A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke: review The question, as I understand it, is not whether you believe in ghosts, but whether you have seen or heard one, and, if so, what it looked or sounded like. The fact that I have never seen a blue whale does not diminish the likelihood of their existing. The same applies to ghosts. This seems to be the starting point of Roger Clarke's extended voyage through the half-lit world of lost souls. For hundreds of years people have reported encounters with ghosts and told stories about them. Therefore - even if only in the imagination - ghosts have an existence. Thus they have a natural history. But what are they? Clarke quotes, without comment, one ghost-hunter's belief that they are "the electrical residue of emotions that became entangled with the living." Lord knows what that is supposed to mean. Another "seminal figure," Hans Holzer, defined them as "a surviving emotional memory," unaware of their own death and therefore in need of help. The problem with real ghosts, as opposed to the elegant fictional creations of the likes of MR James and Susan Hill, is that their behaviour is so erratic and irritating. Clarke has a very long chapter about Hinton Ampner, an Elizabethan house where a tall dark female figure roamed around to the accompaniment of bangings, crashes, groans and shrieks. Was she the spirit of the illegitimate child fathered by the lord of the house and throttled by his manservant? Who knows or cares? She certainly made life unpleasant for those living there. At Epworth Rectory in Lincolnshire, the boyhood home of John Wesley, the peace was constantly disturbed by groans, squeaks, tinglings and knockings. Mrs Wesley was of the view that there were good spirits and troubled spirits, and that encounters with the former would be more common "did not our lapse into sensuality prevent it." Some of the tales told with ghoulish relish by Clarke were simple frauds - the Cock Lane Ghost, for instance, which evolved into an ornate and absurd con. If the main drawback with ghosts is their maddening addiction to making silly noises and opening and closing doors for no good reason, another is that they attract the enthusiasm of the worst kind of nutters, charlatans, neurotics and bores. There is a very large cast of them in this book. It's hard to tell what Clarke himself thinks of all these people and their ludicrous antics. At one point he observes in an apparently po-faced way that "there's been very little in the way of academic research into the class structure of ghost belief." And a damn good thing, too, some might say. But were a chair of Parapsychology and Ghost-hunting to be established by one of our more progressive seats of learning, I can think of no one better qualified to fill it. A Natural History of Ghosts Roger Clarke Viking, £20, 361pp