Enacting Ghosts, or: How to Make the Invisible Visible

Abstract

In the Netherlands, there was always a clear distinction between Protestant and Catholic folklore. That is visible in witchcraft accusations, but it is also visible in ghost lore. This lore is here reconstructed applying a not always used source, to wit newspaper articles. Here, I will discuss how accounts of hoaxing on the one hand and misinterpreted experiences on the other, help to understand how, in this case people in the Netherlands of roughly a century to a century and a half ago, realized their imagination of the dead. Not in a paradisical kind of afterlife, or as rotten corpses in the ground, but as specific entities which permeated the boundaries between the living and the dead. These newspaper reports are confronted with the stories (or jokes) collected by folklorists. I will also discuss content, with a special focus on the phenomenon of the hoax. Hoaxsters, however, allow the researcher to engage with an extra dimension in the encounter, between the ghost and the observer there is now a third party interacting with both. (How this involves the researcher, is always a problem in historical research.) Was there an overall ghost picture? What was the reaction of bystanders? Moreover, this essay will move between story and history, between the past as it was experienced and as it was related to contemporaries, between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ to give it another name. As it will appear, the boundary between the two seems blurred but in the end turns out rather precise.

1.

Early September 1853 newspapers reported an uncanny story from Vlijmen, a small place just west of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the province of Noord Brabant in the Netherlands. Some days ago, so the account, a well-to-do Protestant woman had died, and she had been buried in the Protestant graveyard, which was adjacent to the Catholic one. A few days later, people had seen things: “frightening faces and so-called apparitions of ghosts”, specified as “fiery or flaming skulls and pearly white ghosts, in the shape of cats, which moved up and down, in all directions accross the graveyard”. This made that no one dared to come even near there anymore. Rumour had it that the soul of the deceased woman was tormented by Satan, but that he had trouble executing his job in the neighbourhood of the Catholic graveyard. This was clearly a Catholic opinion: Vlijmen was mixed confessionally and after almost two centuries of an underground existence the Catholics had just been officially recognized again. Many prayed for the poor soul.

One brave journeyman at a mill, however, decided to do some research. Armed with a bat, he went to the graveyard, where he was confronted by a skull with fiery eyes and mouth, followed by a white shape. Level-headedly, he wanted to beat away the ghosts, but before he was able to, he stumbled over an iron wire, just above the ground. From a nearby bush, a man rushed off. Our hero chased him to his house and acquainted him with the bat. Then he went back to the churchyard and discovered that the skull was nothing more than a hollow pumpkin with a light inside and the white ghost a dead cat. They had been pulled across the graveyard by iron wires.1

This is as far as the newspaper account went. The reporter praised the young man for his action and mentioned that a police report had been filed (which may mean that local research can yield more specifics). I have cited this case as one of the about 60 examples I have found in Dutch newspaper reports twenty-five years ago. They mainly stemmed from one newspaper, the Provinciale Drentsche en Asser Courant, produced in Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe in the northeastern Netherlands.2 They covered the years between 1850 and 1910. In the course of my research into the history of witchcraft in the Netherlands I had hit upon this particular source (de Blécourt 1990).

As an anthropologist, I had become fascinated by the presence of traditional witchcraft in the anthropologists’ own backyard, so to speak, while all we were thought was about witchcraft in Africa or in Surinam and other faraway places (van Wetering 1973). Of the ghost reports I had just noted down the dates, and my notes had been lying dormant until I found an opportunity to finally have a closer look at the actual reports. I had selected this province because it offered the best opportunity to find witchcraft reports of the period after the witch trials (in the Netherlands they already stopped in the late sixteenth and early seventieth centuries). I have now checked the reports from the Asser Courant against present-day newspaper databases in the Netherlands.3 In order to obtain some sense about the overall reliability of the Asser reports, I have also conducted a small, parallel research in a newspaper from Rotterdam in the western part of the Netherlands, the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad for the years 1878–1899 (it started in 1878).4

The reports in the two newspapers overlapped only slightly: of the thirty-six from Rotterdam, only six were also published in Drenthe. Already the mention of the source in the Drenthe newspaper (the Rotterdam reports do not include sources) shows a vast amount of copying between newspapers and consulting the historical newspapers online only enlarges such a finding. This, of course, primarily indicates that a particular report was popular. Others attained much less attention and my impression is that ghosts were also deemed to be good page fillers, although such differed between newspapers.5 A national newspaper as the liberal Algemeen Handelsblad left ghosts largely alone, for instance. Sometimes local papers present more detail, especially when a story runs for a couple of days or has a follow up when a court case ensued. Were all these reports genuine? Certainly, there can hardly be any doubt when the phenomenon or story attracted crowds and also when a “real cause” could be indicated. Moreover, there was always the possibility to protest against the depiction of a specific locality.

