Headless Horsemen & Morphean Space: with Kirstin Mills

Dominic is joined by the inimitable Dr. Kirstin Mills Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Research & Graduate Diploma of Research in the Faculty of Arts, at Macquarie University. Kirstin's recent articles include the chapter "Morphean Space and the Metaphysics of Nightmare ..."  published in Gothic Dreams and Nightmares for Manchester University Press.

Their conversation flits and tumbles through the realms of 19th Century dreams and nightmares. Many of which are sure to have visited the young Charles Dickens, thanks to the bedtime stories told to him by Mary Weller, and the books he would later read voraciously …

Expect to meet Demons, Vampires, the much overlooked Headless Horseman and - one of the greatest literary creations of all time - Ichabod Crane!

Sounds of horses, dutch folk dances, eerie whistling and windy gusts on a mountain side were used provided under license by Epidemic Sound

Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd  / Original cover headshot of Kirstin Mills © Kirstin Mills / Painted backdrop of The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane by John Quidor (1858) has been sourced through Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Tempo: 120.0

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Hi everyone! It's that time of year when the shadow of all hallows Eve has yet to shrink from the glowing light of Advent. Out in the streets, the pumpkins are slowly turning to pulp, their carved faces slowly sinking. But before they molder and turn grey, there are many more ghostly episodes for you, the listener, to pass through. Last week, I spoke to the inimitable Dr. Kirsten Mills, senior lecturer and director of the Master of Research and Graduate Diploma of Research in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her recent articles include the chapter Morphe in Space and the Metaphysics of Nightmare, published in Gothic Dreams and Nightmares for Manchester University Press. Our conversation therefore flits and tumbles through the realms of the 19th-century nightmares, many of which are sure to have visited the young Charles Dickens, thanks to the bedtime stories told to him by Mary Weller, and the books he would later read voraciously. You must expect to meet demons, vampires, and the much overlooked headless horseman. And one of my favourite literary creations of all time, thanks to Washington Irving, Ichabod Crane. Kirsten, hello. Happy Halloween, and welcome to Charles Dickens' Brain on Fire.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Thank you so much. Happy Halloween to you as well. I'm very excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

The article that you wrote on the Headless Horseman, I was so enthralled by that because I actually hadn't read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. And just to start off with, that is so funny.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Isn't it so funny? And that's something we don't expect because we've come to know it more through its adaptations now in, you know, either Disney adaptations or any of the sort of horror films or television shows that adapt this headless horseman as a big scary Halloween creature. And yet the story itself, it's so funny. And there's a lot of it that isn't particularly gothic or necessarily about the headless horseman himself. It's so clever.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

No, it's funny actually, because the headless horseman doesn't feature anywhere near as much as you think it's going to in the whole setup and about this kind of magical strange place, uh Sleepy Hollow.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

And uh how do you feel towards Ichabod Crane? How do you feel towards him?

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Uh he's the the lovable anti-hero, I think. I've I feel a bit sorry for the poor guy. He's um I he's so brilliantly characterized by Washington Irving. He's such a beautiful satirical version of um of masculinity at the time, sort of the antithesis of what was held up as the kind of masculine ideals. He's very much the intellectual, um, he's reserved, he's you know, he's got the sort of knocked knees and lanky legs, and um this is very much part of Washington Irving's point, is is setting him up as this kind of yeah, somebody we feel a bit sorry for, I think.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small and flat at top, with huge ears, large green, glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. Yes, the description is is amazing. There's even a line about um him looking like um some scarecrow that had eloped from a cornfield. Exactly. And then in your your article, you connect man and beast, so you connect them to horse, and and poor Ichabod, the horse that he I think he hires. Yes. Called gunpowder. Again.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Brilliant description of this poor horse, as well as this absolutely clapped out horse that's just it's got nothing left in it. It's got one sort of devilish eye that doesn't work anymore, and it it's just got a mean spirit, it can't be tamed, and poor Ichabod has no horsemanship.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

