© The Author(s) 2016
Karen J. Renner Evil Children in the Popular Imagination 10.1057/978-1-137-59963-6_4

4. Ghost Children

Karen J. Renner 1 
(1)
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA
 
The folklore of many countries provides names for specific types of ghost children, who behave in generally consistent ways. However, in contemporary stories generated in the UK and the USA, ghost children are as psychologically unique in death as they were in life. In addition, their spiritual selves often remain at the same stage of development as they were when they passed, meaning that the ghost child’s behavior cannot always be counted on to be reasonable or fair. While some ghost children have benign or even benevolent purposes—a desire to reveal a hidden crime, perhaps, or to rescue another innocent from danger—others demand vengeance. Because these types of ghost children often punish the living in ways that resemble how they themselves suffered, they function as symbols of the so-called cycle of violence—the theory that abused children become abusers.
That the ghost child is even in the afterlife tormented by what he or she suffered while alive seems a rather damning assessment of abuse as a life- and death-defining experience. At the same time, these narratives do offer a solution. Peace can be attained through the diligent intervention of the living, whose job it is to uncover the secret crimes the ghost has suffered. Once ghost children feel justice has been served, they frequently shed their frightening appearance and are put to rest. This common plot structure provides a comforting affirmation of a therapeutic response to abuse that advocates that the abused face their trauma and confront their abuser; the ghost’s human advocate represents a therapist who aids the process of recovery. However, the therapeutic process has been criticized as prescriptive, invasive, and idealistic. Likewise, the reassuring symbolism of the typical ghost child narrative—namely that the cycle of violence can be stopped—could be seen as overly optimistic, and some ghost children do resist this easy move toward resolution.
Stories about ghost children who haunt living kids perform similar ideological work, with the stages of the cycle of violence divided up between the two characters. The living child displays many of the characteristics of children currently suffering abuse, and the ghost child acts as a dark reminder of what the abused child may become if the abuse is not recognized and redressed. The ghost, who is often dismissed by others as an imaginary friend, acts out the rage that the abused child feels. In dividing up the “labor” of the narrative in this way, the living child remains free from the taint of violence. While abuse victims evoke our sympathy, that sympathy is complicated if the child then takes on the position of abuser. The not-so-imaginary-playmate narrative resolves this emotional conflict.

Ghost Children and the Cycle of Violence

While the USA doesn’t even have a single specific term for a child apparition, Juha Pentikäinen has identified 30 words meaning “dead-child being” in the Scandinavian region alone. Frequently found in the woods, the mördklack , for example, is a being that makes a noise when travelers pass nearby. If someone imitates the sound, the mördklack will then “ride[] on the back of the experiencer and weigh[] there like a heavy load until the wanderer gets home or crosses water” (1968, 188). The Faroe Islands of Denmark tell of the ni ð agrísur , a being that is “small, thick and round like a small baby in swaddling clothes.…It dwells near the place where a newborn, illegitimate, murdered child has been buried in secret. It lies there and rolls at the feet of men walking in the dark, to make them go astray” (221). Finnish legend includes the ihtiriekko , supposedly the “souls of babies who have been killed without having received baptism.…They follow human beings invisibly but shout loudly and want[] to reveal the hiding place of the dead child’s bones” (231). And perhaps most haunting of all is the útburðir , which in Icelandic mythology is a baby who has been exposed at birth and “secretly buried in unhallowed ground.…They are said to make particularly vicious ghosts, wailing and screaming near their place of burial.” Like the ni ð agrísur , they try to lead people astray in fog or in the dark, but what is most disturbing about them is the way they move, “crawling about on one knee and elbow,” often at surprising speed. It is said that “if they can make three circles round anyone, he will go mad” (Simpson 2000, 106).
