In this volume, ghost stories are studied in the context of their media, their place in history and geography. From prehistory to this day, we have been haunted by our memories, the past itself, by inklings of the future, by events playing outside our lives, and by ourselves. Hence the lure of ghost stories throughout history and presumably prehistory. Science has been a great destroyer of myth and superstition, but at the same time it has created new black boxes which we are filling with our ghostly imagination. In this book, literature from the Middle Ages to Oscar Wilde and Neil Gaiman, children’s stories, folklore and films, ranging from the Antarctic and Russia to Haiti, are covered and show the continuing presence of spectral phenomena.

Maik Hildebrandt: "Medieval Ghosts: the Stories of the Monk of Byland" 13 // Ruth Heholt: "Speaking of Seeing Ghosts: Visions of the Supernatural in the Tales of Catherine Crowe" 25 // Eleanor Dobson: "The Ghost of Oscar Wilde: Fictional Representations" 35 // Kati Voigt: "Ghostly Science or Scientifc Ghosts: The Fourth Spatial Dimension in Children’s Literature" 45 // Claudia Richter: "Carl Gustav Jung and the Ghosts" 57 // Désirée Kriesch: "‘They only see what they wanna see’: Traumatised Ghosts and Ghost Story Conventions in The Sixth Sense and The Others" 71 // Clausdirk Pollner: "‘At the Hollow, there was Magic.’ The Language of Kim Newman’s Ghost Novel" 87 // Dominik Becher: "Neil Gaiman’s Ghost Children" 91 // Julia Kunz: "The Ghost as a Metaphor for Memory in the Irish Literary Psyche" 107 // Sophie Tiele: "'I Know not who these Mute Folk Are' – Ghostly Houses in Early Twentieth Century English and American Poetry" 115 // Johanna Grabow: "Haunting the Wide, White Page – Ghosts in Antarctica" 125 // Julia Pfeifer: "The Loa as Ghosts in Haitian Vodou" 137 // Minwen Huang: "From Cultural Ghosts to Literary Ghosts – Humanisation of Chinese Ghosts in Chinese Zhiguai" 147 // Vera Shamina: "Mystic Motifs in Silver Age Poetry and Prose" 161 //