2.

Historical anthropology has been characterized as “doing fieldwork among the dead” (Burke 1987). In practice, it means archives and paperwork, but the metaphor remains catching. The two main differences with actual fieldwork are that, firstly, archival research is much more topic oriented (and as such serial) and it is always problematic to contextualize reports, to embed them in their local community, the more so since they all stem from different places. Secondly, historical anthropology is based on fixed information. The next researcher may find new material or reinterprete known records, the texts themselves remain the same (and can therefore be checked). They can be “interrogated”, but they don’t talk back. Communicating with the dead has always been a one-sided affair and this applies equally when the dead return to plague the living, especially when the then living have a hand in it. Dealing with reports as the above means shifting through layers of images and opinions and often the answers remain elusive.

Drenthe was seen as a backward province, a sort of internal colony that mainly provided peat as an energy source of the mills in the west, particularly Holland. As the intellectuals of Drenthe were very much aware of the image they generated elsewhere in the Netherlands, it gave them pleasure not just to report on the “superstition” within their own province, but also to show that people in the rest of the Netherlands could just be as uneducated and stupid. As it was stated in 1888: “One does not have to be in a remote corner in one of the provinces to find extreme cases of superstition”. In this particular case it concerned ghosts in a place within a stone’s throw of The Hague (PD&AC 20 Febr. 1888: Voorburg). Two years later a ghost incident in Amsterdam was reported.6 However, this countering of backwardness can hardly have been the motif of the editor of the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, although it is striking that five reports from Amsterdam were printed and none from Rotterdam (Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 22 Oct. 1888, 27 Febr. 1889, 25 Sept. 1890, 29 March 1893, 16 Oct. 1893). I suspect that apart from being desperately educational, ghost stories had an entertaining value, too. The general drift of newspaper reports on topics such as witchcraft and “ghost stories” everywhere was that by disposing the “reality” behind the (mistaken) beliefs, they were meant to further enlightenment. Even when no particular cause had been discovered or no particular perpetrator (“the police is still looking”), publishing the “superstition” in the public domain itself was still deemed to contribute to the education of the “supoerstitious”. The ghost reports are thus fairly evenly spread over the country, although statistics have to remain tentative.

The gist of the newspaper reports was, and still is, that people were mistaken in believing in revenants. Most of the time, it either concerned normal physical phenomena, or it turned out that pranksters had been active. Both possibilities, however, also provide some insight as to how common people imagined ghostly manifestations a process that went beyond the visual and that included sound and, in a sense, touch. Next to that, the reports reveal what people’s reactions were to manifestations of the returning dead. Any overall picture will nevertheless have to be judged as balancing between the construction of the historical anthropologist (or historian) and contemporary concepts.

3.

Ghosts were undoubtedly conceived as white. A white shape, spotted in 1855 (Meppel) was taken for a ghost and that it eventually turned out to be a piece of white cloth, snapping in the wind, only underlined the overall idea of whiteness (PD&AC 25 July 1855). Thus a figure, “coömpletely clad in white” frightened some people inside a house while his accomplishes were busy stealing 36 bags of potatoes (Wouw; PD&AC 13 March 1866; also Rotterdamsche Courant 15 March 1866; earlier: Algemeen Handelsblad 12 March 1866 and Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant 12 March 1866). In Zeeland, a young woman, dressed in white with a large crinoline, caused quite a scare (1873). Whiteness was the one major characteristic that appeared in the Rotterdam reports, too (six times) (Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 19 July 1887, 21 Febr. 1888, 9 July 1889, 29 Oct. 1889, 17 Sept. 1890, 31 July 1895). Only in Vlissingen (Flushing) a black lady appeared (PD&AC 2 Sept. 1885; Goessche Courant 29 Aug. 1885; Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 5 Sept. 1885; Zierikzeesche Nieuwsbode 8 Sept. 1885).7 In the province of Groningen, however, again a girl was frightened by a “figure dressed in white” (PD&AC 29 March 1892, from Nieuwe Provinciale Groninger Courant 26 March). But two years later in the capital of the same province, there was some discussion as to whether ghost had been red or white (Algemeen Handelsblad 16 Aug. 1894; Leeuwarder Courant 17 Aug. 1894). At least it was described as wearing a long white sheet and having red hands and fiery eyes (PD&AC 16 August 1894, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden 15 Aug. 1894). Yet white remain the disguise of choice.

