Why Do We See Dead People? | The Walrus
Familial and fraternal hauntings have long been central to the stories we tell, from Enkidu’s ghost in The Epic of Gilgamesh to Odysseus conferring with his slain brother-in-arms Achilles to Banquo’s discarnate presence in Macbeth to Wuthering Heights’s sorrowful Catherine. More recently, there’s erratic detective John River, who confers with his newly dead partner, Stevie, in the television series River. In the nineteenth century, such fictive imaginings were often based on real losses as infectious disease swept through families. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, watched her ...