“The Botathen Ghost” was written by R.S. Hawker and first appeared in All The Year Round (May 18, 1867). Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875) was the poet vicar and antiquarian of Morwenstow in Cornwall. Today Hawker is known as the author of “The Song of the Western Men,” the unofficial anthem of Cornwall. “The Botathen Ghost” is a fine ghost story of a type not written in the twenty-first century.

Clergy in the west of England in the seventeenth century were in positions of peculiar power, because they were geographically isolated and left to run their own parishes in their own way. Individual parsons developed their own habits and tendencies. One of these men was Parson Rudall, a learned man who was “a powerful minister, in combat with supernatural visitations.”¹ In 1665 a pestilence broke out in his town, which led to Rudall preaching the funeral sermon of one of the local gentry. After the sermon one Mr. Bligh, of the local hamlet of Botathen, approached Rudall and asked him for help. Mr. Bligh’s son was usually high spirited and a good boy but had lately become sullen and withdrawn, and Mr. Bligh wanted Parson Rudall to see what was wrong. Rudall went to Bligh’s house and there met another minister, who told Rudall what young Master Bligh claimed was the matter. He was seeing the ghost of Dorothy Dinglet, who he’d known since childhood. Seeing the ghost, who lingered along a path the boy traveled every day, was quenching his spirits. The boy never varied his story, either, which convinced the minister that the boy was telling the truth. Parson Rudall speaks with the boy and decides to walk along the path with him. Both see the ghost, and the Parson is left speechless and amazed by it. Rudall tells the boy that he will do what he can. Rudall goes through his books and finds out what is to be done, and then, following Church canon law, visits his bishop and gets his blessing for what is about to happen. The bishop is reluctant to let Rudall perform the exorcism but eventually gives in, and Rudall returns to Botathen and performs the requisite magical ceremony. Rudall traps the ghost in a magic circle and questions her, trying to find out why she is unquiet. Dorothy first proves that she is a true spirit by predicting the plague of the coming year, and then tells Rudall the reason for her return. That night Rudall questions the elder Bligh: “At even song, a long discourse with that ancient transgressor, Mr. B. Great horror and remorse; entire atonement and penance; whatsoever I enjoin; full acknowledgment before pardon.”² The next morning Rudall meets with Dinglet’s ghost again and tells her Mr. Bligh’s penitent words and “the satisfaction he would perform.”³ She is satisfied and leaves permanently after Rudall dismisses her.

“The Botathen Ghost” is the type of religious ghost story which is out of vogue now but which was done and done well by a certain type of clergyman in the nineteenth century. Stories such as “The Botathen Ghost” and Sabine Baring-Gould’s “Master Sacristan Eberhart” which made use of ministers and Christian dogma in neither a didactic nor a contemptuous way. In the nineteenth century the ghost story had not yet become completely divorced from Christianity, and it was not unusual for the protagonists and heroes of ghost stories to be ministers and reverends. “The Botathen Ghost” is different in tone from “Master Sacristan Eberhart,” less sweet and more learned, but similar in approach. “The Botathen Ghost” does not pluck the heart strings the way that “Master Sacristan Eberhart” does, but it is nearly as entertaining. Hawker creates a setting with a nicely historical feel to it, so that “The Botathen Ghost” reads as if it is a story out of an actual, if idiosyncratically written, contemporary history. “The Botathen Ghost” is based on a “real” Cornish ghost,⁴ but the important point is that “The Botathen Ghost” is written so that it feels real. Lesser writers would not have achieved that. Hawker’s style is sophisticated but also an accurate recreation of seventeenth-century diaries, a combination that in less skilled hands would jar but in “The Botathen Ghost” works well. Hawker puts his knowledge of historical Church custom and law, and of medieval sorcerous practices, to fine use. The characterization of Rudall is slyly amusing. Hawker takes a smart approach to the supernatural aspect of the story. The description of what the ghost looks like is vivid and memorable, but the description of her grievance, and what Mr. Bligh’s crime was, if indeed it was a crime and not some type of accident, are wisely left ambiguous, which leaves “The Botathen Ghost” lacking the neatness of fiction but bearing the messiness of real life.

Print: Michael A. Cox and R.A. Gilbert, Victorian Ghost Stories: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

¹ R.S. Hawker, “The Botathen Ghost,” Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall (London: J. Lane, 1903), 161.

² Hawker, “The Botathen Ghost,” 174.

³ Hawker, “The Botathen Ghost,” 174.

⁴ Angela Williams, “The Botathen Ghost,” Robert Stephen Hawker: His Life and Writings, accessed Jan. 23, 2019, http://www.robertstephenhawker.co.uk/?p=2171.