As Halloween approaches, the veil between this word and the next grows thinner and, according to legend, the spirits of the dead can more easily come into contact with the living. These days, we tend to focus less on communing with our dead ancestors and more on dressing in costume, watching horror films, and telling ghost stories. But either way, we’ve still got ghosts on the brain. And what better way to celebrate ghosts than by seeking out some shining examples from Gothic literature? For the purposes of this post, I’ve limited myself to only ghosts that are fairly unambiguous supernatural apparitions of dead humans, though the Gothic genre contains a multitude of spirits that range from literal to metaphoric or imagined to everything in between. Below are five of the most memorable ghosts that appear in Gothic literature:
Alfonso the Good (from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto)
Though this ghost may be a little bit obscure today, he’s essentially the one that kicked it all off with his role in the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). Of course, ghost stories existed before the rise of this particular genre, but the figure of Alfonso the Good helped to establish how ghosts fit into the Gothic and the purposes that they serve in these stories. The Castle of Otranto begins with Alfonso’s giant helmet falling out of the sky and crushing one of the characters. From this scene, it’s immediately apparent that Alfonso is not depicted as your stereotypical translucent, floating spirit—it’s not even initially clear that there’s a ghost involved at all! Instead, the characters slowly get glimpses of a giant clad in armor, whom we eventually learn is the shade of one of the castle’s previous rulers, Prince Alfonso. Despite his unorthodox appearance, Alfonso plays much the same role as many other ghosts in Gothic literature: he brings attention to a long-ago wrong that needs righting and represents the intrusion of the past into the present.
The Bleeding Nun (from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk)
This one’s another iconic ghosts from one of the early foundational works of Gothic literature. Most of the horror in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) comes from the horrific behavior of the corrupted monk Ambrosio and his involvement with sorcery and demonic powers. But with all that going on, there’s still room for a few good ghosts in the story, too. One of these is the Bleeding Nun, a legendary ghost who is said to haunt the Castle of Lindenberg where a young woman named Agnes lives. When Agnes decides to elope with her lover Raymond, she plans to disguise herself as the ghostly nun in order to move through the castle uninhibited. Raymond gets into a carriage with the veiled nun, but they crash and he wakes up to find Agnes gone. Much later, he learns that it was never Agnes in the carriage with him at all, but the actual ghost of the Bleeding Nun. As a lustful and murderous woman in life, the Bleeding Nun represents a warning against the perils of giving into sin.
Jacob Marley (from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol)
This ghost is probably much more familiar to contemporary readers. Though we usually think of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) as a heartwarming holiday tale, it is also a rather Gothic ghost story. Scrooge’s old business partner, Jacob Marley, is the first of many spirits that visit Scrooge at night to teach him about empathy and generosity. Marley appears much as he did in life, but translucent and with a handkerchief wrapped around his head to keep his jaw from drooping gruesomely open. He is also wrapped in chains that incorporate symbols of his greed: cashboxes, purses, ledgers, and deeds. Much like the Bleeding Nun, Marley’s purpose is to serve as a warning to Scrooge—an example of the torment that awaits those who do not lead virtuous lives.
The Woman in Black (from Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black)
The titular Woman in Black from Susan Hill’s 1983 novel haunts an eerie, isolated manor called Eel Marsh House. When a lawyer named Arthur Kipps visits the estate to retrieve some documents, he keeps catching glimpses of a pale, spectral figure dressed in antiquated mourning just before a terrible tragedy strikes in the surrounding town. The townspeople believe that seeing the Woman in Black presages the imminent death of a child. But the truth is even more terrifying: the Woman in Black is a malicious spirit, actively causing the deaths of other children after having watched her own child die. Like many ghosts in Gothic literature, the Woman in Black is a woman who has been wronged. But as there is no way to undo the harm of forcing her to give up her child and then witnessing his death, her spirit cannot be placated. Instead, she serves as the antagonist of the story, perpetuating the pain and loss that she once suffered.
Beloved (from Toni Morrison’s Beloved)
The eponymous character in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is another tragic and potentially malicious spirit. Known only by the single word carved onto her gravestone, Beloved is the ghost of the infant daughter that Sethe killed in order to spare her the horrors of slavery. The child’s spirit haunts the house where Sethe and her other daughter Denver live, expressing anger and frustration by throwing objects around and causing disruptions. When the ghost is forced out of the house, she reappears in the flesh in the form of a young woman arriving on their doorstep. Over the course of the story, Beloved is depicted as both a traditional ghost—an invisible presence that interacts with objects and the house—and, more unusually, as the flesh-and-blood woman that she could have grown into. The arrival of Beloved in the flesh forces Sethe to confront her past and reckon with her trauma. But Beloved also has a negative impact on Sethe’s well-being, as Sethe’s guilt drives her to pour all of her energy into pleasing and caring for Beloved and neglect her own needs. In this way, Beloved blends together two of primary roles that ghosts play in Gothic fiction: a) reminders of issues from the past that need to be dealt with by characters in the present and b) supernatural antagonists that need to be escaped or defeated.
If you’re still looking for a last-minute Halloween costume, consider dressing as one of these iconic ghosts! Who are some of your favorite ghosts from literature? Let me know in the comments, below!