In June 1895 drawn-out moaning sounds were heard at a school in Vreeswijk. First taken for something ghostly, after a few days it was discovered that it had been a girl who helped at the school. Interestingly enough she admitted to be constantly anxious herself and to see a shade next to her (De Tijd 26 June 1895, Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 26 June 1895). People nevertheless stayed scared and at the end of the next month the local policeman encountered a white shape. He grapped it but found himself only with the cover, a white sheet. He persued the figure and discovered a twenty-two years old woman (Algemeen Handelsblad 31 July 1895, Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 31 July 1895). Her story emerged at the ensuing court case: her mother lived next to the school where many people had congregated because of the ghost and had made such a noise that her mother, who was ill, had been gravely disturbed. She had decided to chase off the crowd by appearing as a ghost herself, taken a white sheet and suddenly manifested in the moonshine. Only the constable had not been frightened. She was convicted because of wearing a “forbidden disguise” De Telegraaf 26 August 1895, Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 28 August 1895).

The red ghost will have referred to something glowing, as in the report mentioned in the beginning of this essay. One of the main differences between Protestant and Catholic revenants, was that the latter were fiery it was a characteristic of the soul who was beyond grace, as also the souls of unbaptized children were imagined as ghost lights, will’-o-the wisps. Catholics thus identified lights as ghosts: people were frightened by a candle in a pumpkin in Neer (Limburg; RN 1889; cf. Welters 1876, pp. 54–55). Or a match struck at a churchyard could easily be taken as something supernatural, as happened in Tilburg in 1895 (PD&AC 1 Oct. 1895; Nieuwe Tilburgsche Courant 26 Sept. 1895; De Telegraaf 27 September 1895; Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 28 Sept. 1895; Algemeen Handelsblad 28 Sept. 1895). Protestant whiteness will have been related to the contrast with the living (funerals were in black) and indicated the crossing of the boundary into the realm of the dead. White ghosts were also better visible at night. Sometimes a particular tallness is mentioned (PD&AC 29 Dec. 1881 Zierikzee, from Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad; PD&AC 18 Febr. 1882 Willemstad from Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad). Occasionally a ghost turned up in a different shape, for instance with a strange hat,8 a hat with ribbons (which turned out to be a scarecrow) (PD&AC 2 July 1886 Leur from Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant), or even a bird or a big black cat that was impossible to hit (Leeuwarder Courant 8 Oct. 1898). And in a number of cases the reporter did not even bother to give a description of the creature’s appearance.

Next to being visual, ghosts alerted people to their presence by sound. Anything out of the ordinary would qualify. Thus a “frightening noise” in an attic in Roswinkel (Drenthe) made four or five men tumble down the stairs, until it turned out to have been in mouse caught in a bottle (PD&AC 10 Nov. 1895). In 1898 in Den Bosch a loud roar would induce people to talk about ghosts (PD&AC 22 Dec. 1898). And of course, there was the knocking, reported from Axel near the Flemish border as well as from Amsterdam (PD&AC 17 July 1886, from Middelburgsche Courant). Or worse: a rain of stones (PD&AC 18 Jan. 1898 Bleskensgraaf from Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant), or in another case, objects being thrown around, clothing soiled and cut (1899) (Velsen. PD&AC 1 April 1899; Haarlem’s Dagblad 31 March 1899, Leeuwarder Courant 31 March 1899; De Tijd 1 April 1899, from Nieuwe Provinciale Groninger Courant). In yet another case beds were disturbed and kitchen utensils messed up. In yet another stones flew around and wallpaper was ripped off the wall.

