Véronique Campion-Vincent | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 24, 2000

Gillian Bennett, Alas, Poor Ghost. Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse, Logan (Utah), Utah State University Press, 1999, 223 p.

Personal experience stories are the core of Gillian Bennett’s research into contemporary supernatural folklore, linked to widespread “informal belief systems, created and expressed through a network of interactions”.

This new edition, expanded and extensively revised, of Traditions of Belief. Women and the Supernatural (1987) includes a new chapter, (chapter 3 written with gerontological psychologist Kate Bennett) discussing “the experience of bereavement and the sense of presence which we believe are basic contexts for vernacular beliefs about personal contact with the dead” (77-114) and closes, on chapter 5 with a renewed presentation of the historical context of modern conceptions about ghosts: evocation of three famous ghosts (Hamlet’s father, the Cock Lane Poltergeists, the Vanishing Hitchhiker), two competing interpretations of ghosts at the end of the 19th century (that of rationalist Clodd and of “believer” Lang, both folklorists respectively illustrating the traditions of disbelief and of belief), “a history of belief in the power of the dead to witness and respond to the lives of the living” (139-172).

Chapter 1 presents the study briefly (a more extensive presentation is given in the appendices) and outlines the worldview of the respondents (9-38). Chapter 2 discusses the believers’memorates and presents their beliefs (39-75) while chapter 4 analyzes the memorates “to show how personal experience is transmuted into narrative form and shaped into philosophical debates between the narrator and an imaginary opponent”(115-137). For Gillian Bennett, this analysis shapes the picture of contemporary belief. These three chapters rely heavily upon the memorates collected and analyzed with great finesse by Gillian Bennett.

Never dogmatically defending a thesis, but scrupulously adhering to the narratives through which the Manchester women express their beliefs, this book delineates an intriguing picture of the complexities of contemporary beliefs in the supernatural and in the continued presence of the dead amongst us.