The animal he bestrowed was a broken down plough horse that had outlived almost everything but its viciousness. He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer, his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs. One eye had lost its pupil and was glaring and spectral, but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

And this is part of the what a Washington Irving is doing with his his sort of critique of masculinity here, Ichabod Crane attempts to ride this horse, and it's just every time he tries to turn left it goes right, and every time he tries to turn right it goes left, and then it starts running and he can't stay on, and the saddle goes upside down, and it's just all a big mess.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Ichabod was a suitable figure for such a steed. He rode with short stirrups, which brought his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle. His sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers. He carried his whip perpendicularly in his hand like a sceptre, and as his horse jogged on, the motion of his arms was not unlike the flapping of a pair of wings. And his great rival for the love of Katrina Van Tassel.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Yes, Brombones!

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Brombones, who's on the opposite pole of kind of manliness to a boy.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Absolutely. We still see these guys around today, the kind that walk around as if they're carrying carpets under their arms, like they've just been to the gym, you know, puffed up. Um this is Brombones, he's a stereotype even back then, and he's the hero, the rascal, the daredevil. Um he rides his horse called Daredevil as well. And the both of them have this kind of synergy between man and beast, and you know, Brombones is very much in control of his horse that no one else can control. And um he's also got a bit of a mean spirit, a bit of a bully about him, uh, as poor Ichabod Crane finds out.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Yes, and he likes his horse Daredevil because he's untamable and vicious.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Brombones, however, was the hero of the scene, having come to the gathering on his favourite steed, Daredevil, a creature like himself, full of metal and mischief, and which no one but himself could manage. He was in fact noted for preferring vicious animals, given to all kinds of tricks which kept the rider in constant risk of his neck, for he held a tractable, well broken horse as unworthy of a lad of spirit. But it it feels to me, it feels to me so Dickensian. I mean it feels so much to me like Dickens obviously loved Washington out of the inning and seems to have taken a lot of inspiration in terms of style from him. Even the even the long descriptions of food when when they go to the party. Yes, you know, and all of that feels so Dickensian. Very much. There were apple pies and peach pies and pumpkin pies, besides slices of ham and smoked beef, and moreover, delectable dishes of preserved plums and peaches and pears and quinces, not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens, together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

That's so Dickensian.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Yep, absolutely. And and you know, just another favourite is just the description of Ichabod's dancing.

unknown 7:38

Uh yes.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Like not a single limb that's idle. Ichabod prided himself upon his dancing as much as upon his vocal powers. Not a limb, not a fibre about him was idle, and to have seen his loosely hung frame in full motion and clattering about the room, you would have thought that St. Vitus himself, that blessed patron of the dance, was figuring before you in person.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

You just feel like you'd pressed yourselves against the wall there to avoid being elbowed in the face or something.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

But it's so relatable, isn't it? Because I mean, I no nobody wants to admit to being Ekibod in any respect, but we've definitely seen that person or some in some form, some aspect of that.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

But you you talk about in your article here about um something about the fusion of of man and beast and how that perhaps in itself is some sort of monster.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Yeah, so th this is why I love the the headless horseman as a ghost so much, because it's it's not just the ghost, it's the ghost on horseback. So it's the it's it's a it's a ghost horse as well. But they kind of you can't separate them. You don't really see the headless horseman without his horse. It says in the story that he that he hitches his horse to the graveyard, but you never see that. It's just sort of part of the whispers and the legends that are setting up for this moment of encounter with the alleged headless horseman, which may have, of course, be Bromburns in disguise, but Washington Irving leaves that really open to our interpretation.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Yeah, I think I think it is Bromburns, do you know? In that instance.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

I like to have it both ways. I like my cake and I will eat it too.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Sure, sure, sure, sure. So, in terms of the gothic, so the gothic is obviously deep into your vocabulary and your whole uh experience as an as an academic. Uh I always slightly feel because the words use quite a lot, I always feel like everyone seems to understand what that word means more than me. I'm I always struggle a little bit to get to grips with it. What where where do you how do you explain it? How do you perceive it?

