“Unseen but very evident”

Hauntings have played an important part in fictional and non-fictional uses of the English Civil War. This chapter discusses the visible engagements in early-modernism in both the adaptations of, and the historiography concerning, the English Civil Wars in order to interrogate different aspects of the War’s haunting returns. In Edgehill 1642, the presence of ghosts speaks towards the possibilities of acknowledgement: the acknowledgement of non-linear realities, as exemplified by the story’s nod towards “reincarnation,” and, by extension, an acknowledgement of history as an embodied epistemology, as a personalised form rather than a text to be read. The Edgehill haunting of the 1640s is situated as a precedent for later supernatural encounters in the area. Romney-Woollard’s encounter with a Roundhead ghost describes a quintessentially uncanny experience, in which the unfamiliar is unexpectedly located within the familiar, in a way that unsettles Romney-Woollard’s identity.