Ghosts of Print Culture Past

The WPHP Monthly Mercury

Do you believe in ghosts? In this spirited (ha ha) Halloween episode, Kandice and Kate encounter a ghost of their very own in circulating library owner and author Mary Tuck’s Durston Castle; or, The Ghost of Eleonora (1804). Every year, in anticipation of October, we scour the WPHP for suitably spooky titles—previous Halloween episodes have featured badly behaved monks, rogue banditti, haunted castles, lost (and found!) parents, and pages upon pages of moralizing in the mountains (we’re looking at you, Catherine Cuthbertson’s four-volume Romance in the Pyrenees). Often satirical and rarely scary, these “Gothic” novels we share every year play out many of the tropes of the genre that we expect as readers, including explaining away anything supernatural. So when Kandice realized we might have a real ghost on our hands, well, we couldn’t resist—and a real ghost story demands an audience.

Join our intrepid ghost-hunting hosts as they do a reading of Mary Tuck’s tale together and harken back to a common eighteenth-century practice: reading aloud with friends and family. Filled with horrified gasps at the actions of “sanguinous villains,” delighted laughter at descriptions of “brawny thighs,” and inquisitions about how practical it is, really, to throw yourself onto a bed to sleep in full chain mail, this episode engages in a practice of print culture past and reflects on the act itself as much as the spirited tale being shared.