Ghost stories

From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)

A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or the belief of some character(s) in them. In that sense The Tale of Genji contains ghost stories, and Shakespeare's Hamlet is a ghost story. Henry James used the ghost story premise. Stories involving ghosts are found in traditional cultures worldwide. But it was Charles Dickens who wrote the most famous ghost story A Christmas Carol, in which a miser Scrooge is visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve. They show him how he has misused his life, and their influence changes him. He celebrates the following day by ordering a great turkey for his clerk, Bob Cratchit, and it is a suitably moral tale for those who would deny others the joy of living.

In a narrower sense, the ghost story has been developed as a short story format, within genre fiction. As such, it may be a relatively restrained form of supernatural fiction, compared with the excess of the horror story. The ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, Charles Dickens, H. Russell Wakefield, and Sheridan Le Fanu are classic expressions.

Many ghost stories are passed down through the telling of them to family members and friends. However, there are often several verisons due to personal changes to the story and forgetfulness.

Japan has a long and complex tradition of ghost stories (k(w)aidan in Japanese), perhaps best-known from Lafcadio Hearn's book, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

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The English Ghost Story

In Some Remarks on Ghost Stories (1929)[1] , Montague Rhodes James identifies five key features of 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"

There is an extensive critical analysis of the work of several English ghost story writers in Jack Sullivan's book Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story From Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978).

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