SPEAKER_00 9:42

For yeah, it it's a it's a tricky one. I think I think rather befitting of the Gothic, and this is part of what the Gothic is, is something a bit amorphous, a bit hard to define, a bit fuzzy around the edges, it blurs boundaries. Um the Gothic is very concerned with particularly a sense of a return of the past, um, something buried emerging into the light, something repressed returning. Um we see this with pretty much all of the supernatural specters. Anything that sense of something haunting is is by definition something from the past returning into the present, kind of interjecting itself, usually in a shocking or an unpleasant kind of way, usually bringing some sort of revelation to the people experiencing it. Um it doesn't have to be supernatural, um, but it often is. Um, it could also be um, and this is throughout the Victorian period in particular, they like sort of they switched their storytelling um in the Gothic. It was kind of a journey, I guess, from the old mouldering castles that were very much set in the medieval period, and they start exploring a more psychological Victorian sense of the Gothic as potential um sort of madness and and dreams are bound up in that. And this is what my research looks at is that boundary line where dreams kind of bridge ghosts and the supernatural and the contemporary life and modern psychology, and they sort of there's kind of the bridge through which the Gothic moves from its olden day kind of old world ghost stories to modern day explorations of of everything we still fear, everything that the Victorian society as if I could sort of characterize and generalize it as a whole, which we shouldn't really do. But um, everything people repress um is right there in the in the modern gothic, and we still have that very much today.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

What I find interesting though in these in these stories is if we're in the 19th century, yeah. The Victorian era is still kind of understandable to us. We can still kind of hold it almost and understand despite all our technology and wizardry, we can we can really feel it, can't we? I think.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Absolutely. I think there are two reasons for that. Partly it's it's familiar to us in the sense that it's not that long ago compared to some of the earlier forms of society and culture. Um, post-industrial revolution, things start looking quite similar to us in terms of that experience of being on the cusp of technology. So, you know, for people in the 19th century, that was watching all of these cities grow up around machinery and factories and new technologies emerging, like the telegraph and you know, the rail network. For us, it's digital technology and AI, and we're experiencing these very similar upheavals. Yeah. And I think the other thing that makes it so relatable is what we were saying about the writing styles in the 19th century. They really start delving into a sense of tangible reality and a psychological reality that wasn't as important to storytelling in earlier generations, uh, where it was more about um the kind of spectacular plot points that were happening, and it they didn't quite take as much care with characterization, with having a very real sense of a person in a place and a time experiencing a particular moment.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

Yes. Does this link at all to Morphean space?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

It does. And Coleridge? What is that all about? So I love this concept. I'm just so drawn to Coleridge's writing, to his thinking. Um just to sort of preface his concept here, Coleridge, as you know, was one of the most well-read, if not the most well-read thinker, I think, at the time, uh, you know, when he was living. Um, and he he's so well connected to so many different people as well. He would regularly interact with and hold hold sort of dinner parties for um other writers, sort of scientists, philosophers, like all the different kinds of thinkers. And he would bring them together for this kind of lush, deep conversation um about metaphysics, all the sort of the juicy, indefinable parts of life, trying to sort of figure everything out. And he had so many different theories about everything. But one of the most interesting for me was very personal to him. He was plagued by nightmares, he was haunted by nightmares throughout his life, and he spent his whole life attempting to theorize this to explain what was happening. Because these dreams that he called he in his notebooks is full of recordings of his nightmares and dreams, and he calls them hell-pretending nightmares and scream dreams, and all of these wonderful phrases, they're provocative phrases that just really capture how hellish these experiences must have been. Um, and in them are these demonic sort of figures that are attempting to break out of his dream space, and some of them, my favorite examples are so chilling, where the demon um attempts to grasp his eye, for example, and grabs hold of it, and Coleridge wakes, but still feels the sensation of something there with him.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Friday night, November the twenty-eighth, eighteen hundred. Or rather, Saturday morning. A most frightful dream of a woman whose features were blended with darkness, catching hold of my right eye and attempting to pull it out. I caught her arm fast. A horrid feel. Wordworth cried out aloud to me, hearing my scream, heard his cry, and thought it cruel he did not come, but did not wake till his cry was repeated a third time. When I awoke, my right eyelid swelled.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

