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RB: My mother lived by 8., where D.B. lives. She had a brother thai lived
upon the hill, raised a big family and ... night after night afler they'd
gone to bed, they'd hear this desperate racket, just as if someone was
beating down the house, and that went on and on, and he used 10 be
frightened. He had brothers and sisters and he used to tell them all, ilod
they got together. They didn't have much money to have a mass. They
got together, and each of them gave two dollars or something and my
mother was one. Then she had to go to the priest and ask to have the
mass. Anyway, she went, and she was dubious about telling him, you
know. She said: "Well, Father, I really don't know who I'm having
this mass for," and she told the story. He answered: "How would you
like it if you lived in the house with him?" That house out there, that
parish house was always haunted. That was the answer he made to
her. t
The Catholic Church thus gained control over ghosts by submilling them to its
superior power over evil. Thus "tamed," ghosts, however obnoxious, were "pitiful
creatures in need of prayer;" at the same time, their plight resulting from unrepented sin
also put the living under control:
Peter Smith from Freshwater was a soldier in France in WWI. During an
artillery barrage he had his head blown off and was buried in France.
About four years later his wife, Ellen, was in bed one night when she
heard something coming over the stairs. She opened the bedroom door
and saw her husband standing at the head of the stairs without a head.
Somehow he knew it was her husband. Then it vanished. This happened
four nights in a row. Finally, Ellen went to the priest to see what it meant.
The priest asked her if she were saying any prayers for her husband. She
said that lately she wasn't saying them regularly. So the priest advised her
to say a few masses for his soul; she did and the ghost was never secn
again.2
One report suggests that supernatural stories were often told by the priest to "put the
fear of the Lord in people," or by parents to pUllheir children in awe of the priest. 3 So,
as medieval ghosts essentially upheld the Church's moral tcaching, their descendants
continued to enforce standard social norms. Their appearances, in all cases, were
motivated by some definite purpose; they carne back to denounce specific injustices and
unsuspected evil-doers, or rectify some social arrangement. Following the Refomlation,
while "papist ghosts" might still ask masses for their sou), others merely craved proper
burial, or served "supernatural detection" with an expertise extending from professional
crime to domestic drama, such as broken promises and child neglect. Their sphere of
IMUNFLA 87·159/CI2036.
2MUNFLA ms 66·004c, p. 16.
3 MUNFLA ms 79-752, p. 39.