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Here is the thing and it will be with you for the rest of your life
As I go on disorganizedly tracking the emergence of tropes that interest me, tonight in proto-Stone Tape we have Joseph Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (1937):
"Now if, by your expression spooks and ghosts, you imply conscious emanations, aftermaths of physical existence capable of independent functioning of a semi-earthly character, well, then I probably do not believe in that sort of thing. There are others, of course, whose opinions I respect, who disagree with me. They consider that you, sir, are doomed to exist perpetually in some form or other. That is, perhaps, a depressing thought. But if, by spooks and ghosts, you imply emanations recreated by acute living sensitiveness or intelligence from the inexhaustible store-houses of the past, then I do believe in that sort of thing. Inevitably. [. . .] What is a simple gramophone record but a record of the past?" he demanded, tapping the bore on the knee. "Caruso is dead, but we can hear his voice to-day. This is not due to invention, but to discovery, and if the discovery had occurred three hundred years ago I should not have to travel to Naseby to hear Charles the First's voice—if, that is, I am to hear it. But Nature does not wait upon our discoveries. That is a thing so many ignoramuses forget. Her sound-waves, light-waves, thought-waves, emotional-waves—to mention a few of those which come within the limited range of our particular senses and perceptions—all travel ceaselessly, some without interruption, some to find temporary prisons in the obstructions where they embed themselves. Here they may diminish into negligible influences, or—mark this—they may be freed again. The captured waves, of course, are merely a fragment from the original source. Potentially everything that has ever existed, everything born of the senses, can be recovered by the senses. Fortunately, sir, there will be no gramophone record of your recent expletive; nevertheless, in addition to its mere mark on memory, your 'Bosh' will go on for ever."
Since this novel also contains psychometry (a bed, a chair, and a hammer all contain imprints of their associated deaths, imperceptible to most but distressingly present to the psychically sensitive chorus girl who makes up one-sixth of the small snowbound cast of this supernaturally tinged mystery), I'm starting to wonder if that's the actual origin of the idea of ghosts-as-recordings, generalized from individual objects to buildings and landscapes. Then again, maybe it particularized the other way round. Or they evolved independently and dovetailed. Really the problem is that I'm trying to answer this question without a deep dive into the history of parapsychology and I might have no alternative. It just interests me so much as an idea that so thoroughly permeates the field I read and write in, I can't remember where I first encountered it. Anyway, I don't just want to know when it entered parapsychology. When did it become one of the recognized literary modes of ghost?
"Now if, by your expression spooks and ghosts, you imply conscious emanations, aftermaths of physical existence capable of independent functioning of a semi-earthly character, well, then I probably do not believe in that sort of thing. There are others, of course, whose opinions I respect, who disagree with me. They consider that you, sir, are doomed to exist perpetually in some form or other. That is, perhaps, a depressing thought. But if, by spooks and ghosts, you imply emanations recreated by acute living sensitiveness or intelligence from the inexhaustible store-houses of the past, then I do believe in that sort of thing. Inevitably. [. . .] What is a simple gramophone record but a record of the past?" he demanded, tapping the bore on the knee. "Caruso is dead, but we can hear his voice to-day. This is not due to invention, but to discovery, and if the discovery had occurred three hundred years ago I should not have to travel to Naseby to hear Charles the First's voice—if, that is, I am to hear it. But Nature does not wait upon our discoveries. That is a thing so many ignoramuses forget. Her sound-waves, light-waves, thought-waves, emotional-waves—to mention a few of those which come within the limited range of our particular senses and perceptions—all travel ceaselessly, some without interruption, some to find temporary prisons in the obstructions where they embed themselves. Here they may diminish into negligible influences, or—mark this—they may be freed again. The captured waves, of course, are merely a fragment from the original source. Potentially everything that has ever existed, everything born of the senses, can be recovered by the senses. Fortunately, sir, there will be no gramophone record of your recent expletive; nevertheless, in addition to its mere mark on memory, your 'Bosh' will go on for ever."
Since this novel also contains psychometry (a bed, a chair, and a hammer all contain imprints of their associated deaths, imperceptible to most but distressingly present to the psychically sensitive chorus girl who makes up one-sixth of the small snowbound cast of this supernaturally tinged mystery), I'm starting to wonder if that's the actual origin of the idea of ghosts-as-recordings, generalized from individual objects to buildings and landscapes. Then again, maybe it particularized the other way round. Or they evolved independently and dovetailed. Really the problem is that I'm trying to answer this question without a deep dive into the history of parapsychology and I might have no alternative. It just interests me so much as an idea that so thoroughly permeates the field I read and write in, I can't remember where I first encountered it. Anyway, I don't just want to know when it entered parapsychology. When did it become one of the recognized literary modes of ghost?
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I'll let you know what I find! I never thought much about it myself until I realized there's a non-horror version of the idea in A Canterbury Tale (1944)—see footnotes to this post—and that meant it predated the wave of '70's parapsychology that includes The Stone Tape (1972) and The Legend of Hell House (1973) and even Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) and that made me curious.
There's a ghost trapped in a repetitive pattern in Margaret Oliphant's "The Open Door" (1882), but the story doesn't use the metaphor of recording and in fact the exorcism depends on breaking the ghost out of its pattern, at which point—however briefly—it can be affected by the words of the living like the conscious person it once was. That feels like something slightly different, more psychomachic, to me.
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This is the part where I'm trying to avoid diving into the history of parapsychology! Even though the other thing I've been wondering is how closely this remnant-based approach to ghosts parallels the development of paleontology and archaeology as fields . . .
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At a party hosted by a magician, the human guests are invited to choose something to be transformed into for the duration of the party—various guests choose to be a (small) motor-car, William Shakespeare, or a cisswapped version of themselves. One kid asks to be a ghost – Mr. Leakey attempts to dissuade him, pointing out that he’s eventually going to be one anyway, whereas this is probably his only opportunity to be a gorgonzola cheese, etc. The kid sticks to his choice, and spends the party happily walking through solid objects.
At one point he falls through a chair, or something, and only his legs are visible. The narrator comments that ghosts are really funny when you can only see their feet, and adds that this happens more often than you’d think – he then recounts a story about an old manor house that during some renovations changed the level of the floor, and how the Cavalier ghost that always walked in that section of the house subsequently appeared to be wading through the floor, or to be a pair of phantom feet sticking down through the ceiling if you were in the room below.
*I keep forgetting Haldane was mostly known as a geneticist, and supposedly the originator of the saying “If you attempt to study God through His creation, you will rapidly conclude He has an unhealthy fascination with beetles.”
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