This chapter discusses implications for thinking about the politics and the ethics of literature. The literary ghost is ultimately “indiscernible”, and then a scholarly account of ghost stories should focus on how they ask questions of literary representation itself. If the ghost story is a matter of “life itself”, Oliphant shows how that life is unaccountable, comes from darkness beyond the ontological frame of reality. For Oliphant, then, stories about ghosts were very like ghosts themselves: they could not be conjured up at will but would arrive in their own time, a time always at odds with the ego’s daylight world and its well-ordered schedule. Elizabeth McCarthy rightly cautions against reading Oliphant’s work as no more than a response to trauma, pointing out that she was writing ghost stories long before the major catastrophes of her life, the multiple bereavements and family crises.