The Ghost of Col. Bowen: 1655, 1691, 1941/42

In 1655 the ghost of her husband appeared to Catherine Bowen. In 1691 Richard Baxter, in The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, collated witness statements about this extraordinary event. This article investigates this account as both typical and atypical of seventeenth-century ghost stories, and how in this period narratives were constructed around allegedly true stories of the supernatural. It also follows the story into the twentieth century, when the colonel’s descendant Elizabeth Bowen retold it. It suggests that, in both her family history Bowen’s Court (1941) and her short fiction, especially “The Demon Lover” (1942), Bowen is not only influenced by but also comments, directly or indirectly, on the seventeenth-century case.