From Wynyard’s Gap the livelong day,
The livelong day,
We beat afoot the northward ways
We had travelled times before.
The sun-blaze burning on our backs,
Our shoulders sticking to our packs,
By Foss way, fields, and turnpike tracks
We skirted sad Sedge-Moor ...
O doubt not that I told him then,
I told him then,
That I had kept me from all men
Since we joined lips and swore.
Whereat he smiled, and thinned away
As the wind stirred to call up day ...
– Tis past! And here alone I stray
Haunting the Westfield Moor. Thomas Hardy, A Trampwoman’s Tragedy
Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;
Whither, O whither, will its whim now draw me? Thomas Hardy, After A Journey
They hail me as one living,
But don’t they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?
I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A pale past, screening
Ashes gone cold ... Thomas Hardy, The Dead Man Walking
I idly cut a parsley stalk,
And blew therein towards the moon;
I had not thought what ghosts would walk
With shivering footsteps to my tune. Thomas Hardy, On a Midsummer Eve
Something tapped on the pane of my room
When there was never a trace
Of wind or rain, and I saw in the gloom
My weary Beloved’s face. Thomas Hardy, Something Tapped
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
Ghosts are real ... The first time I saw one I was ten years old. It was my mother’s. Black Cholera had taken her. Crimson Peak 2015 starring Mia Wasikowska & Jessica Chastain & Tom Hiddleston & Charlie Hunnam & Jim Beaver & Burn Gorman & Doug Jones et al, director Guillermo del Toro, opening commentary
The ambiguity of the Ghost is of fundamental importance. Philip Edwards, Tragic Balance in Hamlet
The treatment of the Ghost raises rather trickier problem. There is no doubt that the Ghost ought to thrill even a blasé, sophisticated modern audience. Often it doesn’t; the key to doing so may be found in something Charles Marowitz wrote in his Introduction to his College Hamlet; ‘What is frightening about a ghost is not its unearthiness, but its earthliness: its semblance of reality divorced from existence’. Peter Davidson, The Comedy of ‘Hamlet’
To producers such as Peter Hall in 1965, the Ghost assumed super-human proportions, standing 8 to 12 feet high depending on which theatre critic one read. ibid.
The tonal ambiguity matches to perfection – or rather, realises dramatically in performance – the uncertainties attendant on the Ghost for Hamlet and us. Shakespeare keeps prompting our uncertainty by his choice of words, and his requirements for stage movement. ibid.
The play opens in murky light, on a cold battlement, and its first line is a question. Soon, a ghost appears, but he does not speak. He speaks to no one, throughout the play, but Hamlet. By revealing the ghost to eyes other than Hamlet’s – indeed to the audience – Shakespeare establishes its objective reality, validates its existence. The presence of the sceptical, rational Horatio emphasises that the ghost is not a figment hallucinated by a fevered mind. The ghost is as real as a ghost can be.
What is ambiguous is the import of the ghost, not just whether it is a ‘spirit of health or goblin damn’d’, but what its message really means. Maynard Mack and Harry Levin have pointed out that the entire play occurs in an atmosphere of ambiguity, irony, and interrogation. Marilyn French, Chaste Constancy in ‘Hamlet’
First he recounts the overall fact of the murder, and the cover story given out ... And within a few lines, the ghost is attacking not Claudius, but his queen. ibid.
In general, the world that surrounds Hamlet is as morally ambiguous as the actual world. Claudius is a good ruler; he loves his wife and is patient with her difficult son. ibid.
G Wilson Knight suggests that ‘the question of the relative morality of Hamlet and Claudius reflects the ultimate problem of the play’. But that relativity embraces others too. ibid.
9The Ghosts in revenge plays consistently resist unequivocal identifications, are always ‘questionable’ in one of the senses of the word. Dead and not living, visitants at midnight (the marginal hour) from a prison-house which is neither heaven or hell, visible to some figures on the stage but not to others, and so neither real nor unreal, they inaugurate a course of action which is both mad and sane, correct and criminal. Catherine Belsey, Revenge in ‘Hamlet’
The Ghost calls Hamlet deep into this world of disruption. Its invitation to decapitate the body politic seems a horrific charge. John Hunt, A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in ‘Hamlet’
What is frightening about a ghost is not its unearthliness, but its earthliness: its semblance of reality divorced from existence. Charles Marowitz, College Hamlet, Introduction
Do the dead haunt everyday objects? In Atlanta the pilots of a crashed airliner return from the grave. Can an aeroplane be possessed? In Britain the near-fatal attack on a boy is blamed on a painting … After an earthquake in New Zealand a man is attacked by a ghost. Weird or What? s3e4: Curses, Discovery 2012
Millions of us claim we’ve not only encountered them in our homes but almost anywhere and in anything. ibid.
45 million in US who believe in ghosts. Phenomenon s1e14: The Lost Archives, Unknown Encounter
Some say there are spirits who walk among us. Claims of strange ghostly phenomena have been reported all over the world. Bizarre sounds, mysterious photos. Paranatural s2e6: The Haunted, 2012
In the US mass sightings of a new and terrifying paranormal phenomena labelled shadow people. The Unexplained Files s2e11: Shadow People & The Sun Miracle
At Preston Castle a new and even more terrifying phenomenon has been reported: shadow people. ibid.
Huge, dark forms often human in shape. ibid.
A ghostly apparition in the dark of night: what was it and why did it come? There are stories of ghosts and of hauntings to suit every taste, from the playful to the macabre. But those who have studied ghosts claim to have discerned patterns in their behaviour. What might be set down as Rules of the Haunt. In Search of s1e18 … Ghosts, History 1977