A long (although extremely problematic) historiographical tradition emphasises the ability of psychoactive plants like jimsonweed, henbane, mandrake, and belladonna to trigger supernatural visions and experiences, especially in the context of the European witch trials. Inns, taverns, coffeehouses, and alehouses were also primary locales for the telling of ghost stories, while historical proprietors were quick to capitalise on celebrated hauntings in their vicinities, like the eighteenth-century Smithfield publicans who (according to Horace Walpole) ‘mae fortunes’ from the crowds who flocked to see the controversial Cock Lane ghost in 1762.Įven more interesting are the mental and imaginative affiliations. Haunted pubs, along with the haunted stately home, form what Roger Clarke has termed one of the ‘twin polarities’ of the British landscape eerie every village, town, and city has at least one, resident phantoms and poltergeists are used as marketing tools by the drinks industry, and while generally a twentieth-century conceit they are sometimes fleetingly glimpsed in the historical record, like this unusual and unsettling case of a ‘spirit in green colour’ who appeared to a maid at a Manchester inn in 1662. This spooky season, while holed up in an isolated farmhouse in deepest North Yorkshire, I’ve been thinking about the connections between intoxicants and ghosts, which haven’t been fully explored in the extensive academic literatures around either topic, but which seem to be many and various.įirstly, there are long-standing material associations between intoxicating spaces and the spectral.
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