Scandinavia doesn’t have a monopoly on ghost child mythology, either. Romanian legend includes the moroiu , which, like the Norwegian útboren , is “believed to rise from its grave for the last time on the eighth anniversary of its interment, screaming and demanding baptism” (O’Connor 1991, 39). Indian folklore speaks of the masan , “a vampiric spirit…created when a child from a low caste, who was a bully in life, dies.…[T]he masan now delights in tormenting and killing children” (Bane 2016, 89). The Polish have the latawci , who “wander[s] the earth for seven years begging for someone to baptize it” (Bane 95). Filipino mythology references the tiyanak , a creature that imitates the form of a child, crying in the jungle until it is picked up, when it attacks. Russians warn of the rusalka , which dwells near water, trying to lure people to death. Inuit legend includes the angiak , the “angry spirits of those unwanted children who were left out on the open snowfields to die of exposure. When [one of] these spirits returned to its family camp, the ghost would seek out its mother and suckle from her breast while she slept.” Once strong enough, the angiak would then attack its elders (Bane 2016, 22). In Germanic tradition, the souls of unbaptized children manifest as “Irrlichter (wandering lights, ‘will-o-wisps’), and as birds which walk with childrens’ [sic ] footprints which we are told may be expelled by presenting them with a shoe” (O’Connor 1991, 40). Asian countries even have a variety of names for the ghost of a fetus, including toyol in Malay, yingling in Taiwan, and zashiki-warashi and mizugo in Japan.
Many of these legends arose due to a troubling religious question, namely what happens to the souls of children who pass away before being baptized, either due to foul play or illness? These legends imagine that such ghosts are destined to unhappily wander the earth but often envision a solution that will allow them to eventually go in peace. 1 Some ghost children simply need to be acknowledged or named, which allows them to rest. Other ghosts want their murders to be acknowledged. Still others are vindictive and unforgiving, driven to punish not only those who harmed them but innocent passersby as well.
Ghost child narratives today are less concerned with religious issues, and since the most well-known ones produced today are Anglo-American, they have less of a folkloric tradition to contend with. As a result, ghost children are frequently psychological beings rather than categorical types, their behavior shaped directly by what they suffered while alive. The characterization of modern ghost children has been influenced by concurrent concern about child abuse as well as by the theory of the “cycle of abuse” or “cycle of violence.” As strange as it sounds, child abuse has not always been such an urgent issue. Richard Beck claims that after a surge of interest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “[c]hild abuse completely disappeared from the public agenda for nearly forty years” (2015, 3). Beck argues that concern about child abuse reemerged after C. Henry Kempe published “The Battered-Child Syndrome” in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1967. 2 This interest built up to the passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) in 1974, which, among other things, initiated mandated reporting. As Kathleen Coulborn Faller explains, sexual abuse was not initially included under mandated reporting until 1981. Because sexual abuse rarely leaves detectable physical signs, new guidelines for investigation had to be developed, which seemed all the more necessary after Roland Summit proposed “child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome” in 1983, which basically held that children are, for many reasons, reluctant to report sexual abuse. Guides began to establish new practices for investigating allegations from children that involved less direct forms of questioning, including having them draw pictures or engage in play that would give some insight into their experiences and emotions. 3
At exactly the same time, interest in the cycle of abuse was rising. Originally coined by Lenore Walker in 1979 to explain the pattern of violence in domestic abuse situations, the term has since been used to account for the supposed tendency of victims of abuse to become abusers. A Google Ngram search for “cycle of abuse” shows that its usage dramatically increased after 1985 and peaked in 1996; since then it has fallen off quite rapidly. A search for “cycle of violence” shows usage of that term as increasing from 1975 to 1985, dropping for a few years (during which time “cycle of abuse” may have momentarily taken its place), and then steadily increasing until well into the 2000s. The concept behind both terms has since come under fire by sociologists who debate whether research has proven it to be an actuality and also from feminists who see it as upholding problematic gender distinctions and ignoring structural sexism. 4 Although current professionals in the field seem to prefer terms like “intergenerational transmission of violence,” the phrases “cycle of abuse” or “cycle of violence” still pop up in all sorts of book titles. This theory is also given symbolic validation in ghost child narratives. A victim of terrible abuse, the ghost child frequently returns as a vengeful spirit who relies on violence and terror to express its emotions and get its needs met.
As with all of the types of evil children in this book, ghost children do take on positive forms and purposes. Some warn others that their lives are in danger. For instance, in Arthur Machen’s “The Monstrance” (1915), a story in his collection of interrelated pieces about World War I, the child ghost ensures the safety and victory of the British. In the piece, German troops are creeping upon English forces, who are entirely unaware of their enemy’s advancement; the success of the German maneuver will leave “the English…hopelessly enfiladed.” However, in the middle of the operation, a German soldier named Karl Heinz screams and dies. We discover through his journal that in recent days, Heinz “saw continually advancing toward him a white procession of little children” and, at the end of the line, a priest holding something in his hands. Later, we discover that Heinz had killed a priest and helped to crucify a three-year-old child; it is implied that the child’s body is what the ghost priest is holding. Heinz’s death is the result of shock at seeing the ghosts of people he murdered; the child ghosts are therefore only indirectly involved with his passing and thus retain their innocence. More importantly, though, Heinz’s outburst before he dies alerts the English to the advances of the enemy; thus, the ghost children also ensure the victory of the “good guys.”
