SPOOKY STORIES

HISTORY

• Ghosts and their stories are present in every culture
• Thought of as a “person within a person”
• Consistently described as a white mist like apparition

GOLDEN AGE OF THE GHOST STORY

• Decline of the gothic novel beginning of WWI
• Victorian ghost stories
• A Christmas Carol

THE ENGLISH GHOST STORY

• The pretense of truth
• "A pleasing terror"
• No gratuitous bloodshed or sex
• No "explanation of the machinery"
• Setting: "those of the writer's (and reader's) own day"
• M.R. James

AMERICAN GHOSTS

• Washington Irving
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• The Turn of the Screw
• Edgar Allan Poe
• His various spooky tales

KAIDAN

• Japanese ghost stories
• Edo period Japanese ghost/scary stories
• Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

SPOOKY CONCLUSION

• The idea of ghosts is found in every part of the world
• Ghosts are often used as vehicles of prophecy
• Ghosts are modern too