Reporting from the Spirit World: Ghostly Journalism at the Fin de Siècle

This chapter provides a new perspective on the British ghost-story tradition by centralising spiritualist figures producing journalistic accounts not only about ghosts, but by ghosts. After fraudulent behaviour began marring spiritualism’s reputation, two prominent spiritualist authors and editors, Florence Marryat and W. T. Stead, published remarkable details of their ghostly encounters in an attempt to defend the movement’s authenticity. Marryat claimed to have conversed with her spirit-world daughter, while Stead’s daughter published her father’s account which allegedly forecasted his own death on the Titanic. Their editorial credentials and adoption of ‘New Journalism’ amplified the sensational style of their tales, enabling them to incorporate documentary detail and reported speech from ghosts. In exploring narratives from those said to be receiving ghost stories directly from spectral sources, this chapter highlights how fin-de-siècle journalism allows for a reimagination of what constitutes the ghost story.