Introduction
In 1703, a group of Londoners in Fans Alley were disturbed by the post-mortem appearance of their former neighbour Elinor Norway. Fans Alley was a small narrow lane, just off Goswell Street, tucked away at the edge of the northern border of the city, occupied by approximately 16 householders of little means. Norway had died a week or so earlier, shortly after giving birth to her fourth (or possibly fifth) child, leaving all her children orphaned and in the care of the local parish, as her husband had died a few months earlier. With the deceased’s house left unoccupied, one week after her burial, neighbours across the road reportedly observed a ‘strange and amazing light’ inside Norway’s bedchamber. Word quickly spread around the neighbourhood. The following night more neighbours turned out to watch for the light. It appeared at 12, initially blue, then glowing brighter and brighter. Just as the neighbours were wondering where this light could be coming from, ‘the Ghost or Apparition of the Deceased Elinor Norway visibly appeared’ in the chamber, holding a flaming torch.Footnote 1 She walked two or three times around the room and appeared to be looking for something. Witnesses observed that Norway wore the exact same clothes she had in life. The tale quickly spread beyond the tiny alley, becoming the lore of one of London’s many ghost story pamphlets published in the early eighteenth century. As the anonymous author rendered it, within days, ‘many curious Persons’ were waiting outside the house at midnight to see the ghost, who hardly ever failed to appear.Footnote 2 Elinor Norway’s nightly ghostly visits were a community event that elicited ‘great Terror and Consternation’ and put the otherwise unremarkable Fans Alley on the supernatural map.Footnote 3
This article examines the role of ghost stories in constructing a supernatural map of an urban environment in which community ties were strengthened through the affective resonances of shared supernatural stories and experiences. Based on a close reading of five ghost stories published between 1661 and 1705 – a period in which there was a surge in the publication of ghost pamphlets – this article argues that the circulation of ghost stories did more than reflect the fears and anxieties of urban dwellers in early modern London: ghost stories built community through collective consciousness and affective reactions to fear.Footnote 4 They helped to forge a common imaginary of the physical city and its supernatural hauntings, one that was both grounded in the particularity of tight urban spaces and that transcended the distinct local neighbourhoods that dotted and defined London’s growing metropolis. This article will focus on five ghost stories from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to demonstrate how tales of urban ghosts reveal hidden geographies that were imbued with individual and collective emotion. As well as the above case of Elinor Norway, I will also explore the 1661 story of Mr Powell, who lived near the Falcon Inn at the Bank-Side in Southwark; the 1679 case of Mrs Adkins, a midwife who lived in Middle-Row, Holborn; the 1691 case of John Dyer, a sawyer who lived in Deadman’s Place also in Southwark; and the 1705 case of Mrs Mabell, who lived and died in Rosemary Lane, a somewhat down-at-heel area in London’s East End.Footnote 5 These five narratives have been chosen for the different ways in which they highlight the role of ghost stories in individual and communal conceptions of space and place, and the importance of space in fostering emotional reactions to ghosts.Footnote 6 We also see how the (usually anonymous) authors of ghost stories employed shared perceptions of space and place to amplify their appeal and impact, and to add veracity to an otherwise doubtful narrative. Taken as a group, these five narratives demonstrate how the inclusion of specific spatial details was crucial to creating affective responses to ghostly tales within densely populated urban environments – and how these ghostly narratives can shed light on community consciousness, neighbourliness and shared emotional experience.
