I can't remember when I first saw this image but the shadow in the lower right hand corner seemed apparitional. Most certainly an accident, it triggered in me a desire to find out more about the life of my grandfather, Robert Gye. He was already dead eighteen years before I was born. What I knew of him was as spectral as the shadow that I took to be him.

Chasing after ancestors is like chasing after ghosts. You know they are there but they elude you at every turn. The traces that they leave are often misleading and contradictory. But there is something about the ghost as figure that is compelling and we continue to be haunted by it.

As Peter Buse and Andrew Scott argue,

"Even in a 'disenchanted' world, ghosts are still invoked when there is some uncertainty about the believability or authenticity of an event or experience in the material world - hence phantom pregnancies, limbs, and phone calls, ghost-writers, 'a ghost of a chance', tele-visual ghosting, and so on. In the context of a truth test, , 'ghost' and its many synonyms always provide useful metaphors when the test ends in failure. In other words, even though it is now frivolous to believe in ghosts, they cannot shrug off the spectre of belief: it is simply that now they have been consigned to the task of representing whatever is not to be believed. The equation has not changed, but now ghosts inhabit its other side. Why do ghosts continue to occupy such a prominent position in debates over the boundary between real and unreal? Why do they furnish such workable tropes of untruth? The answer lies in their relationship to reason and rationality. The current understanding of ghosts owes less to the Reformation, which denied their return from purgatory, than it does to the Enlightenment. With the advent of the Enlightenment, a line was drawn between Reason and its more shadowy others - magic and witchcraft, irrationality, superstition, the occult. In this wider activity of exclusion, ghosts of course fall very firmly in the camp of unreason and therefore become fair game for empiricists eager to demonstrate that ghosts are in fact the product of illusion or hoax, or mere hallucination...In recent years, cultural historians have been alert to the processes of exclusion performed by Reason on non-Enlightenment practices where ghosts found or remained in favour. These scholars of the margins painstakingly chart the histories of witchcraft and sorcery, occultism and spiritualism, giving voice to people and illuminating practices otherwise silenced or neglected by the mainstream historical record." (Buse & Scott, 1999, p.3)

My family, while not to my knowledge involved in spiritualism or the occult, seem also to have been 'otherwise silenced or neglected by the mainstream historical record'. Leaving behind few photographs and letters, as is the case with many working-class families, they seem to have fallen between the cracks, consigned, to borrow Greil Marcus' phrase, to 'the dustbin of history'. But like the table rapping ghosts of the 19th century, they continue to return to haunt the present.