On a run with my friend Maura a few days ago, we passed the abandoned cabin collapsed into the mossy thrush that lines Davidson’s cross country trails.
I commented in passing that the sloping log edifice disintegrating into damp soil was a perfect representation of Mark Fisher’s definition of “the eerie”: a family had been once present here, we could see their turned over sink and ice-box. Ostensibly they were now absent, for reasons we were sure were fraught and nefarious.
“I want to take a photo of this but I feel like some spirit would possess my phone or something,” I commented jokingly.
“I found like a 1950’s saddle shoe here once,” Maura said, and then added “empty of course.”
Which provoked a strange thought, “ghosts like are never from like a decade after the 40s though.”
In the media, rarely do you see a ghost that isn’t a small victorian child in white-ish night gown with long stringy hair and empty eyes.
Enter Bethan Bell’s “Taken from life,” in which dead victorian folks are propped up with what I can only imagine are coat hangers and photographed. I was struck by the fact that the images were the crystallization of what my brain thought of when it thought of “ghost.” A ghost had to be someone distant from me in sense of dress and in decade. The more antiquated the more likely to come back haunting.
“Yeah like you wouldn’t see a ghost from the 1970’s. What would they do shake their bell bottoms at you and boo?” I said.
“But you also wouldn’t see like the ghost of a caveman or something” Maura decides.
So evidently one’s perception of “ghosthood” is highly temporal. It has a scopic element that refracts our categorization of who can who can’t be a ghost.
Why particularly are Victorian people so much more likely to be ghosts? Were they sadder, more melancholic, more ashen faced, more hysterical, more generally creepy?
Well, honestly, probably, but also we might find the answer in Jeffrey Cohen’s theses on monsters. Just as monsters are a “cultural body” so too seemingly is our perception of the ghost inflected with cultural anxiety (Cohen 4).
I’m no historian on the late industrial period, nor am I exactly sure why the people of this time are the recycled fodder of many a haunting T.V. show, novel, or film.
Maybe some of this may connect to the insurgence of gothicism that began in the mid to late 18th century, maybe some of this was related to the increase in population, which meant a proportional increase in death, maybe victorian people were really just that more creepy than the rest of us. I can’t particularly point to one reason. But it’s worth interrogating why I can’t fathom someone from the 80s rocking shoulder pads and a bad haircut haunting me.