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ghosts are always up to something besides scaring the audience. Or take Dr. Jekyll’s other half. The hideous Edward Hyde exists to demonstrate to readers that even a respectable man has a dark side; like many Victorians, Robert Louis Stevenson believed in the dual nature of humans, and in more than one work he finds ways of showing that duality quite literally. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) he has Dr. J. drink a potion and become his evil half, while in his now largely ignored short novel The Master of Ballantrae (1889), he uses twins locked in fatal conflict to convey the same sense. You’ll notice, by the way, that many of these examples come from Victorian writers: Stevenson, Dickens, Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu, Henry James. Why? Because there was so much the Victorians couldn’t write about directly, chiefly sex and sexuality, they found ways of transforming those taboo subjects and issues into other forms. The Victorians were masters of sublimation. But even today, when there are no limits on subject matter or treatment, writers still use ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and all manner of scary things to symbolize various aspects of our more common reality.
    Try this for a dictum: ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires .
    Here’s where it gets a little tricky, though: the ghosts and vampires don’t always have to appear in visible forms. Sometimes the really scary bloodsuckers are entirely human. Let’s look at another Victorian with experience in ghost and non-ghost genres, Henry James. James is known, of course, as a master, perhaps the master, of psychological realism; if you want massive novels with sentences as long and convoluted as the Missouri River, James is your man. At the same time, though, he has some shorter works that feature ghosts and demonic possession, and those are fun in their own way, as well as a good deal more accessible. His novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) is about a governess who tries, without success, to protect the two children in her care from a particularly nasty ghost who seeks to take possession of them. Either that or it’s about an insane governess who fantasizes that a ghost is taking over the children in her care, and in her delusion literally smothers them with protectiveness. Or just possibly it’s about an insane governess who is dealing with a particularly nasty ghost who tries to take possession of her wards. Or possibly…well, let’s just say that the plot calculus is tricky and that much depends on the perspective of the reader. So we have a story in which a ghost features prominently even if we’re never sure whether he’s really there or not, in which the psychological state of the governess matters greatly, and in which the life of a child, a little boy, is consumed. Between the two of them, the governess and the “specter” destroy him. One might say that the story is about fatherly neglect (the stand-in for the father simply abandons the children to the governess’s care) and smothering maternal concern. Those two thematic elements are encoded into the plot of the novella. The particulars of the encoding are carried by the details of the ghost story. It just so happens that James has another famous story, “Daisy Miller” (1878), in which there are no ghosts, no demonic possession, and nothing more mysterious than a midnight trip to the Colosseum in Rome. Daisy is a young American woman who does as she pleases, thus upsetting the rigid social customs of the Europeansociety she desperately wants to approve of her. Winterbourne, the man whose attention she desires, while both attracted to and repulsed by her, ultimately proves too fearful of the disapproval of his established expatriate American community to pursue her further. After numerous misadventures, Daisy dies, ostensibly by contracting malaria on her midnight jaunt. But you know what really kills her? Vampires.
    No, really. Vampires. I know I told you there