"A Ghostly Visitant"

An article entitled “A Ghostly Visitant” was published in the Illustrated Police News on May 16, 1874 alongside an illustration captioned “Strange Adventure in a Churchyard.” The article chronicles “an interview of extraordinary and exceptional nature” that occurred during an elderly man’s visit to his wife’s grave one night. He was about to leave the churchyard when he noticed “a strange, spectral-looking figure creeping noiselessly over the turf.” The young girl, who appeared to be about twelve or thirteen years old, crept toward the man and put her hand upon his shoulder, at which point he realized that the girl “was not a being of another world” (that is, a ghost of some sort), as he had originally thought. She began to mutter some incoherent sentences and asked the man to write them down; as he was writing, a female figure appeared, took hold of the girl’s arm, and led her away into a nearby cottage. The man later found out that the girl was well-known by neighbors as a “poor demented creature” who was also a “somnambulist” (a sleepwalker).

This article stands out among the other articles in the Illustrated Police News because it does not report a murder, or even a crime; it is merely an account of an elderly man’s strange encounter with a young, ghostly girl in a churchyard. So why, then, did the newspaper choose to report on this seemingly inconsequential event? Would nineteenth-century readers have expected to find articles of this nature in a newspaper that is primarily known for reporting on murders and crimes? What appeal would this article have held for readers (beyond the fact that ghost stories are cool)? Presumably the subject matter of the article is a reflection of the prevailing beliefs of the time regarding the supernatural; perhaps there was simply much more interest in ghosts and ghost stories in the nineteenth century than there is today, and thus this article was a worthy and much-read addition to the newspaper. (It is also worth noting that much of Victorian literature contains references to the supernatural and the gothic, which speaks to the public’s interest in stories of this nature.) I would like to know more about the reasons for which this story was deemed worthy of publication, and whether or not similar stories can be found in other issues of the Illustrated Police News.