So this idea that something supernatural, a demonic being from within his dream, could cross over into the natural world, the waking world.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

And so this is where his concept of morphian space, or he calls it somnial space as well. Um, this kind of dream space, sleeping space, uh emerges. And he configures dreams as a kind of liminal kind of realm of their own, where the when you're sleeping, uh and the the brain is sort of the the will, the conscious will is not active, it's asleep. And so the soul kind of is kind of free to move. And he, you know, in typical Coleridge in sense, um, he sort of links the soul with the great powers of imagination and things like that. And so this the soul is free to uh move around and it enters this space that overlaps with the a very real sense of the supernatural world. And so we're not just sort of making up images in our heads when we're dreaming, we're actually entering a space where demons we might encounter are potentially real. Um, and so this is an idea he has, and he draws on a lot of different philosophies of the supernatural to kind of create this idea. He's also thinking about um early brain science that's emerging at the time. And this is an idea he wrestles with. He doesn't necessarily lock onto this as exactly what's happening, but it's an idea that haunts him and it continues to haunt him as a possibility that absolutely terrifies him.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Ghost. Does he come out the other side of it? Does he does he settle? No. Okay. No, he's just No. Just scared because his whole life.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

Pretty much. He wavers in and out of of of different theories, but but I think what makes this so compelling for me is that it it haunts him, it dogs him throughout his whole life as something he can't prove doesn't happen. Uh this is a typical sort of um problem we have with with the idea of ghosts is that we can't prove they don't exist. You know, we can't necessarily prove they do, depending on who you talk to. Uh, but but we can't, you can't sort of prove a negative. So it's it's this is I think the driving force behind not only what Coleridge is thinking, but the the 19th century kind of explosion of interest in the supernatural and the rise of spiritualism and the rise of things like, you know, the Ghost Club, which Dickens was a member of, or the Society for Psychical Research, which came after it. And these are sort of pseudo-academic societies that that bring people together to attempt to genuinely scientifically investigate and verify claims of the supernatural. So they'd go out to all of these houses and manor houses around England and you know the UK and they would attempt to measure the purported ghostly activity and write up a report about whether it was real or not.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

They were kind of ghostbusters. Absolutely, they were ghostbusters. That's amazing. So, where does Dickens feature in that then? Does he really go for it?

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Yeah, so Dickens again, much like Coleridge, I think he spent his whole life fascinated by the supernatural. But Dickens has a really interesting resistance to it as well. He's very self-conscious, I think. So Dickens comes a lot later. Coleridge was writing right when the gothic kind of explodes onto the publishing scene as a huge thing, and everybody is telling ghost stories and everybody's hosting parties um to sort of read and perform these ghost stories aloud to each other and spook each other silly, uh, which is sounds so much fun. Um, but Dickens comes obviously later than that. And so by by you know, mid-19th century, the gothic has become a stereotype. And um, this sort of interest in the supernatural, as much as it is gaining traction again by the time Dickens is writing, it's also a bit of a stereotype. This idea of the credulity of of um superstitious people who have lost their sense of rationality. And obviously, Dickens is great at lampooning the extremes of society and and foibles in people. And this is an easy target, people who bel implicitly believe in every ghost story they hear, or think every bump in the night must be some sort of demon walking down the hallway. So Dickens is intrigued by ghost stories and the supernatural, and he had, you know, he he was um his nurse, who I think was a 14-year-old girl at the time when when he was a child, would tell him ghost stories.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Oh, just you know, uh Mary Weller, is it thinking? Yeah, yeah. Captain Murderer and all of that.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

She must have been wonderful. I wish I could hang out with her and hear a story from her lips because it would have been so fun, but so terrifying for a small boy attempting to go to sleep.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember, as a sort of introductory overture by clawing the air with both hands and uttering a low, hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony, in combination with this infernal captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But she never spared me a word of it.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

