Did People In The Medieval World Believe in Ghosts？

Ghosts, ghouls, things that go bump in the night. There's a kind of adrenaline rush that comes along with a good ghost story, and there's a reason for this. Ghost stories survived us from across time and around the world. Every culture on Earth, from the Amazonian rainforest to the taiga in Russia, has its own ghost stories. Often, societies use ghost stories to reinforce their own values. To figure out what makes a society tick, it often helps to look at what makes that same society frightened. Join us as we uncover the medieval phantasmic to find out what the restless dead of the Middle Ages tell us about the anxieties of the living. When I first came here, it had a reputation as a haunted place. This is not what you would want as your burial for this period. It's completely outside the norm. It's a very, very visual reminder of the stark reality of the death that will come to you. When you look at different cultures around the world, people have been pretty much ghost hunting since the dawn of time. I'm slightly freaked out now, so I guess that we should go explore a little more. You can hardly talk about ghosts without coming to a graveyard, so we've come to one of the most beautiful graveyards in all of London. This is Abney Park Cemetery, and it's one of the so-called Magnificent Seven. It's a wonderful place to come and think about burial practice and what it means. Ghost stories go back as far as any recorded human history. In fact, there are ghost stories dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, in which the authors left clear instructions etched on stone tablets about how to correctly deal with things like demons and the ghosts of the deceased. Later, there are ancient Roman sources, like that of Pliny the Younger, which tells a tale of a brave philosopher using logic to confront restless ghosts in the community. And we think that ghost stories exist even before any written records do. This is sort of tied with ideas about dead bodies themselves. You see, humans have an innate repulsion to dead bodies. It's something that we call necrophobia. Animals have it as well, and that's because corpses, if unattended, can actually injure your health. Corpses decay just like anything else does, so it's very, very important that they're treated with the utmost care in order to protect communities around them. Given the care taken in communities to ensure a proper burial, it's not surprising that so many of our ghost stories, both modern and historic, center around the consequences of improper burial. At some point in time, we even started to bury bodies with extravagant and useful grave goods. It suggests that people thought their loved ones were going somewhere and might still need these objects in death. If you believe that there's such a thing as a journey into the afterlife, then it stands to reason that the part of you that still exists without your body can also journey back from that same afterlife. And it's from this that we get our concept of ghosts. The medieval period is often associated with horror tropes because some see it as a comparatively grim time which experienced horrors like the Black Death and one which accepted corporeal punishment and sometimes torture. And while their ghost stories may be similar to ours, the way they understood the concept of things like spirits and death was very different. To see how, let's look at one of the earliest surviving ghost stories from my favorite time period. In the reign of King Richard II in York, a tailor named Snowball was riding his horse home from the town of Gilling to the town of Ampleport. Suddenly, a raven began to fly around his head repeatedly before it opened its wings and flew into the ground, beating onto the ground as though it were dying. Sparks began shooting out of the raven's body. The man drew his sword and began to fight with the raven, saying, God forbid that you should have the power to hurt me on this occasion. After hearing the name of God, the raven flew off. For protection, he began to hold the hilt of his sword in front of him like a cross. The raven returned, but this time in the form of a giant dog with a chain around his neck. He told the tailor that he was a damned soul who had been excommunicated from the church. The spirit asked that the tailor go to the priest that had excommunicated him and ask for an absolution of his sins. However, the spirit warned that if the tailor failed to do this, the flesh would crawl from his bones and he would begin to physically rot. He immediately went to go find the priest, but the priest refused. Eventually, the tailor found a chaplain to whom he paid five pieces of silver. In return, the chaplain reinstated the man's soul into the church and he gave the tailor a piece of parchment that stated that his excommunication was no longer valid. The tailor returned as the ghost had requested with the good news of his reinstatement into the church and several copies of the Gospels. The spirit thanked the tailor for his intervention and said, know that on Monday next, I shall pass into everlasting joy along with 30 other spirits. The story that we just heard is one of the so-called Byland Ghost Stories. They're called the Byland Ghost Stories because they were written down here at Byland Monastery in about the year 1400. As you can probably tell from the size of this complex, Byland was an incredibly important Cistercian monastery and these buildings were finished around about 1177. The story of Snowball the Tailor does a few things. First of all, it explains to audiences what purgatory is. For medieval people, purgatory is a kind of hell