As in “The Monstrance,” other ghost children are motivated more by a desire to save others than to avenge their own injustices. The eponymous ghost child of Alex (2011), a horror novel by bestselling Kindle author Adam J. Nicolai, also behaves benevolently. Alex was kidnapped and physically and sexually abused before his death. His killer has already been fatally punished, the result of a wound suffered in his final struggle with Alex. Alex’s father, Ian, begins to see Alex’s ghost as well as that of his murderer and even—to make things all the more horrifying—is given nightmarishly vivid visions of what his son suffered before his death. Although Ian initially believes that Alex is punishing him for not protecting or rescuing him before he died, Alex has a far nobler purpose: he wants to inform his father that his kidnapper had an accomplice who is now torturing another victim. Alex’s intervention allows the girl to be saved. 5
Another of the primary reasons ghost children haunt the living is to bring the identity of their killers to light; ensuring an eye-for-an-eye justice is not their objective, though quite often it occurs as a fortunate side effect. This type of narrative dates back at least to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale,” an anti-Semitic episode of The Canterbury’s Tale that describes a child killed by Jews whose corpse miraculously begins to sing when discovered by his mother. As a result, the Jews responsible for the child’s death are named and viciously executed. A similar outcome concludes the movie Stir of Echoes (1999), which is very loosely based on a novel of the same name by Richard Matheson. In the story, a man named Tom is given psychic abilities long enough to solve the murder of a developmentally delayed 17-year-old girl, whom two boys attempted to rape and accidentally killed. Tom discovers the girl’s remains hidden in his house and brings the crime to light. Revelation of the crime and a proper burial seem to be all that’s required to put the girl’s spirit to rest. That two of the people involved in committing and covering up the crime die is merely an indirect bonus.
According to Roxanne Harde, these types of ghost children are particularly common in stories by female writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who “summoned the child ghost to bring to light injustice and suffering and offer social curatives.…Those ghosts that can be conjured away, exorcised and laid to rest suggest instances where justice can be accomplished, right restored” (2013, 199). As Harde makes clear, revenge is not a necessity in these stories; the revelation of wrongdoing is. 6 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ghost stories certainly fit Harde’s descriptions. “The Wind in the Rose-Bush” (1902), for example, communicates concerns about children raised by non-biological parents. In this story, a woman goes to collect her niece, who, since the death of hers father, has been raised by her stepmother. When the aunt arrives, she is told that her niece has gone away on a trip. During her visit, though, she has many interactions with a ghostly spirit, which the stepmother refuses to acknowledge. In the last lines of the story, we discover that the niece is dead, and rumor has it that the stepmother is to blame for not giving the child the medicine she needed while ill. Although the crime is revealed, no action is brought against the stepmother because there is insufficient evidence. There is some reason to believe, however, that the presence of the ghost is punishment enough. At one point, in response to a ghostly encounter, the stepmother is described as “struggling for breath in great, choking gasps. She clung to the back of a chair.” However, this “punishment” tends to be quite mild in comparison to that inflicted by other ghost children. The ghost child in “Rose-Bush” demands that the crime perpetrated against her be acknowledged but doesn’t require an equivalent revenge.