By focusing on the importance of space and place in ghost stories, this article adds to the growing scholarship on the role of the supernatural in defining the imagined topographies of cities. The historical study of ghosts has seen something of a boom in recent years. After a long hiatus during which ghost research tended to be the domain of folklorists, literary scholars and cultural theorists, historians have returned with a number of recent articles that use specific case studies to make a broader social point.Footnote 7 While much has been said about the importance of ghosts in shaping urban space, nearly all of this commentary has been reserved for the modern period.Footnote 8 Hauntings and ghostly presences were deeply tied to specific spaces and places in the early modern world. Ghost pamphlets used spatial clues to ground their narratives, a trend that has not been the subject of sustained study. It was common for ghostly tales to include specific details such as the exact address of the house haunted, the names of the witnesses or the location where the ghost had previously lived. The local details of each case – the ‘specificity of place’ – were important to the veracity of the ghost story.Footnote 9 Karl Bell, in his study of nineteenth-century Portsmouth, argued that ‘ghosts were intimately woven into people’s lives and the town’s material fabric through their haunting of houses, inns and particular streets’.Footnote 10 At a neighbourhood level, oral retellings of the story meant that ‘the ghostly narrative reinforced local bonds to particular sites, marking them out as significant reference points in one’s mental map of the locality’.Footnote 11
Karl Bell’s work on the modern supernatural city has been instrumental in shaping our understanding of the connections between supernatural belief and urbanity. While I agree with Bell that ghost stories reveal hidden geographies and further our understanding of the supernatural cityscape, I want to emphasize that when looking at the early modern world, the way in which ghost stories were rendered as affective narratives is key. These pamphlets provide untapped clues into the cultural forces and fears that shaped how Londoners at the turn of the eighteenth century made sense of the paradoxical nature of both the unfamiliarity and forced closeness of urban spaces.Footnote 12 This article combines an exploration of the affective and spatial dynamics present in printed tales of early modern ghosts to shed light on how these stories spread throughout and were understood in tight-knit communities. In doing so, it takes a new approach to these narratives by arguing for their importance in highlighting how individual and affective responses were shaped by descriptions of specific spatial environments.
It does this in three main ways: first, by looking at how the specificity of place as rendered in ghostly tales furthers our understanding of conceptions of community and neighbourliness in the early modern urban world; second, by exploring the importance of the positioning of affective objects in creating a collective community response; and third, by highlighting that pamphleteers’ focus on the fear caused by ghostly presences was made more powerful by their specific evocation of conceptions of space and place in describing this fear, and that the way in which fear of ghosts manifested was inherently tied to conceptions of community. As such, looking at how spatial details in pamphlets were designed to elicit specific emotional responses – and looking at how the specificity of place described may have heightened that emotional response – adds an additional layer to our understanding of the supernatural cityscape. This article combines an exploration of the affective and spatial dynamics present in printed tales of early modern ghosts to demonstrate how supernatural tales are a key medium through which to explore conceptions of urban space at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Neighbourhood and the affective resonances of space
A quick survey of the state of London and Southwark in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is necessary to understand the worlds inhabited by those discussed below. By 1680, London had ‘stretched east and west into a continuous and shapeless metropolis’ incorporating the city, Westminster and Southwark.Footnote 13 By 1720, when John Strype produced a new version of John Stow’s famous 1598 Survey of London, the capital had grown from about 200,000 people in 1600 to more than half a million.Footnote 14 Roughly half of this population lived within the City of London, and half resided in the surrounding suburbs.Footnote 15 Until the early nineteenth century, London was the only English city with a population of more than 100,000.Footnote 16 London was geographically vast, with one estimate from the 1720s suggesting it covered some 250 miles, with 2,175 streets.Footnote 17 The differing levels of wealth, health, household size, social structure, living patterns and social dynamics across the city were also striking, and were strongly exacerbated by the growing size of the city.Footnote 18 When combined with environmental and social factors, as well as new patterns of consumption, we see that early modern London was an ‘increasingly fragmented metropolis’, one made up of distinct areas, each of which had their own sense of neighbourhood and community.Footnote 19
In the majority of early modern ghost stories, ghosts returned to a physical location to right a wrong. The way their actions were described was situated strongly within the community to which they had belonged before death, and these actions affected those same communities. The narratives were not situated in the urban or in London broadly; they were specifically placed within very small, tight-knit neighbourhoods within the capital, thus suggesting an image of urban space not as a homogenous mass but as several entwined but separate communities. Paying attention to how space was described in ghostly narratives can further our understanding of how Londoners viewed their environment. I do not intend to argue that ghost stories are the only types of pamphlets that can shed light on ideas about urban space; pamphlets on crime, accidents or disasters can also be analysed in this way.Footnote 20 But with their focus on the key role of space to conceptions of haunting and the returning dead, ghost pamphlets are especially equipped for this task. Ghosts were tied to physical space and could not be understood without spatial clues. As such, ghost pamphlets are well-placed to further our conceptions of urban space at the turn of the eighteenth century.
