Introduction: From Folklore to Fiction

The history of the ghost-child in British and New-England cultures can be traced through comparisons of the various theological debates about the child's soul and European folklore and legends influenced by those debates, as well as evidence of unusual burial practices unearthed by archaeological and anthropological studies. In a range of tales from across the British Isles (as in some other European regions), the spirits of unbaptized and/or murdered infants and young children unable to enter Heaven wandered the earth on the wind, or as ghostly lights, wailing and crying for their souls to be let in, or for their discarded bodies to be buried in consecrated ground. Although unsettling, according to Anne O’Connor dead-child ghosts in British and Irish folk tradition were predominantly seen as passive, pitiful, and vulnerable souls who needed help from the living and ‘are rarely represented as the spirits of murdered children’, even if violence or exposure was the cause of their death. These characteristics reflected their condition in philosophical and theological depictions of the underworld, from the pre-Christian imagining by Virgil to medieval and early modern conceptions of limbo, where their disembodied souls would lament their fate with ‘heart-rending sighs’. In other European regions, however, there is a history of considerably darker versions who will shriek, maim, even kill the perpetrator or passers-by who do not help them, and which have a much more tangible corporeality. Across many regions and cultures, beliefs about the ‘deviant dead’ – those who died an unnatural or ambivalent death and might rise and possibly seek revenge – characterized tales and were also reflected in burial practices, and these extended to children: More commonly this involved the exclusion of the unbaptized from consecrated ground, but there is also older archaeological and oral evidence of extreme preventative measures. For instance, Juha Pentikainen notes that, in the Ob-Ugric tradition,