ABSTRACT
Within a decade of publishing what might be considered the first modern Scottish ghost stories, Walter Scott and James Hogg turned their attention to widespread doubt about the form. The ghost story in Scotland does not have a clear genealogy, and the tradition is frequently interrupted. In all of its iterations, the ghost is used to emphasize the relation between individual and collective ways of seeing. Scott’s “Wandering Willie’s Tale”, published in Redgauntlet, has some claim to be the first significant Scottish ghost story. Like Hogg’s “George Dobson’s Expedition to Hell”, it concerns not a haunting but mortals entering into hell. While Scott draws attention to his individual tellers, the earlier folklore collector Allan Cunningham emphasizes the collective formulation of ghost stories. In “The Ghost With the Golden Casket”, published in the London Magazine in 1821, the narrator recalls his visit to Caerlaverock fifty years earlier, combining “the memory of its people, its scenery, and the story” of a ghost.