She kind of instills in him, I think, this f fear and fascination, and I think that's the gothic essence, isn't it? It's this fascination with this, but fear of it, and it's this dual kind of emotional pull that we experience. And then this we still do this with with we you know, we flock to see sort of the latest horror movie when it comes out. We're terrified but excited to be there, and we have the exact same thrill. And this is what um Dickens is is drawn by as well. And so he I think he spends his life fascinated by the supernatural, but he needs solid evidence because he's a very rational, practical man. He's part of the ghost club. I think that's what he's looking for, but also he's attempting to sort of stamp out this rampant, what he sees as this rampant explosion of just wild belief in the supernatural with no evidence whatsoever.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Yeah, so I'm just trying to think which Ghostbuster that would make him, but he's the one that sort of doesn't want to prove that it's all rubbish.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. And he's publishing magazines where he's kind of controlling the discourse in a way. He's he's he's helping other writers publish their ghost stories as well. So he's on the one hand, he's investigating, if we might call it a kind of real world, supernatural, or at least claims to it. And on the other, he's he's stoking the fires of the literary supernatural as much as he's poking fun of fun at it. And again, this is one thing I love about Dickens. He takes it seriously in his fiction at the exact same time as he's poking fun at it. It's such a as as with most of his writing, I think, there's a tongue-in-cheek revelry in the theatrical, in the silly, but there's something very serious and quite deep about his writing as well. And it's this this kind of oscillation between these poles that that for me makes his writing so compelling no matter what it is, but particularly when it comes to writing about the supernatural.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

What drew you to this personally? How did this become the the the very center of your academic research?

SPEAKER_00 23:04

I I think about this a lot because I I I've been trying to pinpoint my kind of origin story and I I can't do it. I I have always been interested in this. When I was very very small and probably far too small to be watching these kind of things um it was only the never ending story which and I say only what a brilliant movie. Brilliant. But the wolf the demon wolf Gmork um I was very small but but I would sit up and pay attention in that scene. I loved the wolf. I wasn't scared of him the way the other kids would sort of be like turn off the telly it's too scary. I lived for that moment. I just thought he was so compelling he's so creepy. He's there in the gloom there's this foreboding sense of threatening this sense that he knows more than he tells this kind of secrets around him. I loved that I also really loved the witch in the Wizard of Oz and these were kind of two films that we we had on VHS and would repeat so I don't do we need to define VHS for the Gen Zeds now yes that's so interesting.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

So you you were you were called by the wolf then in the never ending story which which puts you on the side of the vampires doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 24:15

It it does.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

You're not the scared passengers sort of shrinking from them.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

No they're your children then because that's amazing yeah friend of the darkness yeah gosh.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

And where do vampires feature for you in your whole kind of supernatural space?

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Um very much part of it. For me a lot of these particularly in the 19th century um the borderlines between what constitutes a vampire what constitutes a ghost what constitutes a headless horseman are very porous. We don't yet have quite so much of a sense of distinction between these species of supernatural being if you like as we do now particularly since the advent of television and film where we're picturing a particular way these beings look, you know, look um in the 19th century they're very much bleeding into each other. And so even to go back to Coleridge with his beautiful ballad Christabel, this is very vampiric. So this sort of demon who crosses the threshold into a house and sort of psychologically possessing somebody it's that's a very vampiric thing to do they passed the hall that echoes still pass as lightly as you will but when the lady passed there came a tongue of light a fit of flame and Christabel saw the lady's eye and nothing else saw she thereby Oh softly tread said Christabel my father seldom sleepeth well she trimmed the lamp and made it bright and left it swinging to and fro while Geraldine in wretched plight sank down upon the floor below O weary lady Geraldine I pray you drink this cordial wine it is a wine of virtuous powers my mother made it of wild flowers and will your mother pity me who am a maiden most forlorn Christabel answered Woe is me. She died the hour that I was born O mother dear that thou wert here I would said Geraldine she were but soon with altered voice said she wandering mother peak and pine I have power to bid thee flee and a lot of scholars acknowledge this as as one of the earlier examples of vampiric figures kind of appearing in fiction long before we get to what we sort of acknowledge as the first actual sort of vampire extended vampire fiction in English shall we say with John Polidori's The Vampire. Yeah. Obviously by the time we get to Dracula we're firmly in the territory that that we find familiar now. And so my research kind of wavers between all of it vampires are very much haunting the borders um and so and yes in in the future I'll I'll definitely have more to say about those in particular.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