London was not one amorphous whole in the late seventeenth century but, as comes through clearly in ghostly narratives, was made up of what Jeremy Boulton has coined a ‘mosaic of neighbourhoods’.Footnote 21 The extent to which neighbourliness was a feature of early modern London has long been debated. On the one hand, we might argue that the size of the capital contributed to the so-called ‘death of neighbourliness’ but, on the other, we might suggest that the growth of London may have led to the development of the ‘micro-neighbourhood’, a community made up of only a few streets or alleys.Footnote 22 Ghost stories provide an argument for the importance of both these conceptions of London. These tales were tightly tied to specific streets, thus suggesting a very close conception of community. But they also brought in spectators from outside of these neighbourhoods, thus expanding the spread of the supernatural story. ‘Immediate neighbourhood’ was very important to early modern Londoners but, at the same time, people of both sexes did frequently move outside their immediate locality.Footnote 23 For all this debate though, it seems that ‘the dichotomy between anonymity and tight neighbourhood identities seems in part to be false one’.Footnote 24 Instead of tightly held and immovable communities, early modern London was made up of ‘a complex web of interwoven communities’.Footnote 25 Within these communities, neighbourliness still existed ‘not only as an ideal but as a relational mode – a way of negotiating community’.Footnote 26 Early modern neighbourhoods may or may not have had ‘clearly defined’ geographical parameters, but they were certainly made up of ‘a peculiarly significant kind of local social space’, which conferred upon its members a sense of belonging and a sense of identity as well as a personal knowledge of that space and its inhabitants.Footnote 27 For all but ‘the most migrant members’ of society, ‘the neighbourhood formed the most immediate and inescapable social contract’.Footnote 28
Let us keep this conception of neighbourhood and community in mind as we return to the ghost of Elinor Norway. Stories such as this one suggest that neighbourliness was not in decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but, rather, was being remade in urban environments through cultural artefacts like pamphlets. Neighbourliness carried with it expectations of behaviour, community norms and moral values that were specific to place. In ghostly tales, we see these expectations vocalized and, as in the tale of Norway, a tale of a ghost unable to rest after going against her husband’s and neighbours’ wishes (see below), we see the results of expectations unfulfilled. Norway lived in Fans Alley, off Goswell Street, which was small and narrow, located at the very edge of the northern border of the city, ‘characterised by inns and stables and far from salubrious’.Footnote 29 Land tax records show that in 1693, ten years before the appearance of Norway’s ghost, the street had 16 occupants.Footnote 30 The anonymous author of Norway’s tale situated her deeply within her community, both through specific references to her husband and children, and through the reference to parish relief. Descriptions of the ghost were grounded in local details that would have only been relevant to those who either knew the neighbourhood or had known Norway in life. Her lodgings were described in detail, as were her family situation and even her clothing. The account also gives a strong sense of neighbourliness. The pamphleteer was keen to point out that Norway’s children were left to the care of the parish which had ‘taken great care of them; having sufficiently provided for their supports and bring up’.Footnote 31 Parish relief, especially after the 1662 Act of Settlement, was a key way in which the centrality of the parish to one’s identity and community was established.Footnote 32 Norway’s appearance was authenticated by her immediate neighbours, who gathered together to witness her walking. They also collectively judged the reasons for this walking, highlighting their shared disapproval of her decision to go against her husband’s advice in allowing her young son to go to sea.Footnote 33 The first witnesses to the encounter were immediate neighbours, and those neighbours came together to observe the ghost, judge her behaviour in life and collectively witness her punishment, that is, being unable to rest in death.
