The Importance of Ghost Stories

Upon recently re-reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, I began to consider that the book can be described as many things: a gothic novel, a classic, and even a romance.  Along with these things, however, it is also a ghost story.

I have long held the belief that myths, fairy tales, and ghost stories hold great importance for society.  They are the telling-tales: stories spoken around firelight, generation after generation, that gather listeners together in communal wonder.  They help to bind groups of people together, and each has a particular important purpose.  If fairy tales serve to “tell us that dragons can be beaten,” as G. K. Chesteron acknowledged, then ghost stories exist to remind us to look back.  For, amid the thrills and chills of a ghostly tale, there is always a different sort of narrative: a story about someone’s life.  There is nearly always a description of how someone lived, or a guess about who someone was, that seems to offer some reason for the haunting in the tale.

After all, although Catherine’s ghost only appears once in Wuthering Heights, and appears to have possibly been a figment of the protagonist Lockwood’s imagination, it is that apparition which drives his investigation into the past of the manor house forward.  If the ghost had not appeared, Lockwood’s other discoveries– a diary, and three names written on a wall– would have been curiosities to consider, but nothing more.  It was the ghostly turn of events that really pushed him to scrutinize beyond idle pondering the lives of the house’s departed dwellers.

That, of course, is the importance of ghost stories.  While histories make us curious about great personages and events, ghost stories make us curious about regular people and daily life.  Without them, very often the past would stay buried along with the dead.