By successive stages folklorists have moved away from the idea that folklore is a body of old-fashioned leftovers from some shadowy pagan past which still survives among some special group called the “folk.” They recognize too that, like every other body of knowledge from physics to philosophy, folklore may be true or it may be false, so they no longer subscribe to the popular definition that equates folklore with old wives’ tales. Nevertheless, serious scholars remain very wary about studying supernatural folklore, so there is little opportunity to revise popular stereotypes or counteract educated prejudice.

Where it is not campaigned...

It is common nowadays to think that belief in the operation of supernatural forces is declining in the developed world. Historians and psychologists have hastened to assure us that “for the most part, the dead have little status or power in modern society” (Blauner 1966, 390), that “the social function of belief in ghosts is obviously much diminished and so is their extent” (Thomas 1971, 605), and that “ever since [the] age of enlightenment, percipients in … much of Western Europe, have attributed to the dead an ever-diminishing social role” (Finucane 1982, 222). Such statements betray a concept of history...

In this chapter, I turn from an examination of the competing cultures of belief and disbelief to focus primarily on the believers’ discourse. I want to discuss three related concepts—life after death, visitations, and ghosts—as represented in the memorates the Manchester women shared with me.

Memorates are very good guides to living traditions. They are less influenced by the stereotypes of literature and popular culture than legends and more likely to reflect concepts current in the narrator’s home community. Through them, we can see not only how culture shapes individual experience, but also how individuals shape the cultural...

In the previous chapter we saw that the Manchester women believed dead family members might witness their distress and come to their rescue in times of crisis. Occasionally the witness would approach the foot of the bed at night; more often they were experienced as being “with” them or “beside” them in their daily life. Problems and prayers could be directed to them. They might be “sensed,” heard, smelt, seen; very occasionally they might even touch or be touched by the percipient (see appendix 5).

There were eight stories, however, which have not been discussed so far, in which the...

The women whose stories appear in this book relied very extensively on narratives to put over their point of view and evaluate their experiences. The framework of the Leicester study was overtly narrative, but the women in the Manchester study were never directly asked to tell a story. They were simply invited to express an opinion about serious issues such as life after death, contacts between the living and the dead, the possibility of receiving forewarnings of critical life events, and so on. Nevertheless, they did tell stories—208 altogether, 150 of which were strictly relevant to the subjects under...

As Pierre Le Loyer wrote in the sixteenth century, the supernatural “is the topic that people most readily discuss and on which they linger the longest because of the abundance of the examples, the subject being fine and pleasing and the discussion the least tedious that can be found” (quoted by John Dover Wilson in his introduction to Lavater [1572] 1929). All the stories so far have been oral ones told in the context of interviews and conversations and taken to be representative of the beliefs of many people living today.

However, popular folklore and beliefs have from time to...