This chapter explores how plots centred on family togetherness or romance were used to manage representations of trauma in stories about soldiers returning from World War One. The focus is on stories that encapsulate anxieties around homecoming. These stories both evoke the Freudian uncanny and move beyond it by emphasising that the home becomes the place where identity is restored. These restorations take place within reassuring, textually familiar plots about positive family ties which undo the otherwise radical potential of the disruptive Gothic ghost. The ghost story haunts accounts of traumatised soldiers, but the soldier’s return to health casts off the ghost-like figures that they have become.

It was noted in the Introduction that the ghosts of war bear some imprint from ghosts who are familiar from the Walpolean tradition. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, they demand to be remembered and are often seeking revenge. In Walpole there are also family dramas and political dynasties which become haunted by figures from the past. The family is disrupted by the demands of the political plot which illustrates that private and public worlds are hostile to each other. This is a tension which underpins many of the tales discussed here about soldiers returning from dangerous duty to enter the private world of the home. These soldiers need to be demobilised to enable their entry into the home, even while the home functions to help restore their pre-war selves. These narratives also reflect the anti-Enlightenment ethos of Walpole’s novel as they place the emphasis on emotional loss and psychological disorientation, even while they advance some model of a cure. The return to the pre-war self is, as we shall see, a difficult restoration because the war-produced self is often a stubborn figure who is difficult to consign to the past – like Walpole’s ghosts, they articulate a grievance, although one which love might resolve. Walpole’s ghosts, like Freud’s uncanny, are culturally evoked, but for specific cultural reasons become repudiated. Laying the past to rest requires an exorcism.

This chapter argues that the uncanny plays an important role in a certain type of ghost story which centres on the return of traumatised soldiers. The uncanny is a key concept in Gothic Studies, where it is critically employed to explore the feelings of unease provoked by the ghost. In tales about ghostly, psychologically missing, soldiers the uncanny is unconsciously developed and frequently challenged. Such tales often evoke a Gothic framework about lost selves and emotional disorientation, and they frequently establish familiar Gothic structures based on the ghost story, before attempting to move beyond them.