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The Mysterious Case of the Ghost Who Wasn’t There

The Mysterious Case of the Ghost Who Wasn’t There

By Amy Amendt-Raduege

Paper given at the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies (2013)

Introduction: Sometime around 1400, an anonymous monk of Byland Abbey recorded one of the strangest moments in supernatural history: the story of a ghost that wasn’t there. Nowadays, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about a disembodied ghost, but in the north of medieval England, it was an event worth mentioning. In that time and place, people thought that ghosts were what we would call revenants: animated corpses that return from the dead to trouble the living. But this story is different. This story is remarkable because the long-standing tradition of living corpses seems to be giving way to something new: the idea of a ghost that can’t be touched. Given the rather uninspired name of “Story V” by modern scholars, the narrative goes like this:

There is something else, quite amazing, which I write of. It is said that a certain woman caught a ghost and carried it on her back into a certain house, into the presence of some men, one of whom reported that he saw the woman’s hands plunging deeply into the ghost’s flesh, as if its flesh were rotten, and not solid but illusory.

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Brief though it is, this story contains one of the most puzzling and contradictory moments in medieval ghostlore: if the flesh of the corpse was not solid, how could it be caught? And if it was a physical presence, how could the woman’s fingers slip through it? Two distinct ideas about the nature of ghosts are at play here: the insubstantial spirits that populate the myths and legends of Southern Europe on the one hand, and the more solid revenants of Northern folktales and folklore on the other. The two forms meet and merge in medieval sermon stories called exempla, which ordinary people would have heard every week at church for nearly two centuries before Story V was recorded.

Click here to read this article from Academia.edu

See also: Paranormal Activity in Medieval England: The Ghosts of Byland Abbey

Top Image: Byland Abbey depicted in Antiquities of Great Britain: illustrated in views of monasteries, castles, and churches, now existing (1807)

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