Halloween special: Three Medieval Ghost Stories and My One Encounter with a Ghost

'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages

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To celebrate my birthday—yes I was a Halloween baby—I decided to do a short episode recounting my one up-close and personal experience with a ghost. No, it was not a ghost of some one who died in the Middle Ages. In fact, I don’t know who it was. But since ‘Tis But A Scratch” is a medieval podcast, I start with three ghost stories from the Middle Ages.

It probably comes as no surprise that medieval people believed in ghosts, and ghost stories are scattered through medieval monastic chronicles, hagiographies, preaching manuals, and medieval literature. Ghost stories in medieval England, France, and Germany are mostly about apparitions of the sinful dead to living relatives. These began proliferating in the eleventh century, at the same time that the Catholic Church was developing its theology of Purgatory. Monks and preachers used these stories to emphasize the need to purge one’s sins, even after death. When the Church introduced the idea that the living could lessen the suffering of the dead in Purgatory by doing good deeds or contributing lands and money to monasteries and churches in return for prayers, these stories were used by preachers as fund raisers. The tradition in medieval Scandinavia was different. There the ghosts are not spirits but revenants, reanimated corpses.

I’ve chosen examples illustrating each genre. Two of them were written down around the year 1400. The first is from an Icelandic Saga, Grettir’s Saga. The second is from a collection of twelve ghost stories written by a monk of Byland Abbey, in Yorkshire. Both are about revenants, reanimated corpses, but of very different sorts. Rounding things out is a ghost story from an earlier source, the autobiography of an early twelfth-century French Benedictine abbot, Guibert of Nogent.

I’m afraid that you might find my personal ghost story a bit dull in comparison, but I can assure you that it was anything but dull when I lived it. And just in case you are wondering: NO! I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GHOSTS!.

Happy Halloween!

I used the following English translations in this podcast (each of which I emended slightly):

Grettir’s Saga, trans. G. H. Hight (1914): https://www.sagadb.org/grettis_saga.en2

“Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” trans. A.J. Grant, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 27 (1924): 362-379, posted on the “Medieval Histories” website: https://www.medieval.eu/medieval-histories-time-travelling-to-the-middle-ages/

C.C. Swinton Bland of , The Autobiography of Guibert, Abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, trans. C.C. Swinton Bland (London: George Routledge: New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925), which I revised somewhat following Paul J. Archambault, trans., A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent (Penn State U. Press, 2004). Bland’s translation is in the public domain and posted in its entirety at https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/guibert-vita.asp

This episode includes a short snippet from "The Unknown," a track from KeMi's album "Shadowscapes." https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/album/shadowscapes/13040

Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com

Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at [email protected]