Powerful insights from Ed Simon, Editor-at-Large for LARB’s Marginalia, in an essay for The Millions in which he not only traces a history of hauntedness in various key works of literature (by the likes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Morrison, Chambers, Lovecraft, and King) but relates a couple of his own genuinely weird personal encounters with the seemingly ghostly, after which he finishes by observing that literature is intrinsically a haunted art:
Ghosts may haunt chambers, but they also haunt books. . . . Traditional ghosts animate literature, from the canon to the penny dreadful, including what the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold grandiosely termed the “best which has been thought and said” as well as lurid paperbacks with their garish covers. We’re so obsessed with something seen just beyond the field of vision that vibrates at a frequency that human ears can’t quite detect—from Medieval Danish courts to the Overlook Hotel, Hill House to the bedroom of Ebenezer Scrooge—that we’re perhaps liable to wonder if there is something to ghostly existence. After all, places are haunted, lives are haunted, stories are haunted. Such is the nature of ghosts; we may overlook their presence, their flitting and meandering through the pages of our canonical literature, but they’re there all the same (for a place can be haunted whether you notice that it is or not). . . .
Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). Disenchantment has supposedly been our lot since Luther, or Newton, or Darwin chased the ghosts away, leaving behind this perfect mechanistic clockwork universe with no need for superfluous hauntings. Though like Hamlet’s father returned from a purgatory that we’re not supposed to believe in, we’re unwilling to acknowledge the specters right in front of us. Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved. Most of all, we should be moved by the sheer incandescent amazement that such a thing as fiction, and poetry, and performance are real. . . . Reader, if you seek enchantments, turn to any printed page. If you look for a ghost, hear my voice in your own head.
Source: “Who’s There? Every Story Is a Ghost Story“
Tangentially, but not unrelatedly, I’ll add a coda to Simon’s point by observing that you can also look for a ghost by hearing your own voice in your head. It’s not just writing and literature that are intrinsically haunted. We haunt ourselves. We live as phantoms, in a world of them.