Elinor Norway’s haunting was not, though, only deemed relevant to her immediate neighbours, and word of it spread quickly throughout the city. Ghostly tales spread rapidly at a local level and had special significance to those who knew the main actors and spaces. These tales reached large audiences through their publication in cheap, easily accessible broadsheets, ballads and pamphlets. This was especially true of London pamphlets: the sites of many London ghost stories were often located very nearby to the printing houses that produced them, as were the taverns and inns which helped their circulation. This proximity created a ‘lively community of gossip and print’ and allowed for the ‘everyday experiences and beliefs’ of ordinary people to easily find their way into print.Footnote 34 In this way ghostly tales were able to reflect and appeal both to the local community in which they were grounded but also to a much wider audience through messages that could apply to all. All these forms of communication – oral retellings, printed texts, gossip, rumour and so on – contributed to an individual’s ‘mental map’ of the city.Footnote 35 Supernatural stories represented another layer of early modern Londoners’ spatial conception of their neighbourhood and their city more broadly.Footnote 36 In Norway’s case, immediate neighbours were the first witnesses to the apparition; but as word spread, people came from further afield. We see this same phenomenon in reports of two ghosts we will discuss in more detail later: that of Mrs Adkins (1679), a story in which people came to examine the bones of two children; and Mrs Mabell (1705), a case in which ‘hundreds’ flocked to the site of a haunting. All three of these appearances were initially witnessed by those who knew the deceased. While being filled with local details, the case of Elinor Norway and her inability to rest in peace also served as a strong message to women who went against the advice of their husbands and approval of their neighbours.
Affective objects and spatially shaped hauntings
As well as taking care to locate hauntings very specifically in their immediate geography, some pamphleteers also emphasized the ways in which specific objects could be used to bring communities together. These objects, when placed at the centre of a neighbourhood, became imbued with supernatural and cultural significance that anchored the haunting to a particular part of the city. The first example of this phenomenon concerns Mrs Adkins, a midwife who lived on Middle Row and died in Scroop’s Court.Footnote 37 After her death, Mrs Adkins’ ‘fleeting shade’ in her shape and likeness was sighted around town, causing her former neighbours to physically flee from her wandering form.Footnote 38 Although Mrs Adkins was visible to a number of people, in several locations, she made her most striking appearance to a maidservant who was living at her old address in Middle Row. Around 9 pm one Tuesday night in the spring of 1679, on walking upstairs to fetch her mistress’ bedclothes, this unnamed maid saw the ghost of Mrs Adkins sitting on top of a cupboard. The ghost had a ghastly countenance and belched flames of fire, a sight which caused the maid to become ‘pale with fear’, but the ghost reassured the maid, telling her not to be afraid.Footnote 39 The ghost then instructed the maid to tell her grandchild Mary to take up the tiles in the hearth in her house and bury what she found. Then, in a flash of lightning, the ghost vanished. After recovering from this incident, the maid told her employers. They were inclined to disbelieve her; until, that is, they heard the rumours that others about town had seen this same apparition on several different occasions.Footnote 40 The truth of the maid’s claims being thus substantiated by neighbourhood gossip, they decided to dig and, on taking up the boards under the fireplace, found the bones of two children. According to the printed accounts, these children had lain buried for a great many years and were suspected to have been illegitimate and killed to protect the unknown mother’s reputation. After their discovery, the bones were publicly displayed at the neighbourhood pub, The Cheshire Cheese.Footnote 41
These events took place within streets of each other. Middle Row, a block of houses demolished in the 1860s, once sat prominently in the middle of High and Low Holborn, near Gray’s Inn Lane, and was often seen as a nuisance blocking the flow of traffic. Scroop’s Court lay only a few minutes’ walk to the east, and The Cheshire Cheese also apparently once stood on Middle Row.Footnote 42 This spatial grounding is crucial to how the ghost narrative is related, with the pamphleteer even titling the tale ‘Great News from Middle-Row in Holbourn’. As in the case of Elinor Norway, the ghost’s presence was first attested to by immediate neighbours but word then spread via the pamphlet, and people from outside the surrounding streets came to see the bones of the children. Mrs Adkins’ ghost was spatially located not just in the buildings she haunted but in the way she was described as wandering ‘around town’. In this relation, we see the ghost’s navigation of space as shaped by her previous experience. Rather than being confined to one house, Mrs Adkins’ ghost wandered, ‘around town’, perhaps mimicking her former activities as a midwife. London midwives travelled widely, and it was very unusual for them to limit their visits to one parish.Footnote 43 Instead, midwives serviced multiple parishes across their careers, travelling throughout London for repeat and new clients, with one midwife’s records showing she had clients across more than 30 parishes.Footnote 44 The words ‘around town’ may have been a specific evocation of Mrs Adkins’ lifetime wanderings.