that isn't permanent. So if you end up like the ghost in this story, you will be experiencing the torments of hell. But it also reminds audiences that if they want to and they're worried about their loved ones in the afterlife, they can intercede for them. You probably noticed that this ghost story is different in a lot of ways from our own modern ghost stories. When medieval ghosts appear, they usually do because they specifically want something from you. More to the point, they want something religious from you. However, the Byland Ghost Stories are specifically significant because they inform a lot of horror tropes today. These are some of the first recorded instances of things like necromantic ritual, invoking the name of God in order to intercede with ghosts. Really familiar things that wouldn't be out of place in any horror movie today. But ghost stories aren't the only way that members of the church communicated ideas about the afterlife. There's also physical ways of doing that same thing. To find out more, we're going to visit the most important religious site in medieval England, Canterbury Cathedral. Canterbury Cathedral is the most important cathedral in medieval England. And there's a couple of reasons for this. The first is that it's home to the Archbishop of Canterbury. And this is the most important of all of the bishops of England. The hints in the whole arch bit of the name. Secondly, it's home to the murder of one of the most important medieval English saints, St. Thomas Becket. You may have heard of him. He was also an Archbishop of Canterbury. Kind of got murdered accidentally, sort of on the orders of the king. But for our purposes, it's particularly interesting because it's home to a few stories about sightings from beyond the grave. If you look closely at some of the stained glass in Canterbury Cathedral, you'll see illustrations of St. Thomas Becket floating in through a window, coming back to intervene in the lives of the living. But not only that, there's even been a sighting of the saint here in the cathedral as late as the 20th century. So if you hang around long enough, who knows? You might just catch a glimpse of the saint himself. This reminds me of one of my favorite medieval ghost stories. It comes to us from the Old English Blickling Homily 10. In it, a rich man's beloved relative dies. He's absolutely bereft. Wracked by grief, he leaves the country. He sojourns in distant lands for years until one day he's compelled to return home specifically to go see the corpse of his dead relative. But when he does, the bones rise up out of the grave and instead of greeting him with sweet nothings, demand to know what he's doing there to see them when they're nothing but dust and decay. The man is shocked and he completely changes his life around and dedicates himself to religion. This is a classic trope from the medieval period which historians call dry bone speak. It's seen in religious texts like homilies, mostly to warn the audience against sin and remind them that as the bones were once alive, so too will the audience one day be dead. But we don't just see this idea expressed in pictures and manuscripts. Eventually, by the later medieval period, the idea comes out in a physical expression in what are called transitomes or cadaver tombs. Here at Canterbury Cathedral, there is a wonderful example of the idea that it doesn't matter how rich you are, how powerful you are, or how gorgeous your clothes are, eventually your body's going to decay. The tops of these tombs display the deceased in all their splendor. But at the bottom lays a decayed and sobering reminder of what awaits even the noblest of people. I met up with archives manager, Cressida Williams, to find out more. This is the transitome of Archbishop Henry Chichley who died in 1443 and it was completed during his lifetime, even perhaps over 15 years before he died. So this is incredible because since it was finished so quickly before his death, that means that he would have actually been going by it every day, wouldn't he? Absolutely, because we're here in the choir, the monastic choir of Canterbury Cathedral. So he would have been seated in here on the south side near where the throne is. So it's quite an extraordinary thought that he had that visual regular reminder of his own mortality. There's a legend on the north and south sides of the tomb conveying that message to those present and those who passed by. Cressida takes me into the Canterbury Cathedral archives to see some more examples of what historians call memento mori, a Latin phrase which means remember you will die. This is a printed primer, so a prayer book, printed in 1554 in Rouen in France, but very much for English use. And what do we have here in this image then? So we have the three living and the three dead engraved here with some verse underneath in English. It's a visual reminder of our mortality, the three knights, the three huntsmen here encountering skeletons on the left-hand side. So this is such a fascinating juxtaposition, isn't it? Because you've got these three huntsmen, they're very rich, they're very powerful, and they're doing the thing that's the most fun for rich, powerful people, isn't it? They're just going hunting. And they have to come face to face with these skeletons that are reminding them that none of this matters. Eventually they are going to be a corpse, right? Yes, it's a very, very visual, simple reminder of the stark reality of the death that will come to them. This is a really great example of how individual Christians are really thinking about Christianity and their own salvation, aren't they? Yes, so it's for personal devotion. It's for