A similar ghost is at the center of Freeman’s short story “The Lost Ghost” (1903) as well. In the story, two sisters and a boarder, who later tells the story, willingly accept the presence of a ghost child in their house because they know the girl was the victim of terrible abuse. Her mother was a very attractive woman who became involved with a married man. When she ran off with him, she left the child locked in a room, where she starved to death. What the child’s ghost wants is initially unclear. Her mother was punished long ago, killed by her husband, the child’s father, after he discovered his wife’s crimes. However, this earthly justice has done little to ease the ghost child, who still wanders the house, saying, “I can’t find my mother.” At the end of the story, the ghost child is put to rest when she finds a substitute mother; one of the women, Abby Bird, is seen walking off “with that child holding fast to her hand, nestling close to her as if she had found her own mother.” The other two women then find that Abby is actually “dead in her bed, and smiling as if she was dreaming, and one arm and hand was stretched out as if something had hold of it.” Leah Blatt Glasser argues that “the paralyzing image of the outstretched arm, the hand reaching out to care for the child, captures the level of danger Freeman associated with maternal giving” (1996, 222). However, there is much in the story to suggest that this is a happy ending. Earlier, we learned that although Abby is childless, she “is a real motherly sort of woman” and that “[i]t’s lucky Abby never had any children…for she would have spoilt them.” Upon Abby’s death, both motherless child and childless mother find peace together. Although contemporary readers might find Abby’s sacrifice too sizeable and too prescriptive in terms of gender roles, the story, at least, suggests that it might be a happy ending for both. After all, the narrator states that Abby wasn’t so much “scared by that poor little ghost, as much as she pitied it, and she was ‘most heartbroken because she couldn’t do anything for it.” As problematic as the ending might be for today’s readers, the narrative still presents it as a relatively happy, if haunting, ending. 7
That the spirit in “The Lost Ghost” demands the death of another in order to be appeased may seem unfair and excessive. However, such an outcome is not really surprising when we consider that the ghost child in “The Lost Ghost” and others like it are still first and foremost children and therefore immature and self-centered in their demands. As Anne O’Connor notes in Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions , according to Irish belief, the “otherworld should be envisaged as a world more or less like the present one, in which certain needs, desires and duties must be fulfilled” (1991, 12). Such a belief is at play in many ghost child narratives; because they have not matured beyond the age they were at death, ghost children have little sense of fairness, seeking only to appease their own wants. The Japanese film Honogurai Mizu no soko kara (2002) and its American remake Dark Water (2005) mirror Freeman’s “Lost Ghost” in that the ghost child demands to be taken care of, regardless of the cost to others. However, the outcome is far more tragic in this narrative because the woman the ghost chooses as her mother already has a living daughter of her own.
In the story, Yoshimi/Dahlia, a single mother, moves into a broken-down apartment building with her daughter. The building proves to be haunted by the ghost of a child named Mitsuko/Natasha who was abandoned by her parents. Left unsupervised, she drowned in a water tank on the roof of the building. At the end of the story, Yoshimi/Dahlia must abandon her own daughter because doing so is the only way to save her from the ghost child’s vengeance. Critics have generally viewed both versions of the film as presenting conservative messages about the proper role of women. Valerie Wee argues that the Japanese version “align[s] Yoshimi with the ‘problematic’ modern Japanese woman whose rejection of traditional, patriarchal ideals has provoked the social problems and crises that characterize contemporary Japan” (2014, 105–106). Sarah Arnold finds the American version of the film more restrictive in its treatment of motherhood than the original: “whereas the Japanese film suggest[s] that the symbolic mother persists at the cost of the ‘real’ mother, the US film offers an ideology of maternal sacrifice unproblematically” (2013, 136). 8
Wee’s claim is well supported by the fact that Japanese folklore frequently imagines that only women are avenged by the ghosts of aborted fetuses or victims of infanticide, suggesting that motherhood has more expectations attached to it than fatherhood. Mary Picone notes that both infanticide and abortion were common in Japan well up until World War II and that they did not typically have a negative stigma: “infanticide was most commonly termed mabiki , ‘thinning out [the rice plants] between the rows’” while other such euphemisms “seem to indicate a positive view of the practice: children ‘go to play into the mountain’ or to ‘pick crabs’” (1998, 38). The bodies of these children were even buried under the house so that they could easily find where they were supposed to be reincarnated. Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken describe how sometimes the result is an apparition called a zashiki-warashi , a ghost who “appears as a child about three to ten years old.