This ghostly narration shares strong similarities with another which also emphasizes the spatial dynamics present, as well as the importance of objects displayed within the community. In the winter of 1705, more than 20 years after Mrs Adkins returned from the dead, curious Londoners flocked to Rosemary Lane in London’s East End, to stare at a hole in the ground in a decrepit and abandoned house. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, Rosemary Lane had had a reputation as a disorderly neighbourhood, a reputation that was forged in large part due to the Rag Fair, an almost daily event that attracted pickpockets, thieves and receivers of stolen goods.Footnote 45 It also had a reputation for prostitution. Rosemary Lane was one of the poorer neighbourhoods in early modern London, but it also had a number of richer residents, and higher than average numbers of female householders, like the deceased Mrs Mabell.Footnote 46 It was a close-knit neighbourhood where people from different social groups knew each other well.Footnote 47 The hole in the ground that was the focus of so much attention provided physical proof of the truth of an extraordinary tale circulated in a single-sided broadsheet printed in London the same year.Footnote 48 According to the broadsheet, an iron chest, which was said to have held £4,000, was discovered by Mrs Harvey (then living in Chancery Lane, between Holborn and Fleet Street) after her dead relative, Mrs Mabell, came back as a ghost to instruct her to dig up the chest. Mrs Mabell had formerly owned tenements in Rosemary Lane, a little street sitting in the shadow of the Tower of London, but had lost them in various legal battles, leading to the buildings falling into decay and eventual ruin. After some hesitation, Mrs Harvey employed several men to dig and, sure enough, they found the chest. Although the ghost of Mrs Mabell told Mrs Harvey that the chest was hers, at the chest’s discovery the new owners of the house also claimed ownership.
Let us compare the two tales. Mrs Mabell’s story transpired nearly entirely in Rosemary Lane, where she used to live and own property, and Mrs Adkins’ tale was confined to her old address, Middle Row, Holborn. Mrs Adkins’ and Mrs Mabell’s appearances both came with physical proof that their claims were correct, and the physical proof was displayed within the community. In Mrs Mabell’s case, the hole that once held the iron chest provided compelling evidence of the ghost story’s truth, and neighbours and visitors from further afield regularly came to gaze at it. In Mrs Adkins’ narrative, the bones of the dead children were put on display in the very same street in which they were found. These are emotional objects. As Sara Ahmed has argued, objects can be deeply tied to emotions and act as a means for an emotion to circulate. Objects, she suggests, can become ‘sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal or social tension’.Footnote 49 In ghostly narratives, these affective objects became even more capable of eliciting an emotional response when situated within a specific spatial world. The placement of these objects within spatially meaningful settings in tight-knit communities further imbued them with emotional significance and, in doing so, cemented the local importance of the narrative, which became part of a community’s shared identity. In both cases, Mrs Mabell and Mrs Adkins were important figures within their communities. Mrs Mabell was a prominent landowner, and Mrs Adkins, as a midwife, would have travelled widely and been well-known to her clients, many of whom it is likely she tended to on multiple occasions.Footnote 50 Both Mrs Adkins and Mrs Mabell were thus well-known figures who, even after death, remained part of their neighbourhoods. Their post-death appearances were used to right wrongs, not just against things that had been done to them but to the community as a whole.Footnote 51 The grounding of their tales in the exact spaces they occupied during life gave a sense of familiarity which increased the emotional impact of the narrative on those who knew the area. As the next section will demonstrate, this emotional impact would also have been increased by the specific geographies at play in early modern London.