the individual to reflect on this image and to reflect on the destiny of their soul after death. Not only were ghost stories used by the church to remind both poor and wealthy practitioners about sin and death, they had another role in upholding the hierarchy within the church as well. Pope Gregory the Great recorded two ghost stories in the sixth century. This is one. The deacon Pacasius was, by all accounts, a wonderful man. He gave lots of money to charity, was active in his local church, and well-respected by all of his fellow clergymen. However, at this time, elections for pope were hotly contested. Pacasius ended up supporting a losing candidate, Lawrence, over the successful Pope Symmachus. A few years later, the Bishop of Capua was visiting Baths on order of his physician. As he relaxed in one of the thermal tubs, he noticed through the steam the ghost of Pacasius standing there as though he were going to attend him like a servant. The bishop was terrified, and he asked Pacasius why he was there. Pacasius replied it was because he was being tormented for supporting Lawrence. He begged that the bishop would return and say prayers for his soul so that he would be released from the bathhouse in his torments. Pacasius told the bishop that he would know if his intervention was successful if he returned to the bath and found that Pacasius was no longer there. Lo and behold, after saying dozens of masses for his soul, the bishop returned, and Pacasius was gone. Fundamentally, this ghost story is doing a couple of things. The first is it's showing how important it is to support whoever is elected Pope. It doesn't matter who you were supporting in the run-ups to the election. Once it's over, it's a done deal. If you don't do that, you might end up haunting a bathhouse. Interestingly, the bathhouse itself is doing a couple of different things. Sure, it's a bathhouse, but the hot water in there is supposed to remind you about the fires of hell that are going to consume your soul if you don't support the Pope. The second thing that this story does is it shows how prayer and intervention can save sinners provided that they lived a pretty all right life. This shows us a lot about ghosts in the early medieval period. First, it says that even at the highest echelons of society, people really do believe in them. But stories about them can also be used to reinforce extant hierarchies. It's very, very important to understand that the hierarchy of the church works the way that it does for a reason. But that church power can also be used to save individual Christians' souls. So art tropes like the three living and the three dead or transit tombs, or literary tropes like dry bones speak aren't just about creeping people out or being gory. They are a really important way of underlining one of the fundamental messages of Christianity. And that's that this life that you're experiencing right now is by necessity going to end. So you shouldn't be focusing on things like outward beauty or riches. Instead, you need to understand that your physical body is going to die. And instead, focus on your spiritual body. Turn towards God and prepare yourself for your eventual afterlife. If a ghost story survives to us for over a thousand years, it's going to be because somebody who had a lot of money and power wants you to be aware of that story. There's going to be a political reason for that. It makes perfect sense that a place as important as Canterbury Cathedral has a few spooky things around the shop. The church, of course, is the spiritual intermediary for every Christian in England at the time. They're the ones who are supposed to be telling you how to live your life correctly so that you don't end up haunting anyone in the afterlife. Of course, for some people like saints, it's perfectly acceptable to come back in the afterlife, but that's usually because you're trying to intervene and make sure that other people's spiritual lives are on course. So in a cathedral as important as this, of course there's reminders of the fact that you're going to die. That's the entire point of spirituality. You will die, so make sure that your religious life is correct now. So if ghost stories help reinforce the right way to bury someone, it's because in the Middle Ages, there actually was a right way to bury someone. That's in consecrated or hallowed ground. Consecrated ground would be pre-prepared by a priest, so it's blessed and that's where you know that people are going to be buried. So we can learn a lot by looking at what we call deviant or atypical burials. This could mean sometimes that someone is just not buried in consecrated ground. So for example, they might be buried specifically outside of the walls of a churchyard, or in certain cases, in places that are really unpleasant like marshes. Similarly, we find atypical burials that will, for example, have the head severed and between the knees. This is usually a symbol that this person is a criminal, and there's been some worry that the revenant dead were going to come back, haunt their communities, and even attack people. However, some atypical burials are just a bit of a mistake. Somebody died and there wasn't time or the wherewithal to bury them in actual consecrated ground. So we have to be very, very careful when we look at archaeological finds before we declare that someone is necessarily outside of their community. However, by revealing some of the interesting ways we've buried people over time, archaeological finds can tell us a lot about what past cultures thought of the afterlife, and are important if we want to learn more about how people viewed this transitory period between life and