“The little girl – she was the sweetest child I ever saw – died just two months ago of pneumonia.”

“But she couldn’t have died.” I was a fool to let this out, but the shock had completely unnerved me. “I tell you I saw her yesterday.”

From The Shadowy Third by Ellen Glasgow, written for SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE IN 1916 and later put in a collection called The Shadowy Third and Other Stories published in 1923

The Ghost Seers

Who can see the ghost and what makes that possible are often significant elements in a ghost plot. Historically those thought most attuned to ghosts have been distressed women, sexually ambiguous men, the bereaved, dogs, horses, cats, simpletons, children, people of colour, the blind, the lonely and those known to make a monopoly of their troubles. Phrases such as ‘brain fever’, ‘agitated mind’, ‘cerebral excitement’ and ‘hysterical temperament’ often crop up when describing second sighters or the twice-born, or, as E.F. Benson calls them, ‘sensitives’. Sheridan Le Fanu in The Haunted House in Westminster writes of Judge Harbottle being ‘feverish’, ‘in the vapours’ and falling ‘among his blue devils’, all terms of the period linked with depression. Some past trauma may also come into play. As the narrator observes in Edith Nesbit’s In the Dark, ‘It may – though I don’t pretend to understand how – have been the development through intense suffering, of a sixth sense, in a very nervous highly-strung nature.’

The idea that it’s homosexual men who can see ghosts goes way back to Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1584, where witchcraft is directly associated with ‘effeminate men’, and where the seeing of spirits proceeds ‘from a cowardly nature and complexion, or from an effeminate and fond bringing up.’ In Algernon Blackword’s The Kit-Bag (1908), Johnson, the ghost seer of the tale, is specifically referred to as having ‘a delicate face like a girl’s’, which is perhaps a coded suggestion that he is homosexual. Far less coded is the description of Apuleius Charlton in H.R. Wakefield’s A Black Solitude (1951) who is referred to as a ‘psychological freak’ and the last survivor of the Mauve decade. Where then does this leave the heterosexual male ghost seer? In Sir Walter Scott’s The Tapestried Chamber (1828) merely seeing a ghost leads General Browne to say, ‘I was ashamed of myself as a man and a soldier.’ Tom in Sheridan Le Fanu’s An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (1851) goes even further and says that his encounter with a ghost ‘unmanned him’. Seeing a spook literally de-sexes Tom’s masculine (heterosexual) identity.

Nervous and easily agitated women are also typically thought of as ghost seers. Ellen Glasgow’s story The Shadowy Third (written for SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE IN 1916 and later put in a collection called The Shadowy Third and Other Stories published in 1923) is narrated by a very down to earth nurse who is given the job of caring for a woman who is thought to be going mad because she claims to see a ghost. Her husband is a medical man, a doctor, but over the course of the story it becomes apparent that he is using his wife’s perceived illness to incarcerate her in a lunatic asylum and take control of her wealth. But the wife isn’t mentally ill, for the nurse too sees the ghost, a young child, who is the woman’s daughter from an earlier marriage. There’s even hints the husband, now step father to the child, killed the daughter. Ellen Glasgow’s tale cleverly subverts the suggestible-nervous-woman cliché and could even be argued to be a feminist story. The Shadowy Third plays a key role in ‘I Was Once a Haunted House’ when the character of Miss Osborne reads it by candle light at the symposium on ghosts at Claverley Manor.

Rustics and servants in spook tales usually know there are ghosts, but on the whole choose to avoid them or pretend they’re not there. At the other end of the social scale it’s said in Brander Matthew’s The Rival Ghosts (1884) that the ghost never appears to the master of the house, which is not untypical of Victorian stories. What all this means is that the ghost seer is often a socially liminal character or a guest, or a traveller, or rootless wanderer or some other outsider. Miss Sarah Chrighton in At Chrighton Abbey has the family name but not the status, and so is faced with having to earn her living ‘in a position of dependence – a dreadful thing for a Chrighton to be obliged to do.’ Not surprising Sarah turns out to be the ideal ghost seer and as an intermediate is perfectly positioned to observe the social hierarchy of the Victorian world she finds herself in.

The idea that it’s only those who have been recently bereaved who can see ghosts is central to Rudyard Kipling’s very moving tale They (1904), written five years after the death of his young daughter Josephine from pneumonia. In the same story, there’s a blind woman who can sense the ghosts who says “we blindies have only one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It’s different for you. You’ve such defences with your eyes.”

And then of course there are ghost seeing dogs and cats. The sensing of that which is as yet unseen supernatural visitor functions as a way of setting up strangeness and danger before the ghost or phantom is actually encountered. Dogs are known for their sudden and inexplicable barking, and although this probably comes from their heightened senses – feeling changes in atmospheric pressure and hearing high-pitched sounds – it does often seem as if they have spotted some sort of supernatural phenomenon. The Irish Terrier, for example, in E.F. Benson’s The Room in the Tower is described as suddenly bristling with rage ‘as if he was ready to spring at something.’  Much is made in ‘I Was Once a Haunted House’ of Mrs Jesop’s barking dog and the somewhat patronising Professor F.R. Curtis puts together a list of supposedly ghost sensitive dogs. He mentions how in Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The House and the Brain man’s best friend is described as slinking back to the door, ‘scratching and whining to get out’, how Môme the dog in Chamber’s The Messenger ‘suddenly whipped his tail between his legs, whimpered, and made off across the moor’ and Constable’s spaniel cousin in R.S. Hawker’s The Botathen Ghost running ‘backwards and away, like a thing dismayed and appalled.’ However,  Professor F.R. Curtis missed a few off, including the keeper’s dog in R.H. Benson’s Father Macclesfield’s Tale (R.H. Benson being the younger brother of E.F. Benson and who later became a Catholic priest) and Margaret’s beloved dog Sheen, which in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s ‘God Grante That She Lye Still’ turns against her as she begins to be possessed by the ‘she’ who should have lay still in her grave. Cats, incidentally, feature as ghost seers in fewer stories than dogs, but the cat Spooner is a key player in Eleanor Farjeon’s 1952 tale of the same name.

Horses too seem to have an instinct for danger and a popular scene in a vampire story is when a horse balks and refuses to go further. A variation on this trope is when Van Helsing in Dracula (1979) investigates the grave of his daughter, who he suspects is a vampire, and the horse starts stomping the ground with its hoof, and then runs away in terror.

Of course a different type of ghost seer is the professional medium, who really should be called a clairaudient, as mediums tend to hear ghosts rather than actually perceive them with their eyes. Madame Arcati is the eccentric medium in Coward’s Blithe Spirit, but the twist is that it’s the housemaid, Edith, with her unconscious psychic abilities, who has summoned Elvira and so it is only Edith who has the power to get rid of the ghost, which she does by singing the song Always by Irving Berlin.