Who’s Afraid of a Woman Ghost?
One big factor could be the gravitational pull of the Victorian era, when ghost stories abounded, on present-day culture. It was a time when gender roles were becoming tightly confined, Hieber says, in response to a changing, industrializing society.
That meant women were more tightly tied to the domestic sphere, and their houses, even after death. In a time before funeral parlors, it was often women who washed and prepared the dead, further strengthening their connection with death. Add to that a predilection toward romanticizing death, as Poe did, and you’ve got a formula for memorable dead women—and their ghosts.
Women also took a more central role in the otherworldly around this time, Hieber says, from their involvement with the spiritualist movement as mediums, to a growing cadre of 19th-century authors like Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Ridell penning stories populated by phantasms and spirits, who were often women.
“The pump was primed, as it were, for women to be involved in ghost lore because they had been directly involved in creating it,” Hieber says.
A ghost’s purpose has shifted over time, too. In Medieval times, ghosts were manifestations of cautionary tales. A woman might return as a ghost if she transgressed society’s boundaries, or committed a perceived wrong. Think, for example, of Anne Boleyn’s ghost wandering Hampton Court with her head under her arm.
Those cautionary tales cut both ways. In Medieval times, being a ghost was typically a punishment for misdeeds, real or perceived. Later, it was ghosts like the Bell Witch, rumored to have killed Bell family patriarch John Bell, doing the punishing.
“We have an innate sense of justice, we all do,” Stone says. “We like to see bad people punished and good people rewarded, however long it takes.”
For a women abused by her husband, or cast out by her community, the post-mortal realm may have been the only avenue for recompense available. Her story, relayed by women to their family members and friends, could then serve as its own kind of healing.
There’s “some kind of comfort in the fact that you can haunt someone forever if they failed to meet your needs in life,” Janes says.
Ghost stories are also a means of preserving history. For past women who may not have had the right to own property, represent themselves in court, or even keep their last names, a ghost story may be the most powerful means of being remembered.
As ghosts, women “have a staying power, they have a voice,” Hieber says.