The 17th century was the heyday of the English ghost. Up and down the kingdom during those ‘distracted times’ of the Gunpowder Plot, Civil War and Commonwealth, spectres, revenants and phantoms were at their most restless and fretful. Church bells rang without human agency, invisible armies clattered to and fro in the darkness, drummers sounded a ghoulish tattoo through midnight bedchambers, a whole menagerie of ectoplasmic beasts terrified kitchenmaids or sent children into hysterics. Meanwhile the spirits themselves, a decidedly noisy crew, specific in their demands and inclined to be peevish if not paid serious attention, forecast political events, indicated the whereabouts of buried treasure, confounded atheists and sceptics or simply did the customary ghostly business of carrying messages from beyond the grave.

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