Fear and the urban environment
The affective dimension of these supernatural encounters demonstrates how certain spaces can engender specific emotions. Although all sites have the capacity to elicit affective responses, cities are particularly rich sources from which to study these encounters. The densely populated nature of urban neighbourhoods means that they can draw out a wide ‘range of emotional responses and engagements that are collective as well as individual’.Footnote 52 Examining these emotional responses enhances our understanding of urban space. Giuliana Bruno has even gone so far as to argue that it is not possible to ‘make sense’ of a city without applying an ‘emotional lens’.Footnote 53 Our views of the city are shaped by memory, nostalgia and emotion.Footnote 54 These are not passive concepts. As Deborah Stevenson has reminded us in her study of the city, emotions facilitate action.Footnote 55 That is, in evoking emotions through dense populations and shared experiences, cities help to drive ordinary men and women’s responses to space-based events. As the spatial turn has taught us, space and place are ‘never simply background scenery to the unfolding of historical events, but active in their cultural construction’.Footnote 56 Through being located in specific urban spaces, ghostly hauntings provoked both individual and collective affective responses, and these responses dictated action. In the accounts under scrutiny here, fear, amazement, consternation and terror were all underlying aspects of the narrative. These reactions were described both verbally and somatically in printed literature and were the most common emotional reactions to the ghostly sightings described in print.
This fear was shaped by the spaces and communities in which ghosts appeared. William J. Bouwsma once famously argued that ‘towns provoked anxiety’ and claimed more broadly that the early modern period saw an increase in anxiety because of ongoing urbanization.Footnote 57 Bouwsma is just one of a number of historians who have argued that in the period between approximately 1400–1700 a ‘climate of fear’ or ‘unease’ prevailed.Footnote 58 In more recent years this view has been qualified and challenged. The preponderance of fear and anxiety in records from the early modern period may actually be a result of the greater documentary evidence that we have from this period, rather than evidence of a dramatic shift in emotional climate.Footnote 59 Fear has been, of course, a constant companion throughout history. However, it is worth considering whether there are certain environments, such as densely populated urban spaces, that lead to greater levels of fear and anxiety than others. While it would be impossible to argue that people in urban centres experienced greater levels of fear than their rural counterparts, through their densely populated neighbourhoods and vibrant oral culture, urban centres would have provided ‘an ideal breeding ground for the kind of rumours that led to the development of collective fears about the security of the community’.Footnote 60 And, as we saw above, they were especially rich environments for stories and gossip to circulate widely, both orally and in print. It is this sense of community and shared fear that came through strongly in ghostly relations. Stories of ghosts allowed people to express their own anxieties and ideas about their environment, their neighbours and ongoing spatial and social dynamics. Fear was one of the most explicit emotions present in ghostly narratives. My argument here is not that ghosts inspired fear (although they certainly did), but that the way in which fear of ghosts manifested was inherently tied to conceptions of community. In these narratives, fear acted as a mechanism for social interaction, and as a vehicle for collective fear.
