So I come to you today to laud the friendly ghost – the ghost with character and personality; the ghost who is one of us. The first I loved was the animated sweetie in Casper the Friendly Ghost, with his Betty Boop pout and Shirley Temple voice. Episode after episode, from 1945 to date, sad and lonely little Casper only wanted to make friends, but accidentally terrified everyone, from the giant octopus and the raging bull to the bully boys and the pirate skeleton on the bottom of the deep blue sea, and then, so reliably, rescued someone and won love. He has ancient antecedents. The Grateful Dead, before it became the name of the mighty Californian country-rock band famous for being so stoned they’d pay eight-hour gigs without really noticing, was a term describing a particular kind of spook. The theory was that if a person died and the correct rites were not performed for their body – say because they were out of money, or in the hands of enemies (pace Antigone, the Bible, etc) – their soul couldn’t rest. Should a living person get the chance, they should always perform those rites, for anyone. Then, next time you’re in trouble at sea, or lost in an eerie swamp, or a howling gale, your grateful dead will come to your aid and guide you to safety with a mysterious touch, a ghostly light across the moors or dancing on the wave-crashed rocks under a ragged moon.
It works the other way round too. The living can – and indeed should – rescue ghosts. The Canterville Ghost (1906), in Oscar Wilde’s story of the same name, another childhood favourite, is far from friendly at first, but badly in need of a friend. This vain and self-indulgent fellow had for centuries morosely enjoyed spooking guests at Canterville Chase (in a marvellously varied wardrobe, including a winding sheet with ruffles at wrist and throat), until the Otis family, “cultured Americans of the better class”, arrived with their modern hygienic ways to tease and torment him. They clean up his recurring bloodstain with Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent (which necessitates him using up all young Virginia Otis’s paints to recreate it, and it ends up emerald green). They politely offer “a small bottle of the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator” for his clanking chains. “Never, in a brilliant and uninterrupted career of three hundred years, had he been so grossly insulted.” In the end though, it’s little Virginia who listens to his problems, understands his needs, weeps for him and helps him to eternal rest. “He made me see what Life is,” she says, “and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.”
Bring on The Ghost and Mrs Muir – the wonderful 1947 classic film (with a score Bernard Hermann called his personal best) in which widow Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) moves to a haunted cottage and falls headlong for dashingly grumpy sea captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison), who has alas been dead for four years. She is skint; he wants to write his memoirs. As any fule know, the best route to love is via a shared project (be it getting over a cold in Jane Austen or escaping the gods in Shakespeare) so he dictates, she publishes, and all should be well – until George Sanders turns up… Well, go and watch it. Suffice to say, if you’re in love with a ghost, there are impracticalities and, as the old folk songs suggests, “if you kiss my cold clay lips Your days they won’t be long” – words uttered by a corpse who would like his girlfriend to stop weeping on his grave now please, because it “will not let me sleep”.