Whereas noises, as well as the occasional strange sight, could have been caused by anything, the more specific cases had a human perpetrator. This was not always reported and probably also not always revealed In 1888 initially mysterious knockings in Amsterdam turned out to have been made by an eleven-years old girl (Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 17, 19, 22 and 24 Oct. 1888). In 1892 in Zoutelande in the province of Zeeland not just knockings occurred, but bedcovers, stones and beans were thrown into the room and people hear whistles. After a week, a nine-years old boy was tricked in admitting his role by the local school teacher who copied the ghost sounds: “Now it isn’t me, mother, now I am not doing it” the boy cried bewilderdly (Middelburgsche Courant 29 March, 4 April, 7 April—missing, see Algemeen Handelsblad 8 April 1892–, 8 April, 9 April, 12 April 1892; Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 9, 11 April 1892. See also: Midavaine 1996, pp. 5–8).

It were all occurrences out of the ordinary and one of the few available explanations was the interference from the other side. However, all these reports together do not make a composite “ghost” picture; they can best be considered as outlining the range of possibilities in ghost imagining. That goes for the reception, too. Reactions varied between being frightened and being curious. Crowds who flocked to experience the phenomenon were routinely depicted as a “superstitious” mass. In 1853 in Vlijmen people avoided the graveyard. The cloth in the wind made a woman scream, whereupon she lost consciousness. Her husband, reacting on the scream found his wife “as dead”, and was caught by fright in such a way that he needed help, too (1855). The lady in the crinoline “caused such a fright, that it became impossible to put the children to bed; the maids and farm hands were unable to do their normal job in the evening, the old women, shivering with fear, could not talk about anything else” (1873). A girl who was scared by a white clad shape, ran back into her house and was unconscious the next day, so that it was feared that her live was in danger (1892) (PD&AC 29 March 1892, from Nieuwe Provinciale Groninger Courant; De Tijd 30 March 1892; Nieuwsblad van het Noorden 30 March 1892, from same source). Two years later in Groningen a girl had swooned (PD&AC 15 March 1894, from Nieuwe Provinciale Groninger Courant) The mouse in the attic made people “paralized by fear. Pale as death they stared at each other, but no one had the courage to investigate” (PD&AC 10 Nov. 1895). In Amsterdam, a man who attempted to confront the ghost of a waiter was found lying unconscious on the floor the next morning, pale as a cloth (PD&AC 25 Sept. 1890). Apart from an occasionally frightend woman or girl (these details are missing in the Rotterdam newspaper Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 23 March 1882, 28 Sept. 1895). It is striking that, at least in some of the descriptions, an encounter with the presumed deceased turned the living into a similar, be it more letargic state. It drew them near the boundary the dead had already crossed.

4.

On their own newspaper reports do not reveal everything. Only rarely were they concerned with actual concepts of revenants. In that sense folklore records can be seen as supplementary to the newspaper accounts and vice versa since folklorists hardly reported any misinterpretations of natural occurrences. The narratives were either recorded in the same period, or they concerned memories of people about that period.9 Although they are still a far cry from extensive interviews or field-work reports, they do occasionally provide another look at things, at playing ghost in this instance. They also give a general sense of why ghosts returned to the world of the living, which had to do with broken promises and unkept obligations. These seem, however, of little relevance when it comes to understanding the hoax stories and reports. And indeed, the informants of the folklorists also discussed whether some phenomenon had really been a ghost, and not, for instance, a goat.

The first group of folklore stories on hoaxes concerns the topic of exploitation that for some reason hardly appeared in the Dutch newspapers I consulted.10 As this did feature in, for instance English newspapers, hardly finding it was probably mainly a coincidence. Thus a story (or memory) from the east of the Netherlands, recorded in the 1960s from a male informant born in 1884 related to a house that was for sale. As there were several prospective buyers, one of them tried to outwit his competitors. He wrapped himself in a white sheet, and with a candle in his hand walked around the house between 12 and 2 at night. People began to notice and the man got it cheap; the others who had wanted it didn’t like ghosts (Tinneveld 1976, p. 91, nr. 130). An attempt to influence the sale of a field, already reported in the late nineteenth century from the province of Noord-Brabant did not succeed because a passing woman noticed the ghost’s legs (de Blécourt 1980, p. 3.44).