A great um title you've got here Frankenstein in hyperspace.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Yes what's that all about so this is a great segue actually um because as you know Frankenstein the story was birthed out of a ghost storytelling competition held between Mary Shelley, um Percy Shelley, Lord Byron the poet and John William Polidori. And the vampire the first sort of acknowledged vampire tale emerges out of this ghost story competition, the same one that produces Frankenstein. So there's that connection right from the beginning and another connection this is what I love about this time period everybody knows each other. At this ghost storytelling competition they they would sort of in the Villa di Adatti in Italy in the summer without sunshine there's sort of volcanic ash clouds make the the weather incredibly stormy. It's a dark and stormy night it's extremely gothic um so they sort of batten down the hatches in this house and altogether they're reciting um German ghost stories but they're also reciting Coleridge's Christabel which scares them so much that that um Percy Shelley runs screaming from the room very likely under the influence but nevertheless they're reading Coleridge and it inspires their thinking about ghosts and they they they they have this ghost storytelling competition and and Mary Shelley starts What will become Frankenstein and Polidory writes a fragment that he abandons and it is later found. We don't know who by someone who obviously knew that that Byron was staying in the house and that kind of celebrity that was surrounding him I think influences this person to go in, find whatever fragments are left behind by the party when they've left and he sends it into the monthly which is a magazine at the time and they publish it as the story by Byron and everybody goes mad for it and Byron has to quickly come out and say actually I didn't write that Polidory steps up and says well I did. Nobody cares. Everybody is obsessed with this vampire tale. So vampires kind of emerge onto the scene there. But to return to Mary Shelley, the other sort of story that emerged out of this space um Frankenstein we know best for the monster the the creature don't we? And it's again like the Headless Horseman very much because of the adaptations that we've seen the films the sort of appearances in Scooby-doo cartoons you know anything you can imagine. We all have an image of what the monster looks like and it's probably including the the neck bolts you know from uh from the the film iconic film versions um the way Mary Shelley writes it though that the novel is much more concerned with the the ghostly and ghosts and the psychology of encountering the supernatural than we would think if if before we read the novel. And I'm really intrigued by this. So Mary Shelley is directly picking up threads of thinking that Coleridge had started in terms of dreams as an access point into the supernatural and she she takes this thinking and and just infuses her novel with this. And this is for me this is the kind of the the other side of the story this is the the ghost haunting the novel is this idea of the supernatural as a potentially very real space. And there are actual there are ghosts in the novel Frankenstein I some people claim that you know it's not a ghost story there are no ghosts but there actually are so Frankenstein when he's wandering forlorn and just in bleak landscapes in increasingly inhospitable inhuman landscapes and he's just this lone figure wandering through them. And to get through the days and the nights to keep him going, he's conversing with the ghosts of his dead family members, most of them murdered by the creature um and he's having these conversations with them but it's it's in this kind of dream space. It's it's this kind of idea that dreams are a kind of vision and ghost seeing is a different kind of vision and so they're very much blurred here.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

I saw the benevolent countenance of my father heard the silver tones of my Elizabeth's voice and beheld Clerville enjoying health and youth often when wearied by a toilsome march I persuaded myself that I was dreaming until night should come and that I should then enjoy reality in the arms of my dearest friends. What agonizing fondness did I feel for them? How did I cling to their dear forms as sometimes they haunted even my waking hours the ghosts here are very benevolent.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

