Spectral Aphasia, Psychical Ghost Stories, and Spirit Post Offices: Three Modern Ghost Stories about Communication Infrastructures

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Spiritualism was a watershed moment in which many of the keywords of our communication vocabulary—“medium,” “channel,” and “communication” itself—were first given fleshly and ghostly form in the spiritualist séance, which early on was likened to a “spiritual telegraph.” Throughout this period, newfangled ghosts and communication infrastructures (including the telegraph, but also the equally novel postal service) developed in tandem. This article explores three such boundary genres of communication between the living and the dead: how the séance converted the “spectral aphasia” of haunted houses into the domestic séance; how ghosts of loved ones dying far away across the “phantasmal empire” turned the ghost from an actor to a message, working in tandem with telegrams and letters in the “psychical ghost story”; and lastly, how the American spiritualist press created “spirit post offices” to publish communications from the dead alongside ordinary postal “correspondence” from the living.