“One needn’t be a chamber to be haunted. One needn’t to be a house” – Emily Dickinson

Ghosts have been capturing our fear and fascination for hundreds of years. From Pliny to Toni Morrison, haunted houses to séances, spectres, phantoms and apparitions have all the time been a feature of popular culture, literature and mass media, proving endlessly durable against scepticism. 

Though the subject of ghosts could be sinister, mediumship has taught me that communing with the dead could be quite restorative. My work with the deceased has shown me that the dead are never truly dead – they proceed to live amongst us, whether or not it’s through the retellings of stories or other nostalgic evocations, as thought forms or energy. Death, like life, just isn’t linear, which is why we’ve a powerful sense that the deceased are still with us, as birds, flowers, gusts of wind or guardian angels. We feature the dead inside us wherever we go; the dead aren’t only sickly Victorian children in cheese cloth drapes atop stairs, but also they are the memoric imprints we hold inside us and deposit in given spaces.

THE HISTORY OF COMMUNICATING WITH GHOSTS

A tablet belonging to an exorcist in ancient Babylon around 1500 BCE will be the earliest known mention of a ghost. Depicting a male ghost being led to the afterlife, the inscription reads: “Don’t look behind you.” Recordings of ghost communication were later prevalent throughout antiquity with records of necromancy, the ceremonial conjuring of spirits, in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Rome and China. Certainly one of the oldest literary accounts of necromantic ghost summoning was present in Homer’s Odyssey, which recounts the sorceress Circe guiding Homer to summon the dead through rites various between the mundane to the grotesque: akin to burning fire, animal sacrifice and prayers to the gods of the underworld. 

Ghosts reported in mediaeval Europe tended to fall into two categories: the souls of the dead or demons. Mediaeval European ghosts were more outlandish than their predecessors, with reports of phantom knights and ghosts fighting battles within the forests and atop old forts. Throughout the late Victorian spiritualist movement, mediumship, the art of communicating to deceased ancestors, was popularised as a response to divisive sectarianism that dominated with the disestablishment of faith. Having previously belonged to the realm of the working class, the spiritualist groups and their séances were largely dominated by London’s nineteenth-century elite who would gather in ornate drawing rooms and shriek as gusts of wind would blow out the remaining candles. 

Technological explanations for the rise of spiritualism during this time often cite the event of photography, which in its ability to immortalise its subjects has a ghost like quality of its own. Along with capturing otherwise ephemeral moments, cameras are capable of render the unseen visible through astronomical, microscopic or X-ray photography. The intersection between the supernatural and photography not only reflected a fascination in capturing the unknown, but additionally in providing more concrete evidence for paranormal activity.

Today, each necromancers and mediums are sometimes few and much between. Though there remain festivals all  over the world that allow for interaction between the living and the dead, akin to the Día de los Muertos in Mexico or the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, talk of the dead and the practice of ghost communication stays taboo. In attempts to avoid confronting our own inevitable deaths, and the deaths of those we love, talk of death is branded as morbid or grotesque.

WHY GHOSTS ARE IMPORTANT

The idea that the dead aren’t any longer amongst us not only denies our own personal histories but additionally denies the history of spaces. This colonial view of the world, and of the supernatural, disavows the importance of the memoric history of land, institutions and buildings, in addition to bodies. To imagine in ghosts just isn’t only to imagine in life after death, but life before death too. As Jean-Michel Rabaté reminds us: ‘to haunt’ comes from the Germanic root heim/home. Haunting and inhabiting are inextricably linked, and if we recognise the history of land inhabitation, so too must we acknowledge ghosts and haunting as post-colonial in nature.

Ghosts not only threaten a colonial view of the land, institutions and our bodies, but additionally our sense of linear time. Arriving from the past, and reappearing in the current, ghosts belong to neither realm. They’re neither dead or alive, nor are they corporal objects or absences. In The Specters of Marx, Derrida says the anticipated return of the ghost in society is representative of a collective desire to deconstruct a rigid sense of historical chronology. The ghost’s ahistorical and atemporal nature might help our lives to feel less final and stuck, offering hope that they may lead the approach to a greater future, and a more illuminated past.

My earliest encounter with this was as a toddler. My younger brother had crippling insomnia claiming he could stay awake as two women wearing black lace were pinching him at night. In the future, three witches from a neighborhood spiritualist church were passing through the village and with none prior knowledge of his story, immediately went to his room where they said a small boy had died of cot death in the course of the Victorian era. His mother and night nurse had escaped their mental asylum in mourning clothes to go looking for the dead boy, and of their ghostly state, had mistaken the boy for my brother. In desperate attempts to save lots of my brother from dying of the identical death, their ghosts would pinch him to maintain him awake at night.

Communication with the dead just isn’t only insightful, but it surely may additionally save us from less favourable destinies. Spirit communication has guided me in my very own life, warning me of several dangerous situations or people, never proving itself unsuitable. For Hannen Swaffer, one among Britain’s leading advocates for spiritualism, the knowledge we learn from the dead is just as worthy because the knowledge we learn from the living. If we learn to speak higher with the realm of the dead, we may need a greater relationship with the realm of the living and grapple with our inherent fear of presupposed finalities and endings. 

HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE DEAD 

For those who are inquisitive about the dead, the perfect option is to seek out a medium. As a medium and psychic, I’ll only work with people who find themselves able to, as work with the opposite side could be incredibly healing but potentially destabilising. I often will ask clients to attend no less than a 12 months after someone near to them has passed, in order that they will start the processing journey alone first. 

If, nevertheless, you select to contact the dead yourself, make sure that you might be protected. Medium and clairvoyant Lisa Andrews advises the next: “It is important to solid a protective circle before you’re employed with the opposite side”. You’ll be able to do that by visualising a hoop of white light around you. Andrews also advises on setting an intention, and being open to what comes up: “The dead can respond in alternative ways. They may present themselves in a dream, or in smells like tobacco or perfume, or in shifts in your body temperature. Be open to all possibilities”. 

The dead aren’t dissimilar to the living, and it can be crucial to treat them as such. “Spirits who appear are as unthreatening as some other visitor,” says clairvoyant Rosemary Brown. For Brown, “the following world  could be very much like ours, only infinitely more beautiful”. Because the supernatural and ghost communication becomes more normalised, the banality in our on a regular basis existence becomes miraculous. We are able to only hope to bridge the divide between ourselves and what we’ve lost. In this manner of living, the dead can exist with us harmoniously, as we commune with the shadows in our attics, summon all that haunts us, and enter right into a dialogue with what has passed – and all that’s yet to come back.