They're they're propping him up and they're helping him but what's really interesting for me is that Mary Shelley is kind of flipping the poles between day and night and sleeping and waking natural and supernatural and even madness and sanity and just really blurring those borderlines in a very color sense to kind of imply that there is potentially a real supernatural realm and you can access it via these kind of higher states of thinking. And my my the basis of of that particular research project for me was to argue that this kind of early interest in dreams as a bridge into the supernatural realm merges into by the end of the 19th century an idea of the supernatural realm as a fourth spatial dimension, a kind of hyperspace, a higher space that is a very real sort of material space, just above and beyond the three dimensions that we can access. So this emerges out of mathematics and non-Euclidean geometry and it's not meant in the maths it's not meant to imply that there is an actual physical space. But of course the spiritualists get hold of it and they say this is proof this is mathematical and scientific proof that the supernatural realm exists. It is just in a a dimension beyond our three dimensions that we can access. They get very excited about this the end of the 19th century is filled with this wonderful with these wonderful ideas and spiritualism is at its height at that point. But my argument is that it the lead up to that that what enabled that is this idea of dreams as this kind of access into and yeah just a general sense of the supernatural realm as something that is a space beyond our our material three dimensions but accessible by our mind yeah and of course you know you immersing yourself in in this world certainly in the literature so much of it is is rooted in in in the UK or in in Europe and um but have you ever has it ever have you ever found it near a home?

SPEAKER_01 34:11

I mean I'm just coming across an amazing statistic like 95% of Australia is uninhabited. Oh yeah I mean that's extraordinary isn't it you think the the the the sort of the unknown out there and and I have to say as a Brit that's never ventured out to Australia the amount the number of lethal animals you've got out there like sort of snakes spiders you know crocodiles sharks that's quite extraordinary as well isn't it living so close to death all the time so have you ever seen a ghost I don't know I I hope I have so I stayed one of the places I stayed uh in England I was uh Jamaica Inn um oh yeah Jamaica Inn made famous by Daphne DeMoria's novel of that same name uh is also reputedly one of the most haunted places in the UK it's supposed to be and it's got it's specific rooms that are meant to be more haunted than others and I thought great this is for me and I I was just traveling by myself driving around and it was it was a Oh it just gets worse it gets worse and worse it was nearing Christmas so it it's it's the the nights uh falling in very early and I'd been out hiking over the the moors and everything and it was incredible.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

I absolutely loved it but I would stumble into the inn after dark and it was all sort of freezing cold and I was staying in the room that was meant to be the most haunted and every night I'd sort of go to sleep and think this is the night it's gonna be so great. I'm gonna see a ghost but I was so exhausted from having hiked everywhere throughout the day that I just had the best sleep I've ever had and didn't wake up. I don't know if a ghost was standing there trying to shake me awake but it didn't work. I was too asleep.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

I'm so angry with you.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

I know so this is your moment and you're sleeping through it. Except one the the part where the ghost does come in I think and I hope I was outside it was one of my last nights and I was I I like photography. It's a sort of hobby of mine and I was out with my camera on its tripod attempting to take kind of a long exposure shot of the inn at night against the night sky and it looked really beautiful but it because it was a long exposure it requires people to not be in the shot although it will blur and get in the way. And so I was patiently waiting for people to go inside and it was quite the cold night so it wasn't too bad. There weren't too many people around and I put my eye to the viewfinder to compose my shot and I remember it was immediately irritated because there was a man in the way and he was standing out the front of the um the inn and he had one of those tri-cornered hats, those three-cornered kind of cornish hats on and I thought this this man's gone into the gift shop and he's got a silly hat on what's he doing standing in front of the inn and I've raised my head almost in irritation I wasn't going to say anything to him but I've raised my head in kind of irritation and he wasn't there. I could only see him through the camera and it that's I like to think that that was a real ghost. I really hope it was God that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 37:16

Well Kirsten thank you so much you've been a brilliant sport thank you for going into all of these scary topics and and creatures and monsters for us.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Thank you so much. I'm so glad we finally got to do this your other episodes are so great as well. So congratulations and uh it's uh genuinely an honor to be included so thank you