Apparition

The visible form of a spirit, briefly maintained, ordinarily silent. The category is broader than the figure. An apparition may be the recently dead, seen at the moment of death by someone at a distance. It may be the long-dead, returning to the room in which they died. It may be the still-living, seen by another at the moment of crisis. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in eighteen-eighty-two, classified the cases in three groups by relationship to the time of death: crisis, post-mortem, and haunting. The classification is still useful. The figures are not.

The English-language ghost record is, in volume, predominantly a record of apparitions. The figures appear most often in the family home, in the domestic moment, dressed in the clothes they wore in life. They are seen briefly. They do not, in the great majority of accounts, speak. The archive prefers, where possible, the older record over the dramatised retelling.