The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time, By Peter Ackroyd

Heady brew with spirit chasers

Peter Ackroyd has always had an eye for the ghostly. Palimpsests never seem far from his eye. He is a creature of the haunted library. Hawksmoor remains solidly his best novel and his biography of Dickens teased out the genuine superstitious fears of a man who publicly and angrily lambasted the spurious mediums of the Victorian period.

His Albion: Origins of the English Imagination, and its clever teasing out of the Roman Catholic spine of Britain, is in some ways the best taster of this compendium. For although here he mentions the puritanical abnegation of purgatory, and consequently ghosts, in the 17th century, it was the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791 which brought the ghost back to England. That he gives his book subtitle "spectres through time" is the giveaway: spectre is a word fashioned for late-Georgian theatre, and the mechanical ghost shows of the gothick style.

This is very much a bibliophile's book, the faux-dusty tome of a toiling antiquarian whose eyesight in fading in the last light from a Cambridge quad. Certainly, there are many tales here which are familiar and frankly better-told elsewhere. Surprise omissions includes A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs Veal (1705), almost certainly written by Daniel Defoe. We open with the tale of Hinton Ampner (which Ackroyd insists on calling simply Hinton Manor) in 1765, which goes through the bare bones of a country-house haunting of a woman and her children when her husband is away in Jamaica: a ghostly woman, banging doors, a brother chasing phantoms with a loaded pistol.

There are multiple trawls of Richard Baxter's Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691), Andrew Lang's Dreams and Ghosts (1897) and the inevitable incursion from Catherine Crowe's eccentric Victorian bestseller The Night Side of Nature (1848). Yet the main players of some of the most famous stories are stripped out. There's no Joseph Glanvill, Britain's first ghost-hunter, investigating the drumming ghost at Tedworth in Wiltshire; there's no Harry Price in the Borley Rectory account (ghostly goings-on there electrified the public in the 1930s) and no Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair staking out a council house in 1970s Enfield during an alarming and well-documented poltergeist event.

Ackroyd's reasoning may well be to keep the stories pure and stripped-down. Indeed, the likes of Harry Price remain controversial figures. But somehow the stories without these linked grandstanding ringmasters seem lacking in flavour. The best ghost stories always take good note of the living, after all.

There were also plenty of stories I didn't know, from provincial newspapers and obscure books which read like the ghostly watermarks of his larger research projects. What could he have been doing to come across Anne Mitchell's Ghosts Along the Thames, I wonder? As with Andrew Lang, Ackroyd's first interest is with the supernatural folkloric, a branch of academe that has recently received such a boost from Owen Davies and Sasha Handley.

A member himself, Lang always regretted that the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s took such a hard line on folklore, obsessed as they were with the individuals who reported ghosts being respectable pillars of society, and preferably professional. There were many ghostly servants, including one here from Derby, but servants themselves were never believed.

You won't find even a hint here of the last hundred years' science-led investigation into apparitions, brain fugues and parapsychology; you will get 13th-century poems, neo-platonist theology, nasty feelings about a man sitting on a train at Vauxhall station, hands coming out from railings late at night and "three cold kisses". There are enough haunted and haunting clerics here to fill a small chapel.

For its slight air of cluttered laziness, this is a wonderful little book. It's properly old-fashioned and unorthodox, a scrapbook of clues, tittle-tattle, hints and mortal byways – very 17th-century, in fact. Coleridge once said that he didn't believe in ghosts because he had "seen too many of them", and that a lack of evidence for their existence was the evidence that they existed. Ackroyd offers us no analysis and no hint of his beliefs. His phonetic Canadian twin Peter Akroyd, father of the Ghostbusters actor Dan Akroyd, has written a book recently which brooks no doubt that that dead do communicate through spirit séances. Our Peter Ackroyd is keeping his cards rather closer to his chest.

Roger Clarke's 'A Natural History of Ghosts' will be published by Penguin in 2011