“The most important thing is the setting,” says Ruth Robbins, professor of Victorian literature at Leeds Beckett University in England. “In the 19th century, ghost stories were read aloud so that the atmosphere set people up to be pleasurably scared in a communal way.” Britons in the Victorian era were obsessed with ghost stories because they reflected uncertain times — the Industrial Revolution, a move to urban living and technological advances like the telegraph, a supernatural-seeming invention. “Start with elements that you may be afraid of because of that atavistic, primitive danger,” Robbins says. “Bodies that are apparently human but might not be, like dolls and portraits. If the narrative begins in a room with those items, you’re more likely to be haunted by that space.” Material detail is powerful, because ghost stories are often about objects. “People become possessed by possessions,” Robbins says.
From “How to Tell a Ghost Story” by Jaime Lowe for New York Times; Photo of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England
