Boo! And happy Halloween, dear readers. This day’s habits and festivities draw from a number of traditions across quite a wide spread of time, but some of the most interesting are from 19th century Europe and North America. Take this picture from the 1860s, for instance, showing a woman having a fright from a ghost. That testifies to the new interest in “spiritual photography” made possible by the invention of a camera and a fascination with spirits.
Séances and Spiritualism were also common trends from that century, and a fascinating reason for this is because of the development of the telegraph. For the first time, messages from thousands of miles away could be transmitted. Space seemed to be able to collapse with people half a world away communicating with each other– could the barrier separating life and death be similarly transcended?.
Mary Todd Lincoln conducted séances while in the White House to commune with her dead children. Only a few decades before, in 1847, the Fox sisters of New York infamously began their lifelong hoax to convince others that the displaced knockings that transpired when they were around came from ghostly beings.
Although the exclamation “Boo!” had existed centuries before, as a sort of scare word (a certain Gilbert Crokatt claimed in 1738 that “boo” was “a word that’s used in the north of Scotland to frighten crying children”), by the 19th century it had gotten attached to ghosts and frightening monsters.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between modern ghosts and those of the Victorian era is that today ghost stories and hauntings are associated with Halloween. In the Victorian period, they were most popular at Christmas time. Ho ho ho . . .
Sources: _The Guardian_, “Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them,” Kira Cochrane, Dec 28, 2013, Forrest Wiccan, “When did ghosts start saying “boo!’?” _Slate_, 2011, Oct 28., Image: Hulton Archive: Getty Images
