Medieval Ghost Mechanics
"Medieval Ghosts: the Stories of the Monk of Byland" by Maik Hildebrandt
A little spoiler: the book I’m working on has ghosts in it 👻
One of the things I have to work on is what I call “ghost mechanics”: the rules and boundaries of ghosts’ existence in my world-building (yep, I’m treating it like a magic system).
When doing some research on the topic, I stumbled upon OAPEN, an “online library of open access books”, in which I could find academic PDFs on all sorts of topics—a little goldmine to which I’m definitely going back for future research. That’s where I found Ghosts - or the (Nearly) Invisible, a collection of essays on how ghosts are portrayed in media: exactly what I was looking for.
The first essay, Medieval Ghosts: the Stories of the Monk of Byland by Maik Hildebrandt, is fascinating: it analyzes a collection of ghost stories written in the early years of the fifteenth century at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire.
It feels like a nice addendum to my other post, Magic in the Middle Ages1—so here’s a little dive into some medieval ghost mechanics.
The Church on ghostly apparitions
The early Church was actually “quite suspicious of ghostly apparitions”, because they were connected to pagan traditions that the Church didn’t really approve of.
Something changed from the twelfth century on, once Purgatory was established as the place for the people who died having committed only minor sins.
There were three places for the dead: Heaven for the saved, Hell for the damned, and Purgatory for everyone else.
Purgatory was in essence a concept of hope, since even if a person committed sins during his or her lifetime, he or she could still live among the saved at the moment of the Last Judgement.
Page 14 of “Ghosts - or the (Nearly) Invisible”
How long a dead person needed to spend in Purgatory depended on the seriousness of their sins. However, the time could be shortened by the prayers of the living.
That created an interesting bond between the living and the dead: the living could influence the fate of the dead, which gave the dead a motivation to interact with the living.
The Stories of the Monk of Byland
There are twelve stories recorded in this collection, written down by an anonymous monk of the Abbey (of which the author of the essay considers only eleven, given that one doesn’t quite deal with an apparition of the dead). The narrations tend to adhere to a specific structure.
Step 1: The Encounter
A living person encounters a dead one.
Page 17
In most of these stories, it’s the dead person who makes themselves known to the attention of the living by attacking them and fighting them. The living often bear the consequences of such attacks, with torn clothes or a sudden sickness overwhelming them after the encounter.
An interesting note: ghosts here are somewhat corporeal, meaning that they can cause physical harm—they are not the see-through-touch-through type of spectral apparitions.
That said, “as dangerous as these apparitions appear to be […] it must also be acknowledged that none of them mortally wounds the living”: their goal isn’t to kill the living, but to get their attention. The ghosts don’t want to harm whoever they meet: they are looking for someone who’ll help them get out of Purgatory.
But why attack someone and not talk instead? Well, it seems like the ghosts are “unable to initiate a conversation themselves” and therefore they “need to resort to milder forms of aggression in order to provoke a response”2.
That’s when the conjuring takes place.
Step 2: The Conjuring
The living person makes the sign of the cross or appeals to the trinity in order to deflect any possible harm that could be done by the apparition. He conjures the dead person to tell his name, the cause of his wandering and a possible remedy.
Page 17
“Conjuring” here isn’t meant in the sense of “summoning”, as I thought at first. The Oxford English Dictionary offers an older and more fitting meaning:
To constrain (a person to some action) by putting him upon his oath, or by appealing to something sacred; to charge or call upon in the name of some divine or sacred being; to adjure.
Page 17
It seems that the dead aren’t able to speak on their own, unless they’re bound by the living to do so. The “conjuring” in this case seems to be a ritual that allows the ghost to communicate3.
Finally, the dead can state their problem. In most cases, they will tell what sins they have committed and for which they are punished in Purgatory—they can find peace “after being absolved or by having masses sung for them”.
In some cases, they ask the living to help them remedy a wrong they’ve done.
Step 3: The Remedy
After the conjuration, the living person takes actions to help the dead, who then finds rest and peace.
Page 17
In story VI, the ghost of a cleric appears to a man. After being conjured, he confesses that, while alive, he stole some silver spoons—for that theft he is now being punished. The ghost asks the living man to retrieve the silver spoons in a hidden place: after the man does it, the ghost is put to rest.
The nature of the remedy can differ depending on the sin committed; as far as I understand, in some cases the ghosts ask “only” for prayers on their behalf.
There is one ghost story in the collection that is a bit different.
In story IV, the ghost, a rector who was buried at Byland, walks to his former concubine and blinds her. Instead of being conjured, absolved and thereby put to peace, however, the abbot and convent have his body dug out and thrown into a lake far away.
Page 18
The anonymous monk who recorded the tale is horrified by the actions of the religious people in this story and rejects any responsibility, claiming that he’s only writing the story as he heard it.
It’s a different—and, according to the monk’s reaction, a problematic “solution” to the issue of the wandering dead. Hildebrandt comments, “It is reminiscent of earlier stories about revenants in which the usual remedy against the creatures is the dismembering or disabling of their corpses”.
It was fascinating to read this essay—I’m so happy I’ve found this source.
Now, am I going to use it in my story? There are definitely some concepts that I will use as inspiration, but I can tell already that my ghost mechanics will be a tad different. But maybe not by much?
What do you find to be the most intriguing fact among the ones I’ve written here? If you’re a writer, what was the most interesting research paper you had to read?
If you have any thoughts on what I shared, let me know by simply replying to this email, writing me at ryeyoubs@gmail.com, or leaving a comment!
Take care,
Rye Youbs
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See also
Magic in the Middle Ages — a post in which I share some fascinating tidbits I’ve learned from the Coursera course of Magic in the Middle Ages while doing research for my book.
“Milder forms of aggression in order to provoke a response” — there’s something so “active”-aggressive about this sentence that amuses me every time I read it 🤣
On the conjuring ritual — It’s not exactly clear what this ritual looks like, or at least I didn’t find a specific description of how it works in this essay.
These stories sounds so interesting…as well as a little spooky. Glad to hear your writing is going well, and that you’re finding new inspiration for the worldbuilding!