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Familial and fraternal hauntings have long been central to the stories we tell, from Enkidu’s ghost in
The Epic of Gilgamesh to Odysseus conferring with his slain brother-in-arms Achilles to Banquo’s discarnate presence in
Macbeth to
Wuthering Heights’s sorrowful Catherine. More recently, there’s erratic detective John River, who confers with his newly dead partner, Stevie, in the television series
River.
In the nineteenth century, such fictive imaginings were often based on real losses as infectious disease swept through families. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, watched her toddler, Charley, die in a Cincinnati cholera outbreak during the summer of 1849. She began to read, as she described it, “of visions, of heavenly voices, of mysterious sympathies and transmissions of knowledge from heart to heart without the intervention of the senses, or what Quakers call being ‘baptized into the spirit’ of those who are distant.” Her husband, theologian Calvin Sto