretly followed her. He witnessed his “wife” extending her ghostly arm for several feet to pluck a lime from a distant tree. He fled the scene and realized that his entire village had been wiped out by cholera.

Unlike modern ghosts who we often associate with uncanny sounds and mysterious shadows, older ghosts were resolutely corporeal with passions and needs similar to those of the living. In rural Bengal a petni, a species of female ghost, was known for her love of fish.

The novelist Humayun Ahmed (1948-2012) recalled how ghosts were “members of the family.” A neighbor complained to Ahmed’s grandfather that whenever fish was cooked in his home (which was daily in riverine Bengal) a petni would appear demanding to be fed. Ahmed’s commentary about this exchange between the neighbor and his grandfather is instructive. “The funny thing was,” he wrote, “that no one was surprised by the story. it was assumed to be natural: ghosts loved fish, so of course they would demand their share.”

Embedded in the world of the living, premodern ghosts were almost extended kin. They married other ghosts and even gave birth to baby ghosts. A popular 19th-century Bengali folktale told of two sister petnis, Kuni and Buni. The former lived in houses while the latter lived in the wild. One day a poor Brahmin on his way home through a forest encountered the towering Buni, who rather shyly requested that he carry a message for her sister, Kuni, that she had just given birth to a baby boy. The terrified Brahmin, running home recounted this alarming tale to his wife. Suddenly, a similarly horrifying being, Kuni, rushed out of the interior of the home and asked him delightedly about her new nephew.

Such stories had powerful meanings for agrarian societies with ghosts representing the desires and experiences of peasant society. It is thus not coincidental that the Celtic Samhain, the Mexican Día de los Muertos, and the Bengali Bhut Chaturdashi are all observed during harvest time and all of them are understood to be special days when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thinnest.

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Why was harvest time significant? First, it gave thanks for a good crop—to both the living and the dead. All these festivals involved lighting lamps for dead ancestors and offering them food. Second, the rituals marked an effort by society to align itself to nature’s rituals of transition. Finally, it honored the return of the dead to earth with celebrations rather than mourning. These festivals, just like the stories, provided an easy familiarity with the dead.

By contrast, sorrow, mourning, and darkness are the attendant scores of the modern ghost story. Unlike their premodern counterparts, modern ghosts lack all corporeality and materiality, so much so that “spectral” is understood to be the opposite of “material.”

Historian Keith Thomas attributes this change to a combination of factors, including the rise of Protestantism, the scientific revolution, and the emergence of capitalism as a new mode of organizing life and work.

A new element, Reason, became the yardstick for ghosts. Occult science was premised upon the belief that the spirit world could be studied scientifically with the correct tools and skills, such as spirit photography and planchettes. Under the aegis of British colonialism, these ideas of Scientific Spirituality traveled to Asia and Africa over the 19th century, prompting a Bengali intellectual to claim that “just as Science has empowered us to converse with people at a distance over the telephone…so too through a Medium we can converse with a departed Soul and even hear their voice.”

Modernity’s distance and fear of death made modern specters more fearful than ever before. They no longer belonged to the natural world; they were now part of a new supernatural. While older ghosts were braided into the everyday life of peasant society marking crises and plentitude alongside of joys and fears, the modern specter, whose features were now homogenized across cultures, only represented fear.

It is only when older premodern festivals such as Halloween or Bhoot Chaturdashi come around, albeit without their original context, can we catch a glimpse of an older world, where ghosts were like other non-human beings, with whom we had much in common.

And together we shared a collective and common future.

Tithi Bhattacharya is an associate professor of South Asian history at Purdue University. Her most recent book Ghostly Past Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal has just been published by Duke University Press.

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