A study of the production, circulation and consumption of English ghost stories during the Age of Reason. This work examines a variety of mediums: ballads and chapbooks, newspapers, sermons, medical treatises and scientific journals, novels and plays. It relates the telling of ghost stories to changes associated with the Enlightenment.

Introduction: The Ghosts of Early Modern England; 1: Restoration Hauntings; 2: Printing the Preternatural in the Late Seventeenth Century; 3: A New Canterbury Tale; 4: Ghost Stories in the Periodical Press, c. 1700-c. 1750; 5: Confessional Cultures and Ghost Beliefs, c. 1750-c. 1800; 6: Landscapes of Belief and Everyday Life in Late Eighteenth-Century England; Conclusion