"The Ghost - A Cultural History" by Susan Owens (Tate Publishing, 2017)

Ghosts have changed over the years. John Donne said he saw a vision of his (living) wife. Samuel Johnson was open on the ghost question. Richard Burton (of Anatomy of Melancholy fame) studied the documentary evidence through the ages, and this author does likewise.

• The witch of Endor in the bible summoned up the ghost of Samuel.
• "While a modern ghost might materialise, drift gently towards a door and disperse, in the medieval period it was more likely to break the door down and beat you to death" (p.9)
• The Reformation got rid of Purgatory, which was a source of returning spirits.
• "The rise of pamphlets towards the end of the sixteenth century coincided with two other decisive factors: a skeptical attitude to pre-Reformation religious doctrine and a growing cult of personality" (p.42)
• "Having lost their traditional role at the Reformation, ghosts were ripe for re-invention ... They became obsessed with seeing justice done. Ghosts found a natural home in revenge drama" (p.46)
• "Marlowe's drama conformed to the latest state of post-Reformation opinion (that 'ghosts' were actually spirits and not the souls of the dead)" (p.49)
• "As they were represented in ballad form, ghosts ... put things in order that had been thrown into disorder." (p.92)
• Around 1660, the rebuttal to Hobbes' materialism was that people who didn't believe in ghosts and spirits probably didn't believe in God or any principles of religion.
• "One of the main reasons for ghosts wearing white was to do with the colour of grave clothes ... the Burial in Woollens Acts began to come into effect [in 1666] decreeing that English wool must be used for shrouds" (p.164)
• By 1730 "a sceptical attitude to ghosts had become a litmus test for membership of intelligent, urban society" (p.107). Hoaxes (e.g. the Cock Lane ghost), when revealed, were opportunities to mock the gullibility of the masses.
• "For Wesley, apparitions and other supernatural phenomena served as evidence of the spiritual realm." (p.111)
• In the 18th century "The churchyard began to exert an irresistible magnetism for poets" (p.115). "Over the course of the eighteenth century it became fashionable to appreciate ruins" (p.121)
• "Until Walpole wrote Orlando, ghosts had generally been regarded as symbolic figures ... Walpole revived the medieval idea, expressed in saints' biographies, that ghosts could be visitors from the distant past, stirred into violent retributive action by injustice" (p.124)
• "It was Lewis [writer of The Monk] who caught the mood of the times. He insisted on the physicality of ghosts" (p.125)
• "In the second half of the eighteenth century, the idea of the sublime introduced the concepts of terror and wonder as emotions to be pursued" (p.126)
• "Romanticism, with its focus on the expression of intense emotional states and subjective, individual experience, was transforming the arts ... inventing a bold visual vocabulary to express the ghosts" (p.132)
• Shelley wrote "We talk of Ghosts; neither Lord Byron nor Monk G. Lewis seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without also believing in God" (p.138)
• "At the end of the eighteenth century, a new kind of social satire emerged which simply presented ghosts as funny in themselves - both for their peculiar physiognomy, and in the effect of their appearance on their victims" (p.162)
• "the late eighteenth century also saw a more general change in the appearance of ghosts: it was a time when a range of sartorial options became available to them" (p.164)
• "It was only in the late eighteenth century that ... they became see-through ... concurrently with developments in optical entertainments and light shows ... In visual art, this new quality was also to do with an increasing use of the medium of watercolour ... When Dickens made Marley's ghost see-through in A Christmas Carol, he was drawing on a convention that had only relatively recently been established ... In time, purportedly true accounts of cloudy or see-through ghosts began to be recorded" (p.168)
• "a strong connection was made between ghosts and the aristocracy: ghosts were walking evidence of a family's antiquity" (p.177)
• "Victorian ghosts were shaped by the demands of the magazine format: stories had to be brief, gripping and sensational" (p.190)
• "In the middle of the Victorian era ... The British stopped being afraid of ghosts, drew the curtains and tried to usher them in ... Crucially in most quarters (if not all), spiritualism was not regarded as a challenge to Christianity, but as complementary, even affirmative" (p.200)
• "Early photography was almost uncannily predisposed to the creation of ghostly images " (p.204)
• "Ever since the Reformation, [British artists and writers] had mostly described ghosts visiting people in their urban environments. In the late nineteenth century ... they began instead to find them deep in the country" (p.222)
• "from the 1890s until the Second World War, artists and writers took ghosts out of the historic mansions and urban homes they had so vigorously haunted for most of the Victorian era and re-located them in the heart of the country, down leafy lanes, deep within ancient barrows and along the routes of old pilgrim-paths" (p.9)
• "the post-war years and 1950s turned out to be relatively lean ones for ghosts ... As people's imaginations were captured by space exploration ... the traditional place of ghosts was quickly usurped by aliens" (p.249)
• "Norman's book is one of an enormous number of works published from the middle of the century onwards that discuss and list British ghosts in such detail" (p.254)
• "ghosts have been liberated from the confines of their habitual haunts and let loose in a larger arena" (p.263)
• "Now liberated from the margins of visual culture and from ghost-story ghettoes, ghosts' rich emotional potential, whether as metaphor, Gothic reality or something indefinably in-between, is decisively shaping art and literature " (p.267)

So ghosts survived for several reasons -

• Belief in ghosts opens the way to belief in spirits, angels and gods
• They're a useful literary device - a wander in a graveyard would lack drama without them
• Urban legends - publicity stunts
• Mental problems