In exploitation cases people are frightened away. When ghosts drew people together, it could provide an opportunity for pickpockets, but this did not appear in the Dutch material at all. These exploitation stories or cases (for there is no reason why they should not have been enacted) are derivatives and mainly show the popularity of ghost concepts, in particular the concept of playing ghost. Most relevant in the folklore material are the warning stories which almost completely miss out in the newspapers, mainly because the newspapers issued a different kind of warning by stressing stupidity. The two main groups of warning stories can be characterized as the counter fright and the killing. They are typified as The Extra Ghost (or Devil)11 and What is Dead Should Stay Dead.12 A third group that can be recognized is about speaking skulls, which is too specific in this context (Sinninghe 1943, nr. 942* A: Die vermeintliche Geister–Teufel–betrogen. Cf. de Blécourt 2010, pp. 573–74).

In a Frisian story from the middle of the nineteenth century (1864), a maid serving at ministry is both beautiful and virtuous. She has loads of admirers and finally chooses one but finds out that he tells insulting tales about her and ends the courtship. The boy swears revenge, puts on white clothing and together with a mate forms tall ghost. Upon noticing the “ghost”, however, the maid remarks: “This is strange. Two whites on top of each other, I have seen that before, but the black one on top of that, I have never seen”. Thereupon the boy underneath run away, thinking it was the devil, and lets his mate take a tumble (Dykstra 1864, pp. 64–70. The Dutch version in Dykstra 1896, pp. 98–99). A hundred years later in Frisia this story was (still?) extremely popular, but the stories in this province were also particularly well researched (van der Kooi 1984, pp. 526–28: 1676E* Spookspelen: Twee witten met een zwarte erop; 78 variants). In the south of the Netherlands a late nineteenth-century tale concerned seven young men who wanted to frighten girls. They dressed up in white shirts but suddenly noticed that there were eight of them (de Blécourt 1980, no. 2.71). This was also told as a student prank, in which a student took on the role of the extra ghost (Meder and Hendriks 2005, p. 689, no. 106).

The second group of stories has a more gruesome ending. The same man who knew the tale about the house sale, told about a boy who went courting. As his parents disagreed with his choice, his brother tried to prevent him going to the girl. He put on a sheet and played ghost. But the boy wasn’t afraid and hit the ghost and thus killed his brother.13 The following story was recorded from another informant from the same area: A farmer and his hired hand used to play ghost pranks on temporary labourers. They put a contraption in the loft that produced moaning and the hand showed up with a sheet over his head. With one particular labourer the farm hand continued outside and went to sit on a gate. But the man did not want to be ridiculed anymore and he hit the ‘ghost’. He killed him. Since then there were no more hauntings at this farm.14 Such a story is hard to validate. On the one hand it is clearly a story (even with a number in the folktale catalogue), on the other hand especially the first part is told in such vivid detail that it may very well have happened—it was, after all not impossible to do. A wrongful dead, however, had to be reported to the authorities.15 The last is typically a piece of information which would emerge from a community study (also when negative).

In Zeeuwsch Vlaanderen, Southern Zeeland, a farm hand, who had confessed not to believe in ghosts, was send to fetch a waffel iron at night. At some place he had to cross a board over a ditch. On his return a white shape rose form underneath the bridge. But here, too the farm hand hit out with the waffle iron, saying “whatever is dead, should remain dead”. Back home he did not tell anyone. When people began to worry, they asked him at last whether something had happened to him. Yes, he said, I met a ghost, but I hit it and it won’t harm anyone anymore. They found the farmer’s son dead (Sinninghe 1933, pp. 355–56). The more formulaic a narrative, the more it will have been a narrative as opposed to a memory of an event. These stories function as narratives anyway. They issue a warning not to play ghosts, but in a different register than the newspaper reports. On the other hand, when an attempt to influence a sale is reported as successful, it may have enticed prospective actors.16

5.

