Encounters with the dead: Heaven help them The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead. By Carl Watkins. Bodley Head; 318 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk WINTER is the time for ghost stories, for "fire and fleet and candlelight" and the terror of shadows; it is also a good season for Carl Watkins's book. For this is only partly an historical study of attitudes to the dead. More enthusiastically, it is a gazetteer of weird goings-on in remote corners of England. Here is the delightfully named Mr Snowball, who on a ride to Ampleforth in North Yorkshire around 1400 encountered a fiery raven that became a dog, the ghost of an excommunicated man; James Tankerlay, a wicked priest who, after death, "blew out" the eye of his concubine; and Major George Sydenham, who in the 1660s returned from the dead to tell his captain that there was indeed immortal life, seized the captain's sword, and vanished away. Spirits knock on walls, poltergeists throw chairs, and through the chill night air floats the howling of "Gabble Ratchets," or phantom dogs. Religion, both established and popular, has changed mightily in England over the centuries, but beliefs about the dead have proved remarkably deep-rooted. Medieval people believed that souls wandered out of Purgatory, haunting their enemies and pleading for release. The Reformation did away with Purgatory, but ghosts still walked and sought revenge. In the 16th century prayers for the dead were banned as popish superstition, but survived because people thought it necessary and compassionate to remember them. By and large, people believed in life after death - half of all Englishmen and Englishwomen still do - but heaven was a concept too vague to give proper comfort. Accordingly the bereaved clung to the dead in life, like poor Kenelm Digby, who in 1633 found his young wife dead in bed "as she was alive, like an Angel," had her portrait painted by Van Dyck there and then, and shut himself up with it. To memorialise the dead with stones or monuments, to wear their hair in brooches and to treat their bodies reverently, assured them another kind of life after death. Beyond that, only pious hope remained. Secularism and rationalism made little difference. Cremation caught on so slowly at the end of the 19th century, because many still believed in the resurrection of the body, which therefore should not be burned. After the first world war the bereaved attended séances in crowds, hoping to make physical contact with those they had lost. Famous atheists mocked them and then capitulated themselves to the mysteries of the spirit world: like Annie Besant, a social reformer who ended up as a credulous theosophist. Mr Watkins has fun. He enjoys the strange little towns his research takes him to, and the odd people he meets. Like Charles Dickens's Fat Boy, he "wants to make your flesh creep." Nothing goes very deep, as if he is afraid of treading on still-live sensibilities. An almost pathological aversion to commas makes his book much harder reading than it should be, and the amount of repetition suggests that he assumes no great intelligence in his readers. But perhaps that is fair enough, when this is a subject on which all men and women, in truth, are as ignorant as each other.