death. The University of Bradford houses the UK's largest collection of skeletal human remains. And we've come here to look at burials with biological anthropologist, Dr. Jo Buckbury, starting with a remarkable medieval graveyard. This is a plan of a cemetery from Northamptonshire called Rawns, and you see we've got a small two-cell church in the centre. And all of these individuals are buried with their heads at the west end of the grave and their feet at the east end of the grave. One of the ideas is that come the resurrection, these people would be able to sit up and they'll see the rising sun. So your feet are towards the sunrise angle. It's clear from these carefully aligned graves that medieval Christians were very particular about how they were buried. And this regularity makes individuals that fall outside of those norms very easy to spot. One of the things we know from textual information is that people who had sinned in particular ways and suicides and criminals fall into this is that they would not be buried on consecrated ground. So this is the cemetery of Walkington Mould in East Yorkshire. And if you look at the burials, they're quite disorganised. So first of all, we have them in, there are no rows, but they're also different orientations. They're not all aligned west-east. We actually have a grave down here with multiple people in it. It looks like there's three, there's actually four of them. Wow. And it is unusual for people to be buried in clusters like that. Normally you have an individual in a grave. And apart from these two individuals up at the top, none of them have actually got a head. In addition to these headless bodies, we actually have a series of skulls buried around the cemetery. These may have been displayed in some way. And we do have references in the early medieval texts to the use of head stakes to display heads as a warning. Being separated from your community and buried in unconsecrated ground was a huge deal because it meant that you were unlikely to make it into heaven. But looking at a photograph of this excavation reveals a more grisly story behind these unusual burials. Well, they're clearly executions. We have evidence of decapitation. We have this individual over here and this is the leg and the knee of a second individual. And they're practically touching. So that suggests that they're contemporaneous burials. Okay. And then this individual over here, we know from the radiocarbon dating that he's a little bit later. This is over a few hundred years. We're looking at maybe one execution a generation. So it's a really infrequent occurrence. Beheadings happened in the medieval period for a number of reasons. Not only were painful deaths considered a great deterrent against crime, but the gruesome and unusual death also underlined the fact that your community thought you were unlikely to end up in heaven. Allowing sinful people to go unpunished was thought to create an additional problem, the revenant dead. The word revenant means to return. And these are people who rose from the grave to trouble the living. So beheadings served an additional purpose, ensuring you didn't come back after your death to haunt the community. The idea seems to be that you can't get up out of your grave if your head isn't attached. These three individuals all have evidence of decapitation. Right. But we don't know for certain if that decapitation happened as the form of execution, although we can make that inference, or if it was done as a post-mortem sort of mutilation of the body. For what reason would you decapitate someone after death? What is it kind of showing? Disrespect, really, and otherness, and it is not the type of thing that you would do with a typical medieval burial. For this individual, what you can see is this enormous wedge cut with a polished surface. Look at that. There's another one just to the side of it. It's quite shallow. And there's another one in here that just takes off the surface of the bone. These are not in the right orientation for a decapitation. A decapitation should be coming in like this. Right. These blows are actually coming upwards. Huh. And that is really strange because you can't really wield a sword in a sort of like an upwards motion into the back of somebody's head. So that suggests to me that this individual was probably bending over. The mismatch of the orientation suggests that the person who did this aimed very badly. It could be that the executioner was not as experienced, perhaps. Right. And I think that ties into the idea that this is kind of almost like a once-in-a-generation occurrence. It's not something that people did again and again. And it must have taken at least four blows to detach this cranium, and it wasn't buried with a body, so presumably at some point it was fully decapitated. The haphazard nature of these cuts is interesting because if these beheadings were crudely carried out after death, it's possible that they were either done to put the heads on display to deter crime or done to prevent these people from becoming revenant dead. And the fact that their heads were found buried outside the community in unconsecrated ground only makes this seem more likely. This is not what you would want as your death or as your burial for this period. It's completely outside the norm for what people would have been expecting for the end of their life and the way that they would have the start of their afterlife. So for medieval people, improper burial not only jeopardized one's chances of getting into heaven, but it could also mean that your community was threatened by visits from beyond the grave. Acts like torture and beheadings, which make sense