The question of whether something was just a narrative or an enactment confused people in the late nineteenth century sometimes, too. In September 1890 newspapers ran the story about a (rare) headless ghost in Frisian Oudemirdum which made scary noises and ferocious gestures; instead of drawing crowds it made people stay at home (Algemeen Handelsblad 5 Sept. 1890, also De Tijd 5 Sept. 1890, Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 6 Sept. 1890). In all probability this concerned a live ghost, although it was not pointed out immediately. The creature was only called a “headless man”, rather than a headless ghost. Two weeks later the next Frisian ghost appeared. A local physician who was known for his campaigns against ghost had to pass a graveyard in the middle of the night. Three men were waiting for him and when the doctor came he was met by a white shape who called “you have killed me”. He replied: “Then you devil did not get enough” and hit the shape with his stick, who then ran off (Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 17 Sept. 1890; Goessche Courant 23 Sept. 1890). Other newspapers choose to combine the two accounts. They first reported a follow-up on the Oudemirdum case. Two men had searched for the ghost but not found anything and people thought it would be someone who tried to scare off competitors at thrush-catching. Then the account was continued with a case “of old” in Oostermeer, the one about the physician. “If everyone would act this way on those occasions”, it was concluded, “then there was a chance that the belief in ghosts would finally belong to the past” (De Gooi- en Eemlander 20 Sept. 1890, De Graafschap-bode 20 Sept. 1890). Two years later a Dutch-American paper ran the same story, now located in the village “S”, somewhere in the Netherlands. People had been discussing ghosts and the local doctor assured that he wasn’t afraid of anything. He was challenged to walk on the cemetry at midnight, where he met a ghost telling him: “You have killed me”. But the doctor replied: “What is dead should stay dead” and hit the ghost on the head (De Volksstem 4 V 1892, Wisconsin). If the folklore material better represented the stories in oral circulation, then the pretend ghost should have been killed. When this detail was once added in a newspaper account, it immediately caused problems.

March 1888 the Amsterdam newspaper Het nieuws van den dag reported from Bornebroek a Catholic village in the east of the Netherlands (near the German border) that a ghost had visited one of the few Protestant farmers. He was advised to have it banished by the local chaplain, but finding the costs too high (500 guilders), he decided to take action himself. A few days later, when the apparition showed up once more, he started to beat it severely. Finally the ghost shouted: “Stop it! Stop it! I am the chaplain”. The man nevertheless died of his wounds. The correspondent added that his story was based on truth but had not been made public before because of “local reasons” (Het Nieuws van den Dag 23 March 1888. Not found in the PD∾ only in the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad in August). Already the same day the local school teacher reacted: “I don’t know who your reporter was, but he seems insane”. The whole thing was a fiction and the chaplain was still alive. Two months ago someone who wanted to be funny, had thought up the ghost story (Het Nieuws van den Dag 26 March 1888). The correspondent, asked for justification by his editor, was defiant: the story was known in six places in the region and of the twenty-eight people he asked, twenty-five held it to be true (Het Nieuws van den Dag 29 March 1888). Meanwhile, the chaplain of Bornebroek had registered a complaint about libel at the regional court. He had been particularly offended by the suggestion that he would have tried to swindle a Protestant, a detail that most newspapers missed (Algemeen Handelsblad 30 March 1888, from Twentsche Courant, De Gooi- en Eemlander 7 April 1888). It had become a matter of Roman Catholic honour and the orthodox Protestants suggested that it was part of the Catholic bashing by the liberals (De Standaard 31 March 1888, see also the Catholic Nieuwe Tilburgsche Courant 1 April 1888).

When late August the case was dealt with by the court in Amsterdam (the Nieuws van de Dag had refused to reveal its correspondent and the editor had been charged), the newspaper emphasized the legendary nature of the report. Its local correspondent had only helped to spread the story further, without mentioning name or date. It only had been a contribution to illustrate the belief in ghosts and even the chaplain had admitted that the story circulated regionally about a pastor (Het Nieuws van den Dag 25 Aug. 1888, Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 27 Aug. 1888). The court disagreed; the chaplain’s “moral value as a human being” was certainly infringed and the editor was, after the case had gone through appeal, sentenced to a 250 guilders fine (Algemeen Handelsblad 1 Sept. 1888).17 When oral narratives were disguised as specific reports and published in a newspaper, their character as a legend changed. Instead of the warning the carried not to play ghost (because one might end up dead), they were drawn into a political discourse which under the circumstances could favour a personal rather than a narrative reading.18

The judges failed to recognize the Bornerbroek case as a story. In the legends and especially in the formula “what is dead has to remain dead”, the identification with the dead had become complete, although instead of a personal it had become a social identification, one assigned by others. Moreover, the case was embeded in local history. Two years earlier, a strange man had been spotted with a long beard who was said to have been eating grass. Many considered him as a ghost (Volksblad 14 July 1886). A few kilometers to the west, in the hamlet of Hertme, a “ghist house” could be found. In the seventeenth century the Catholics held their meetings there and it was told that some Protestants had put on sheets to disturb the religious ceremony.19

6.

