‘He was dressed in the costume of a bygone period; his hair was powdered, and round his wrists there were ruffles of lace.’

From Charlotte Riddell’s A Strange Christmas Game, first published in THE BROADWAY in 1868.

How Shall I Go A-Haunting?

“What shall I wear?” Well, a ghost has to decide. Logic might suggest that a soul, if that’s what a ghost is, would have no need of clothes and therefore any apparition should go naked. Yet most ghosts seem somewhat bashful and so present themselves either wearing a shroud or winding-sheet, or in the clothes they died in or were known for in life. And we mustn’t forget all those chains.

It should be said the long chains worn by Marley’s ghost weren’t an invention of Dickens. Dickens noted in A Christmas Tree (1850) that the ghosts in haunted houses were ‘reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little originality, and “walk” in a beaten track,’ adding that when a ghost is about you may hear the ‘haunted sound of a spinning-wheel, or a hammer, or a footstep, or a cry, or a sigh, or a horse’s ramp, or the rattling of a chain.’ However, Francis Grose in A Provincial Glossary (1787) wrote that chains were ‘the accoutrements of foreign spectres,’ and stipulated that ‘English Spirits are free.’ So where does this chain thing come from?

Pliny the Younger, who lived from 61AD – c.113AD, wrote hundreds of letters to his friend to Lucius Lucinius Sur, 247 of which survive. Letter 27 of Book 7 features the story of the philosopher Athenodorus, who, when haunted by a ghost rattling chains, followed the apparition to the courtyard where ghost disappeared. Next day, Athenodorus went to the magistrates who ordered that particular spot to be dug up and underneath were found bones intertwined with chains. Was a living man bound to prevent escape or were the chains put round the corpse of a wrong ’un in order to keep its spirit from roaming? Whatever the reason the bones were buried at public expense and the ghost was never seen again. It seems likely Dickens knew of this tale and developed the idea of chains into a kind of afterlife punishment. Rattling chains also feature in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, but since have rarely featured in ghost stories, except in parody.

Apart from what to wear, there’s also the question of how a ghost should move. In R.S. Hawker’s 1867 tale The Botathen Ghost the spectre ‘floated along the field like a sail upon a stream, and glided past the spot where we stood, pausing’ and the apparition is even compared to what the ancient writers describe as lemures, who ‘swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.’ But all options are open. In Charlotte Riddell’s 1882 story The Open Door (not to be confused with Margaret Oliphant’s tale with the same title) there’s a ghost that fights like a wild-cat, ‘shifting her body as though she had not a bone in it,’ and in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s The Story of the Rippling Train (1887) there’s a phantom which ‘came always rippling in, till at last it began to rise as it still came on, and I saw that the figure, a tall graceful woman’s figure, was slowly advancing, backwards of course, into the room… I cannot describe the motion, it was not like ordinary walking.’ Later a living person enters the room and he passed through the ghost ‘as you may walk through a wreath of mist or smoke.’