ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the literary and cultural depiction of ghostly animals. It explores depictions of ghostly pets, and considers them chiefly in terms of anxieties raised by the spatial proximity of humans and animals. The idea that pets belong in the home may give ghostly pets a greater capacity for producing uncanny encounters in domestic spaces, inasmuch as pets possess that degree of familiarity intrinsic to the uncanny, “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”. The chapter describes the “post-Darwinian ghost”, an ape-like ghost which provokes an unsettling awareness of our own animal being. It considers the depiction of ghostly animals as “vanishing animals” in contemporary narratives about endangerment and extinction—in other words, narratives about the frightening effects of human proximity on non-human animals.