In 1873 in the same area of Zeeland where the “What is dead” story circulated, the police was notified to look for the “White lady” in a certain barn. There they found many pieces of female clothing: skirts, overcoats, etc., and, hidden in a pit, underneath a bundle of straw, the lady herself. Only it was not a woman, but a man of 24 years old, who with some of his friends was engaged in robberies. It may very well be that in between, he had found a way to give expression to his transvestism. While this case in itself should remain unique, the notion of dressing up is, perhaps significant. As Owen Davies remarked, “ghost hoaxers were performing for an audience”. It was therefore necessary “to perform according to the audiences’ expectations, perceptions and understanding of ghosts. Otherwise, a hoax, just like a play, would fail” (Davies 2007, p. 165). This underlines the importance of the public realm, the common imagery of ghosts to which a player had to conform in order to be successful. But what about the actor? Was the donning of the almost obligatory white sheet just a way to better convince the public that they were dealing with a genuine ghost? Or did it also help to better identify with the role, to become a ghost? In that sense the frightening story about the extra figure attains another dimension. The actors dressed up for the part (in the student version, they even went to a specialist shop for it), but were, so the story, were still not ready for the real thing and thus ran away. Identification with the part was fickle, so to speak. It may very well have reflected the orthodox Christian frustration with the theatre, which was simply something that one should not attend.

The other joke was indeed two-sided: the unbeliever who boasted not to be afraid nevertheless did not seem to have bothered that he killed a human being: it had been a ghost, after all. The barber who told this about his grandfather even added: “They did not do anything to him and it did not cause him any trouble”, implying that this would normally have been a cause for prosecution.20 It emphasizes the narrative character, but the story is very close to history here. It was presented as history and in the narrator’s mind it was history. Yet genuine history diverged. In most instances newspaper reports were more sober than legend texts.

A boy who played for ghost in an attempt to deter another boy from visiting a special girl and who had even taken the trouble of putting on a mask, eventually gave up (1858; PD&AC 2 Febr., 4 Febr., 23 Febr. Ruinerwold). A farm hand who boasted not to believe in ghosts and evil spirits was on his way to his girlfriend when two of his neighbours set upon him. He was so frightened that he immediately turned around, leaving hat and wooden shoes behind. When he recovered, he returned with a stick but met the “apparitions” again, fleed and fell into a ditch. Back home he told that he had seen two devils, an old one and a young (1886; the reporter didn’t know whether he had been able to visit the girl, that night).21 Courting was one of the main reasons for being outside at night; in 1885 a maid left by her lover had caused ghost rumours (Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad 5 Sept. 1885, Goessche Courant 29 Aug. 1885), and late 1886 a “pining lover” had even been mistaken for a ghost (RN 29 Dec. 1886, Middelburgsche Courant 28 Dec. 1886, Zierikzeesche Courant 30 Dec. 1886).

Neither reports or stories bothered much with going into the details of the rationale for returning. They concentrated more on the basic question of the existence of an afterlife and how such could be observed. The boaster who doubted this was given a lesson, which was a perfectly normal thing to do in the Dutch context. The stories indicate, however, that the pranxter nevertheless crossed a line. Especially the phrase “What is dead has to remain dead” reveals that the player was identified with the dead, if not so much in a personal sense then at least socially. At the same time the story also indicates that a revenant was not comprehended as properly dead, since for the protagonist the played ghost was indiscernable from a genuine one. Dead people should remain in their graves. The stories may have been widespread, which primarily marks them as stories, their message became manifest every time the were told.

A Brief Conclusion

Newspaper reports were never written for the benefit of future historical anthropologists. Folklore records, often justified as preserving an almost lost past culture, perhaps slightly more so. Yet it is above all the combination of different records which allows a glimpse into past customs and concepts, expressed in a particular form and with specific meanings attached. Enacting ghosts was condemned on different levels, but there were always people who could not resist the challence (and some of them were punished in courts). Rather than communicating with the dead, the hoaxters sought to gain advantage over the living. That they did not always succeed, was only normal. This, of course, can be underlined or countered in future research.