The Witch-Cultist's Hypothesis: Margaret Murray on Ghosts

Egyptologist and 'witch-cult' hypothesiser Margaret Murray once provided expertise to Jacques Tourneur while the director was making his classic 1957 folk-horror movie (well, I think it is) Night Of The Demon. Murray's entry on 'witchcraft' in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica famously remained in place for a whopping 40 years, spreading her interpretation of the subject far beyond the world of academia, where her ideas were received skeptically. Such was her fame as an expert on the occult that movies studies came to her door, looking for advice on how to portray magic and curses.

See? Folk-horror.



Lead actor Dana Andrews, when he wasn't drinking and being a prat on set, took the time to do a little publicity with Margaret Murray to promote the film. During a photo op, the younger man gave the 93-year-old Murray a peck on the cheek, and called her 'you old son of a witch!'

Night Of The Demon being the cult classic that it is, with spooky imagery of 'earth mystery' sites such as Stonehenge, origins in the M.R. James story Casting The Runes, and hints of a surviving witch-cult drawn from Murray's own writings, it's safe to say that Murray has left her direct mark on the world of folk horror. To that end, you'll see her pop up on this blog from time to time.

What I didn't know, until relatively recently, was her opinion on ghosts. This came to my attention through the book Ghosts and Hauntings by Dennis Bardens. I picked this up a few years ago at the Graiguenamanagh book fair in county Kilkenny. I found it in one of those book stalls second-hand collectors dream about, full of musty mid-century tomes on the paranormal priced by someone who didn't know what they had.

Bardens, following a Dennis Wheatley-esque career in intelligence during the war, afterwards turned his writing interests to ghosts and the paranormal. A member of the Ghost Club, Bardens wrote at least three books on the supernatural: Mysterious Worlds and Psychic Animals as well as the present volume.

A Handful Of Dust

Here's what Mr Bardens has to say about Margaret Murray:

I remember the late Professor Margaret Murray, that remarkable authority on witchcraft, magic and what I would call the darker labyrinths of human thought and anthropology, telling me what she thought about ghosts. We had been discussing witchcraft—a favourite subject of hers - and she had agreed to appear on a television programme about witches which I was then organising for a television network.

'Has it ever struck you,' she asked me, 'that ghosts are so frequently seen in places where the air has been left comparatively undisturbed, such as rooms in castles which have been unoccupied perhaps for centuries? ...Perhaps the dust, in some strange way, ''photographs'' what has happened,' she said, 'for you must remember that dust is not a flat surface. These tiny particles may settle, but the atmosphere still retains some of them in a suspended state; and they form a three-dimensional surface.'

This is the soundtrack, not the show. But what a lovely cover!

Bardens was none too impressed by Murray's idea, citing several cases of ghosts that were as noisy as they were visual. (I happen to think the TV programme Bardens is referring to is an early episode of Panorama, by the way).

I, however, was somewhat bowled over by this quote when I first found it. The idea Murray presents is a variation on the classic 'Stone Tape' theory, the idea that certain kinds of material; stone, or in some cases, water, can hold 'memories' of events from the past. The usual idea is that strong emotions, often associated with love, hate, violence or death, somehow 'imprint' themselves onto the landscape. It's an idea which has long fascinated some great writers, most famously Nigel Kneale, whose 1972 TV play on the subject is the trope namer (and still worth a watch!).

I had never heard the take that dust itself can retain the memories, replaying events physically with its shape.

The Ghost-Cult In Western Europe

Murray continues on this theme in her autobiography, My First Hundred Years, published in 1963. In this book, Murray shows herself to be skeptical when it comes to certain fantastic phenomena. She gives the example of the haunted mummy-case of Amon Ra, and how she accidentally contributed to that legend - but that is a story for another day. When it comes to ghosts, she is more open - at least to a certain Stone Tape kind of ghost. She believes in ghosts as a kind of 'photograph', not as spirits of once-living beings.

Noting that ghost stories are more common in the damp northern climates of Europe and the British Isles, she supposes that ghosts are an impression made upon the atmosphere of a place. She doesn't quite state that it's 'dust' which records the impression, but it is broadly the same theory she mentioned to Dennis Bardens. She also reckons this idea explains why ghosts from certain historical periods predominate, as well as why they wear clothes:

The greater number of ghosts of the present day belong to the twentieth century, there are some of the nineteenth century, but those of the eighteenth century now occur only in houses in unusually lonely places where there is little traffic and therefore little displacement of the air. The earlier ones have faded, or the particles have been dissipated.

If my theory is correct, a ghost is the result of the striking of light-rays on some special combination of the elements of the atmosphere. The real ghost, not the fancy variety of the Christmas-story type, is a natural phenomenon worth investigation on scientific lines.

She finishes with a line redolent of the mid 20th century ‘scientific’ ghost-believer:

I am aware that this theory will not be popular among writers of Christmas stories and other horrific ghost-stories.