Women and Ghosts in Eighteenth-Century England

Reveals how eighteenth-century ghost hunting developed scientific methods later used by Victorian psychical researchers, highlighting women’s significant role in documenting paranormal experiences and offering perspectives often absent from male-dominated historical science

Women and Ghosts in Eighteenth-Century England provides an exploration of eighteenth-century hauntings in the words of the women who experienced them. These female narratives of ghostly experiences formed the foundations for the psychical research that continues today.

The investigation of haunted houses was a serious, scientific practice long before the Victorian era, and the methodologies of night-time vigils and record keeping, which psychical researchers employed in the nineteenth century, were established in the long-eighteenth century. The witnessing, story-telling and recording of paranormal experiences have created a scientific working space for women when other areas of science have, historically, been barred to them. And, because many of the resources available to us today have been written by women, they provide researchers with insight at variance with other areas of historical science which have been recorded by men. Just as Mina Harker’s diary adds empathetic depth to the novel Dracula (1897), the female ghost hunters of a hundred years before help us to understand the emotional impact of ghostly experiences on a society more inclined to believe in the paranormal than today.