…[T]he zashiki-warashi is not necessarily dangerous, as long as it is properly ritualized and mollified” (1994, 75). Recently, however, Japan has witnessed the rise of mizuko cults that persuade women that they and their families will be cursed by the mizuko [the ghosts of fetuses and newborns]…unless the women perform a series of memorialization rites” (1994, 37). Mizuko are now imagined to be “‘spiteful’ and a sure cause of the misfortunes or illnesses which affect their families” (1994, 42). In fact, Picone describes how in one publication, “a woman is shown fleeing down a fiery tunnel pursued by skeletal children” (1998, 46). Helen Hardacre argues that the practice “selectively applies fetocentric rhetoric, usually to young, unmarried women…to stigmatize nonreproductive sexual activity in them, but not their male partners, and casting much greater moral opprobrium upon single women than upon married women who have abortions” (1997, 6). Japan is not the only country with these types of ghost children, either. Malay culture has the toyol , Taiwanese the yingling and the xiaogui (fetus demon), 9 and we’ve already seen that the folklore of a number of European countries contains similar spirits. The punishing fetus has appeared in recent films, too, including Gauri: The Unborn (2007), which Meheli Sen has analyzed in the context of similar changes in India, The Abortion (2006), Unborn Sins (2007), Stevie (2008), and The Locker (2009). 10
Situating Honogurai Mizu no soko kara and Dark Water within their specific cultural contexts can also shed light on the different meanings of the ghost child in each. The ghost child in Honogurai , Mitsuko, clearly fits the Japanese idea of the onryō , literally a “vengeful spirit.” While traditionally figured as an adult female, onryō in Japanese horror today are far more commonly represented as “dead wet girls,” the most famous of which is probably Sadako/Samara from Ringu/The Ring (1998, 2002). 11 Thus, in Honogurai , the ghost child is a recognizable type of ghost from Japanese folklore not a uniquely psychological creature. We can similarly understand Yoshimi’s sacrifice as emblematizing a Japanese focus on the community over the individual. 12 As Wee explains, according to Japanese tradition, “‘right’ is clearly aligned with acting in accordance with one’s roles and responsibilities to others (particularly if that entails personal sacrifice for the greater good), and ‘wrong’ is associated with a selfish disregard for the communal in preference for the desires of the personal” (2014, 63–64). Wee believes these values “remain firmly entrenched in Japanese society…and organize the dominant narrative trajectories of kaidan [ghost] films through the ages” (64). Honogurai uses the ghost child to symbolize collective social issues rather than specific psychological ones. 13
The American version of the film calls upon a very different set of beliefs. Perhaps the reason that American tradition lacks names for categories of ghosts is because this culture views people as retaining their identity in the afterlife. Therefore, each ghost is as psychologically unique as its living counterpart rather than an example of a “type.” One can see a focus on the psychological ghost especially emphasized in the American version of Dark Water in comparison to the original. The movie invites us to understand the ghost child Natasha’s selfish demand that Dahlia become her mother as a direct psychological response to the specific form of neglect that Natasha suffered in life: entirely abandoned by her family, the child now clutches desperately onto any caretaker she can find. The American version of the film seems far more concerned with understanding the ghost psychologically, as an extremely neglected child. In addition, Dahlia’s behavior can be read as an outcome of that character’s particular psychology rather than as a collective message to womankind. Both versions of the character were neglected by their mothers and have a history of abandonment issues. However, Arnold believes that Dahlia is far more defined by her abusive past than is Yoshimi. She writes, “While both women carry their traumatic childhood incidents into adulthood, Dahlia is clearly more affected by them” (2013, 130). In making the choice to mother the parentless child, Dahlia heals her own wounds. The American version of the film is far more interested in the psychological particularities of the characters, living and dead.
The ghost child’s function as an emblem of the abused child caught up in the cycle of violence is far more apparent when his or her assaults on the living resemble the abuse that he or she suffered. In August Derleth’s “The Metronome” (1934), for example, we discover that a woman let her ten-year-old stepchild drown because of “irritation at the boy, and hatred because of his resemblance to his mother” (1969, 5). The boy’s ghost returns to visit a fatal punishment upon his stepmother. He first traps her in the library, and, after terrorizing her for some time, she is fatally struck in the head. In the morning next to her dead body is found the boy’s beloved metronome, a gift from his biological mother that was detested by the stepmother for its noise and likely its origins. It appears the metronome “accidentally” fell from the shelf above. That the drowned boy wants revenge is understandable, but that he accomplishes it via an object that had particular psychological meaning for them both suggests just how much the past still influences his behavior, even in the afterlife.
