Lavater’s “Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght”

People have claimed to see ghosts throughout recorded history. Stories about the “revanants,” or “those who return,” commonly state that these spirits startle the living, but they have not always been associated with evil forces. The association of ghosts with malevolence really got going in Ealy Modern Europe with the emergence of Protestant Christianity. Hitherto, the Catholic Church’s belief in Purgatory (a sort of halfway-house for the dead who haven’t quite made it into heaven) allowed for an idea that deceased spirits might just be giving or seeking advice, haunting their own corpses, or even that they possessed benign agendas. But a Christian world without Purgatory meant that the dead must be coming back either from heaven or from hell. It was the European physician and prolific writer Ludwig Lavater who strongly promoted the idea that most ghosts must be emanating from the latter. In his _Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght_, Lavater’s 1569 book got translated for an English-speaking audience, who were receptive to the idea that ghosts were mostly evil — perhaps devils disguised as the dead — and that they probably had an ulterior motive to lure humans into hell . . .