I have a terrible habit of reading 75% of a book and then picking up the next one. So, this weekend when I saw E Jay Gilbert delivery a (really, really good) talk at the London Fortean Society’s Haunted Landscapes conference at Conway Hall, I picked her book back up and tucked back into the remaining pages. The lecture, on underground folklore - from the phenomena of the Kennington Loop on the Northern line to subterranean devils, Tommyknockers, fairies and beyond - was the talk I enjoyed the most that day: funny, thoughtful, and happily willing to slide between ghosts, folk belief, and the uncanny things that lurk under our feet.
Gilbert’s book, Haunted: The Ghost Stories and Folklore of the British Isles, does exactly the same thing on the page. Haunted takes you through some of the most enduring ghost stories of the British Isles and asking what they reveal about the people and places that keep telling them. Gilbert has spent years collecting supernatural stories around her home in a village near Newcastle, and uses those as a jumping-off point to explore a wider landscape of British ghost lore, from familiar White Ladies to local, half-forgotten ghouls and oddities.
If you’re expecting a straight “here is a haunted place, here is its story, next” gazetteer, that’s not what this is. What you get instead is a three-way weave of academia (Gilbert is a linguist and researcher, and it shows in the way she teases out language, patterns, and contexts), mixed with personal reflections and storytelling. It feels like sitting with someone who’s spent a long time listening to other people talk about ghosts, and has thought very carefully about what’s really going on underneath.
Now, I know some ghost researchers get sniffy when ghosts are put alongside other bits of folklore – fairies, devils, monsters and so on… but personally, I think that’s nonsense. I write about ghosts and still have a folklore section and a monsters section on my site for a reason: if you’re genuinely interested in ghostlore, you’re inevitably going to be brushing up against wider folklore, urban legends, religious belief, local customs and myth. If you insist on ghosts and only ghosts, your field of view gets very narrow, very quickly.
Haunted absolutely refuses to stay in that narrow lane, and I mean that as a compliment. Gilbert is just as interested in the social and linguistic archaeology of underground fear, the way fairy lore bleeds into mine folklore and railway folklore, and why certain figures (like black dogs, banshees, and white ladies) crop up again and again in different guises. The Kennington Loop ghosts on the Underground, for example, sit quite comfortably in the same imaginative space as fairies under hills or devils under churches. Gilbert leans into that continuity rather than pretending each category is its own sealed box, and the book is stronger for it.
One of the things I appreciated most is that she treats informants and storytellers with respect. There’s no sneering at gullible believers, but there’s also no wide-eyed insistence that every tale must be literally true. That mix will appeal to both believers and non-believers, the curious and the skeptical – which is, explicitly, who the book is aimed at. As a sceptical paranormal researcher myself, I found the approach very familiar - not “is this real?” but “what does it mean that this story is being told this way, now, by these people?”
It’s not a catalogue of evidence, nor is it trying to settle any arguments about whether ghosts are real. Instead, Haunted presents a smart, humane look at what ghost stories do for us – how they move through communities, hitch rides on trains and rumours, and keep resurfacing in new guises, long after the original teller is gone. As someone who spends a lot of time in the overlap between ghost stories, folklore, and critical thinking, I came away from this book feeling like I’d just had a long, generous conversation with a fellow ghost geek. And I’ll take that over a stack of cheap jump-scare anecdotes any day.
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