Take, for example, the 1691 case of John Dyer. Dyer, a sawyer operating a public house at Deadman’s Place in Southwark, was greatly disturbed by the spirit of his late wife, Jane Dyer. Jane had recently died leaving behind three small children; she had been ‘somewhat discontented on her Death-bed’ because her husband John had lent money without her consent and she was concerned it would not be returned.Footnote 61 John and Jane had led a turbulent life, both within their marriage during which Jane was supposed to have given John much strife through her ‘peevishness and turbulent temper’, and also in their interactions with neighbours due to Jane’s temper.Footnote 62 John first experienced his wife’s ghostly presence through ‘wild and unusual Noises’ in his house which ‘proved a terrour to the whole Neighbourhood’ and left John ‘so frightful’ that he actually moved house twice in order to flee the ghost.Footnote 63 One pamphlet about the case detailed John’s exact movements. It tracked how he moved to ‘Rochester-Yard, distant from the former dwelling’ before moving again to ‘Winchester-Yard, near St. Mary Overies Stairs’, a location very close to his former residence at Deadman’s Place.Footnote 64 It is telling that the pamphleteer described Rochester Yard as ‘distant’ from Deadman’s place; the two are near neighbours, with Rochester Yard actually having a passage into Deadman’s Place.Footnote 65 This perhaps suggests the insularity of individual neighbourhoods in early modern Southwark, reinforcing the idea that early modern London neighbourhoods and ‘micro’ neighbourhoods had their own character and community. Or, it could be that the pamphleteer was personally unfamiliar with the area, and was piecing the story together from oral reports. Despite John’s attempts to outrun the ghost, it followed him, leaving him ‘almost at Deaths door for want of Rest’.Footnote 66 When the ghost did speak, she told her husband to ‘go to Barnaby-street … fetch Fifteen Pounds, and pay it to Mr. Mealing the Brewer’.Footnote 67 Barnaby Street was also very near the couple’s original address. Since the time of the ghost’s appearance, neighbours and a minister had taken turns to sit up with John every night as he was too terrified to sleep. Many of them, who also witnessed the ghost’s antics, observed John to ‘be in an extream sort of sweating, and looking very frightful’.Footnote 68 The end of the pamphlet disclosed that John remained haunted, although it ended with the reassurance that ‘all the neighbourhood affirms the reality [of the ghost]’ and stated that John ‘is visited by hundreds of People every day’.Footnote 69
As mentioned above, this narrative, told across two pamphlets, was filled with place-specific details, such as the mention of Mr Mealing the brewer at Barnaby Street, and the description of John’s exact habitations. The tale ‘presupposed a good deal of local knowledge’ through its references to local characters and locations.Footnote 70 The reader of the pamphlet would have been able to place John on their mental map of London or, if they did not know Southwark, would have been able to expand their topographical knowledge of London through this supernatural tale, thus creating a map shaped by supernatural sightings. There are other spatial dimensions at play here. John’s former wife seems only to have visited him at home, first in what would have been their shared domestic space, and then later following him to his new addresses. She also described their shared world, naming mutual acquaintances. John’s wife was tied to the domestic space that she and John shared, and, unlike Mrs Adkins who travelled widely both in life and in death, her appearances were confined to the home. We also need to think broadly about how fear acts as a mechanism for social interaction here. John was most affected by the ghost’s appearance and most frightened, presumably because his former wife was targeting him directly. But his neighbours also witnessed the ghost’s actions and affirmed its reality. Jane’s pugnacious behaviour in life would have lent credence to tales of a malevolent and violent ghost, and also increased fear within the community. In this way, the ghost’s appearance, and John’s extreme fear of that ghost, acted to bring the community together and reinforced bonds of neighbourliness and support. John’s fear was spatially bound and, in moving house, he attempted (in vain) to out-run it.