within a medieval context and are sometimes used to stave off attacks from the revenant dead, mean that the Middle Ages is often associated with horror by people now. Even its Gothic buildings have become a trope almost synonymous with the genre. Sometimes when we think about the Middle Ages, when we think about ghosts or horror stories, it can be kind of confusing how we use historical terms because of the word Gothic. Gothic technically is a reference to the art and architecture from about the 12th century onwards in the Middle Ages. However, the main way we use it today is to reference Victorian things because probably the only group of people who are more obsessed with the Middle Ages than I am are the Victorians. So we see references to the Middle Ages all across the Victorian period and even in their own funerary monuments. This is an absolutely gorgeous example right here of what we would call a Neo-Gothic tomb. So Neo-Gothic because it's Victorian, but it's using medieval elements. So here you have a gorgeous pointed Gothic arch. The entire thing is what you would call a false arcade. So it's got a series of pillars that are kind of indicating that there's space behind it. You'll also see this gorgeous stone vine here. And this is a reference to a medieval art motif about the sins of the world. You needed to avoid sinning, like getting entangled in ivy in order to live a correct spiritual life. But Victorians aren't just obsessed with medievalisms when it comes to architecture or funerary monuments. They're often the first people to record stories about what they say are medieval ghosts. So I'm off to Chillingham Castle where we can look at ideas about medieval ghosts through a Victorian lens. If I were to say the words haunted castle to you, your mind would probably conjure up an image something like this. This is Chillingham Castle. And even the name sounds like something fantastic I've made up specifically to talk about ghosts. But I assure you this location has a long and storied history. In the 12th century, it was the home to a monastery. By the 13th century, because of increasing incursions from Scottish forces, this castle was built. Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots, led his Scottish campaigns from this location. Over the years, it's been host to royals, been home to several noble families, but now it's probably best known as the home to dozens of ghosts. But unlike other medieval ghost stories, these ones come to us from a little later in time. The first recorded accounts of the ghosts of Chillingham Castle were penned by Lady Leonora Tankerville. She moved here from the US after marrying the Earl of Tankerville in 1895 during what was something of a golden age for ghost stories. Imagine an American interested in medieval ghosts. The Victorian and Edwardian eras were a time of great modernization and secularism, with major shifts away from religious explanations of the natural world. But the flip side of all this worldly rationalism was that it actually increased interest in the occult and spiritualism. Ghost stories were a hugely popular part of fiction as people became increasingly interested in the paranormal, seances, and finding different ways of interacting with the dead. Places like Chillingham found themselves in the middle of the spiritualist revival. Sherlock Holmes author and notable believer in the supernatural, Sir Arthur Cronin Doyle, wrote to Lady Tankerville to commend her reports of the Chillingham ghosts. From the 15th century onwards, the castle had been a seat of the Grey, Bennett, and later Tankerville families. I met with its current owner, married to a member of the original Grey family, Sir Humphrey, who has taken great care in the castle renovations. This great castle was built really to keep the Scots out of England. It began being one strong tower, and then in the 1200s, 1300s, they built three more towers, and then they built between the towers for the king to come and stay, to make it into a worthwhile palace. And so in this room here, you see ancient tower there, ancient tower there, and this room just built between for the king, and the rooms above. So it's been like that ever since, really. You know, with so much battle and action, and so much back and forth, you know, on the Scottish borders here, it's really no wonder, I think, that we get so many reports of ghosts. In the 18th century, there was a figure who spent his time wailing and moaning and shimmering in blue. Digging between the castle walls, join up two rooms, they find the bones of a child, and they buried it, and that solved that problem. But when I restored that room, my guests kept saying, you must have electric fault there, because there's a flash of blue on the edge of the door. Well, there's no electrics there at all. We must have left a toe bone or a knee bone. When I first came here, it had a reputation as a haunted place. There was a lovely priest who was from the family. He said, well, look, I go all around the country getting rid of ghosts, so I'll do that. Yeah. And so he came along, and next morning he said, there's too many, I can't deal with them. So that sounds fairly creepy. And it seems that the ghosts Leonora documented over a hundred years ago are still hanging around and causing trouble for today's residents. I wanted to hear more about the ghosts that Leonora wrote about when she lived here. So I've gone to meet Richard, Chillingham's resident ghost hunter. So we are here in this absolutely gorgeous medieval castle. I hear that it is allegedly one of the most haunted castles in England, if not Europe. I would agree. About how many ghosts do we think are here in