ABSTRACT
The genius of the scene is that it playfully amplifies the mock-scariness of ghosts by making them also disgusting; it does this by making them physically embodied, and giving them matter and texture associated with corporeality. By the early twentieth century the tradition of blending ghosts and other kinds of “practical magic” is established, as is the particularly disgusting quality of such ghosts. The ghost story had long been considered unscientific, old-fashioned Christmas fun. The story is also full of the usual affective elements of ghost stories—plenty of fear and horror, but little disgust—until the culmination of the haunting experience, in which the paranormal investigator describes how he experiences the consciousness of the haunting “mesmerizer”. Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1859 produced one of the most noted ghost stories of the period, and arguably the first that employs core disgust elicitors in a physiological description of the ghost’s manifestation.
