What are the origins of the ghost story

A. Ghosts and spirits have been part of folklore and common belief from time immemorial. Although such spectral figures have always appeared in stories and literature - think of Banquo's ghost in Macbeth - the ghost story as we know it today wasn't possible as an entertainment form until people had started not to believe in ghosts.

Literary ghost stories were a Victorian invention, providing a counterbalance to the prevailing forces of secularism and science. The best Victorian writers of ghost stories set supernatural incidents in solid everyday settings, the very banality of which made such violations of normality all the more convincing.

Q. When was the golden age of ghost stories
A. J. S. Le Fanu (1814-1873) created the most consistently impressive body of short ghost fiction in the Victorian period. Le Fanu gave his most effective stories credible settings and characters and was adept at creating ghosts that induced physical fear - such as the famous spectral monkey in 'Green Tea' (1869). His first collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), although it made little impact at the time, inaugurated the golden age of the Victorian ghost story, and for the next 20 years or so they were produced in abundance.

Q. Who else
A. Le Fanu's heirs were M. R. James (1862-1936) and E. F. Benson (1867-1940). James's antiquarian ghost stories were so convincing that some readers believed them to be factual accounts. His four collections, beginning with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904, were built on solid Victorian foundations, but, even more than Le Fanu, James excelled at conveying physical and tactile horror. Among contemporary authors in whom the Jamesian influence is still detectable are Ramsey Campbell and Susan Hill, whose atmospheric novel The Woman in Black (1983) has been successfully adapted for both the stage and television.

Bram Stoker (1847-1912) wrote the classic Dracula (1897), which, although technically a Gothic novel, rather than a ghost story, had many of the elements of the genre, such as juxtaposing the supernatural with the everyday. However, Stoker did write ghost stories, some of which have appeared collections. Midnight Tales is one such.

The last great storyteller of this period was Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), whose haunted landscape stories were precursors of the film The Blair Witch Project, and who survived to read his creepy tales on the radio and even on early television.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries literary heavyweights had no objections to clanking chains and shaking shrouds. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol epitomises the theme of ghost as moral instructor and established a strange tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw picks up an American thread from Edgar Allan Poe and uses an ambiguous supernatural element as part of an unsettling psychological study. This literary form is not dead - modern masters include Peter Straub and, of course, Stephen King.

Though they are not as ubiquitous as in their heyday - psychological thrillers seem to have taken on the role - ghost stories continue to be written and read, their resilience and adaptability testifying to the tenacity of what Virginia Woolf called 'the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid.'

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By Simon Smith