‘He Could Raise and Lay Ghosts at His Will’: Victorian Folklorists and the Creation of Early Modern Clerical Ghost-Laying

Abstract

Folk legends of brave clergymen confronting terrifying apparitions in fields and houses can be heard all throughout rural England. Situated in the early modern period, these tales establish the archetype of the ‘conjuring parson’ and perpetuate the spiritual tradition of ‘ghost-laying’: the exorcism of ghosts. Clerical ghost-laying, however, is a spiritual tradition without a well-founded historical or theological precedent. The few extant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary depictions of this practice are largely satirical or polemical in nature. Tales of early modern clergymen exorcising restless spirits actually originate from the pens of Victorian authors who developed the sensationalist folkloric exploits of conjuring parsons to fulfil their own literary or political agendas. Through a comparison of early modern and Victorian literary accounts—focusing on the Botathen Ghost haunting—this article illustrates that the genre of clerical ghost-laying lacks any substantial claim to historical, literary, or theological legitimacy.