Chillingham? About 50 that I know of. 50, okay, that's a lot. What periods do we think that they come from? A lot of the ghosts in here go back to medieval times, and indeed it became the home of the torturers back in the day. But I can't tell if I'm excited or scared, but one way or another, can you show me? Absolutely, let's go. So we're here in this gorgeous little medieval chapel. I've noticed these wonderful little medieval oxen who are holding up the roof beams. You've got this really interesting kind of carving in the wall back here. But it's a chapel, and you're telling me there's ghosts here. The famous ghost in this chapel is a young girl, eight years old. Her bones were found under the floor. When she was buried, this wasn't consecrated because the original chapel moved in the castle from one side to another. Oh, so she got buried here. It later became a chapel. Ah, I see. Okay, so that is very medieval of her. It's very medieval of her. I love that. Moving through the castle, we enter the Grand Hall. Welcome to our lovely medieval Great Hall. I love this room. If I was a medieval ghost, this is exactly where I would be hanging out. In here, in the top corner, we often get Lady Mary Barclay. She likes to walk the top part of this hall, and she manifests herself with the smell of roses. And if you're really lucky, a little wafting chill to go with it. Heading further up into the tower, we come to a room with a more regal appearance. This is where King Edward I stayed on his way to engage with William Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298. The wonderful Gothic window behind me, that was installed for Edward I's visit. You can really see that this kind of is a room fit for a king. You've got gorgeous natural light. You've got really high ceilings, incredibly detailed woodwork. You know, it feels really royal. Oh, indeed. You know, Richard, I've been looking a lot lately at these medieval accounts of ghosts. And so obviously medieval people really feel the need to explain ghosts. They want to record them. They need to get out into the world, the fact that these ghosts exist. So ghost hunting certainly has existed for quite some time, but obviously the way that we do it now is a lot different to, you know, waiting for a damned soul to come and ask their brother-in-law for help. People have been pretty much ghost hunting since the dawn of time. There's always been an interest. When you look at different cultures around the world, it's an absolutely fascinating subject. I want to find out how Richard finds these ghosts. So he shows me some of the tools of the ghost hunting trade. These are divining rods or dousing rods. This is a term I know. Though what you do with them, I have no idea. I have a pair especially for you. Amazing, okay. Take hold of the rods. Okay, now what you need the rods to do, keep them about 10 inches or so apart, nice and level. Ask the spirits in the room to move the rods for you, see what happens. Okay, if there's any spirits in the room who want to move the rods for me, give me a go. Oh girl, no. There's the right one going. No, it's scary. There's the right one going. Maybe I didn't want to know this. Spirits, should I stay here tonight? Look, they're both moving. They're both moving. Oh, look at this. Look at this. These guys. I'm slightly freaked out now. Thank you, spirits. That was very kind of you to chat. I'm not 100% sold on the dousing rods, but in using them, Richard is upholding a hundreds of years old practice that wouldn't have raised too many eyebrows in the middle ages, before it was banned by the church in the 1500s. With the permission to stay the night from my phantom hosts, I prepare to settle in for a night in Britain's most haunted castle, and hopefully no more encounters from beyond the grave. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it's clear that a natural fear of the supernatural has haunted us through the ages. The ghost stories I've explored from the medieval period bear an eerie resemblance to our own. They were used to uphold establishment values and sway political contests. From stark reminders of the death that is to come, to the importance of good behavior and proper burial to ward off the undead. It's no surprise that the Victorians and Edwardians had a love of medieval ghosts to rival my own. And lurking below the surface of these spooky tales lies a fascinating window into society's changing norms and values. Well, it was a bit of a restless night, I will admit it, but I didn't see any ghosts. Even though Richard did give me a bit of a fright. However, we did learn a lot about medieval society. For medieval people, ghosts do a really specific thing. They're a reminder to live your life correctly. In a world that's dedicated to Christian theology, if you end up coming back from beyond the grave, it means something very seriously has gone wrong. Either you need help yourself or you're warning someone else about how they need to live their life correctly. It makes sense that this isn't how we see ghosts anymore, because our society is very different from that of the medieval period. Now, by and large, if we think about someone being a ghost, it's because a terrible tragedy has befallen them. For medieval people, oftentimes a ghost would be responsible for that tragedy. Even if I didn't see any ghosts today, one of the things I think we can all agree on is that by and large, we're all haunted, just by societal expectations. on the History Hit YouTube channel, you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out. Or if you are a true history fan, check out our special dedicated history channel, historyhit.tv. You're gonna love it.