We find another Southwark example in a pamphlet of 1661 which described the ghostly appearance of Mr William Powell. Powell was a baker, recently deceased, and ‘a man eminent in the Borough of Southwark’.Footnote 71 While we do not know what Powell died of, he did make a will, while ‘sick and ill in body’ in 1660.Footnote 72 Mr Powell was first seen by his former maid, Jone Finchley, who still lived in his house, after which the news spread through word of mouth. Mr Powell was spotted by several reputable witnesses, including Mr John Simpson, formerly minister of Bishops-Gate, and ‘divers Learned Men’ who engaged in a dialogue with him.Footnote 73 Finchley explained that in the five months since Mr Powell’s death, there had been ‘a hideous noise heard in the House, and a great ratling out of one Room in to another; insomuch that his son Thomas left the House’, but she continued to live there.Footnote 74 It was only when she went outside and saw the physical form of Mr Powell standing near a pear tree, ‘his Fists knit close together, his Eyes sunk in his Head, his Face extraordinary Black, and in the same Cloaths he used to wear when he was alive’ that Finchley realized her master had come back from the dead.Footnote 75 Finchley was ‘much amaze[d] and was ‘startle[d]’ to such a degree that she experienced a ‘great trembling, quivering, and shaking, since which time she hath been very ill’ and ended up lying dangerously unwell, having fled the house for other lodgings in Southwark.Footnote 76 The house, ‘scituated near the Faulcon at the Banck-side’ remained haunted, despite attempts by ‘conjurers’ to lay the troubled spirit to rest.Footnote 77 There was much community speculation about the cause of Mr Powell’s walking; at first ‘it is conjectured’ that money must have been hidden in the garden or about the house, a supposition based on well-known narrative tropes, such as we saw in the case of Mrs Adkins above.Footnote 78 Searching for it was to no avail; although the searchers did spy money in a hole they dug, each time they saw it, it moved further and further out of reach. It was only after Simpson, the former minister of Bishops-Gate, invoked God to ask the spirit the cause of his waking, that Mr Powell revealed that he had returned to help his granddaughter who had been ‘unjustly treated’.Footnote 79 After passing this on, Mr Powell vanished, seemingly never to return.Footnote 80
The mention of the Falcon Inn in the pamphlet was clearly expected to work as a spatial marker for the reader of this account, one that would allow them to place Mr Powell’s home. As in the account from Middle Row, this story was defined by where it took place, with the pamphlets and ballad published about the case all being titled a variant of ‘strange news from the Falcon’. The Falcon Inn may have had quite an animated atmosphere, given its location at the Bankside, an area known for drinking, gambling, prostitution, theatre and bear-baiting.Footnote 81 The inclusion of a landmark building was clearly meant to orient the reader, the same tactic we saw used in the case of John Dyer. But in tying Mr Powell’s appearance so tightly to the Falcon Inn, the ghost story placed another layer of meaning onto how Southwark was perceived. As such, this tale helps to reveal a hidden geography of a city, one that is rich with emotional, communal and social significance.
Conclusion
Early modern London had no shortage of supernatural narratives. Hauntings were witnessed individually and collectively, and then spread through word of mouth and cheap print to reach a broad audience. These hauntings were nearly always grounded in very specific neighbourhoods, and those reporting on them were keen to locate them within specific spaces and communities. All five of the pamphlets discussed here included the exact location of the ghostly haunting on their title page, thus emphasizing its centrality. These tales helped to build a supernatural map of an urban environment, one in which community ties were furthered through shared supernatural stories and experiences. These spatially located hauntings remind us of the ongoing importance of neighbourhood and community in seventeenth-century London and demonstrate how supernatural beliefs nuance our understanding of the affective resonances of urban space. While previous studies of space and the supernatural have focused on the modern period, this article has shown how, in applying a spatial lens to early modern ghostly tales, we are able to understand how they were fundamentally shaped by conceptions of neighbourliness and community, and, in turn, how these stories had an important affective dimension which influenced and was influenced by the specific setting in which they were located. As such, it is clear that supernatural tales can reveal a hidden geography of early modern London, one that shaped early modern men and women’s mental maps of the city.
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to the many people who have heard or read versions of this article over the years. I first presented some of the initial research at a conference on the ‘Urban Weird’ in Hertfordshire in 2018 but was then derailed by lockdowns and the birth of my two children and the project risked being abandoned. I am deeply grateful to those who helped me get back on track, including my brothers Alex and Paul Millar (one of whom accompanied me on a ghost hunt around London) and my many colleagues in History at the University of Melbourne – especially Jenny Spinks, Paige Donaghy, Matthew Champion and Julia Bowes. I would also like to thank Katy Schumaker and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their very helpful comments.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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