the genealogy book

, on ghosts :

The very notion of history, of genealogy, one might argue, is to wrestle with or even chase echoes and remnants of archival threads. We work to understand, and reconcile. We work to articulate.

Through the western cultural tradition, ghosts often seem depicted as Victorian, whether sources contemporary to the period or since. Such abstract features, beyond embroidery and trim, and layers of petticoats. The cruelty of being held beyond death is one thing, but the indignity of an eternity within a corset is something else. There are outliers, sure, including American Civil War-era ghosts, early Colonial, or Salem women, tried and executed over Puritan fear and misogynistic delusion. How those Puritan men so deeply threatened by any sense of female agency. One supposes any culture’s phantoms emerge from the period that holds their attention. We make our own ghosts, after all. Not their unfinished business, but ours. Might guilt be a factor? Might there be ghosts that lurk in my 1950s-era Ottawa cupboards? Might the settler-descendant even encounter pre-Colonial spirits?

Perhaps, as one might gather from Julie Carr’s Mud, Blood and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (2023), Victorian-era ghosts could be simply a holdover from the rise of 19^th century spiritualism. There was so much talk of ghosts, of spirits, that we depict them still as how they were first considered. The lens through which they remain. As Carr writes:

“All words are ghosts,” writes KT Thompson, since they stand in for things not there. Are all stories ghost stories, then? All memories? If we invent these spirits that nonetheless alter our lives in large and minor ways, why do we invent them? What is it we want from our ghosts (our memories, visions, dreams, stories), and what do they want from us?