The ghost child of The Changeling (1980) is even more vengeful. The protagonist of the film is a man who recently lost his wife and child to a terrible accident. 14 After many terrifying experiences with the ghost in his new house, the protagonist finally figures out that it is the spirit of a physically disabled child who was murdered by his father because he was deemed an unsuitable heir. His father then replaced him with a boy better able to make him proud (the titular “changeling”). No one is even aware that the biological son was killed because the family left the country immediately after, putatively intent on treating the boy’s medical issues, and only returned after years had passed and the switch was undetectable. The protagonist not only uncovers the details of the murder but also finds the boy’s corpse, which had been buried surreptitiously (under someone’s floorboards, of course). However, the ghost child isn’t happy until his changeling is killed off and the family mansion burned down to the ground. Only then can he “pass over.” The child knows of no other way to deal with the abuse he suffered than to visit it upon another person.
Ray Garton’s novel The Loveliest Dead (2005) features horrific scenes of abuse met with an especially violent spiritual revenge. When a family inherits a house from the mother’s estranged father, they begin to see both the ghosts of children and of an older man. Careful investigation reveals that the woman’s father, while alive, was kidnapping young boys and torturing them in the house. At the end of the novel, all of the ghosts of the dead boys viciously attack the specter of their abuser: “They gouge his eyes and claw at his mouth as his white cowboy hat tumbles away and disappears into the deep darkness, spattered by blood. She feels their anger and hatred and knows they did not tear at Leonard Baines’s body, but at his soul, at the deepest part of him .” While the pedophile’s terrible crimes make this bloody revenge seem warranted and also rather satisfying to witness, it is still an emblem of the cycle of violence. Once peaceful children visit a torturous end upon their abuser. Other ferociously vengeful ghost children can be found in the movies Ju-On (2002) and its American remake The Grudge (2004), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Wicked Little Things (2006), and The Echo (2008) as well as in Susan Hill’s novel The Small Hand (2010). Ghost child narratives fulfill the wish that abuse against children—considered the most heinous crime today—will be fiercely punished if not in this life then in the afterlife. 15 At the same time, however, they confirm the cycle of violence as an inevitable outcome of abuse.
In recent ghost child stories, those in contact with spirits often consult “experts,” mediums or paranormal investigators trained to serve as mediators between the dead and the living; symbolically, they are stand-ins for the mental health professionals who intervene in cases of abuse. Psychics make an appearance in both The Changeling and The Loveliest Dead , and they also show up in Poltergeist (1982), The Orphanage (2007), Insidious (2010), and Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013). These figures are not often able to solve the problem entirely on their own, however, and their failures or at least incomplete successes suggest that psychological professionals alone are not always enough to end the cycle of abuse; the abused child/ghost child must also feel cared for by someone not hired or trained to do so.

Not-So-Imaginary Playmates: Separating Abused from Abuser

In many movies, the person who encounters a ghost child is also a child. These types of stories rely on the longstanding assumption, fomented during the Romantic era, that children are especially attuned to the spiritual world. 16 In such stories, a child is the only one who sees the ghost, and his or her claims are initially dismissed and the ghost explained away as an imaginary friend. The reader/viewer, however, is typically given enough information that we know that the child’s insistence on a paranormal presence is true. That the child’s declarations are ignored even when we know them to be factual dredges up long-standing fears about abused children’s cries for help going unheeded. When other evidence comes to light, parents begin to realize that what the child is saying is true and what was imagined to be a psychological problem is actually a supernatural one.
It’s not surprising that children with not-so-imaginary friends would become emblems of abused children. While Majorie Taylor has shown that many of the stereotypes about children who have imaginary friends are just that—stereotypes—the associations between abuse and the invention of imaginary friends is extraordinarily high: Taylor quotes Frank Putnam, former chief of the unit on dissociative disorders at the National Institute of Health, as estimating that “about 89 percent of children who are abused have imaginary companions” (1999, 81). Imaginary friends became even more associated with abuse during the ritual abuse moral panic of the 1980s, during which large numbers of children were believed to be suffering terrible acts of cruelty at the hands of Satanists. This moral panic incited Sesame Street creators to change the relationship between Mr. Snuffleupagus and Big Bird. For seasons, Snuffy, as he is affectionately called, had been Big Bird’s friend, but no one else knew he existed. Whenever another person would enter the scene, the kindly, old, wooly mammoth would conveniently lumber off before he was seen. In 1985, however, Snuffy was finally witnessed by others, and Big Bird’s “imaginary” friend acknowledged to be a reality. Executive producer Dulcey Singer explained, “In this day of child abuse,…we felt it important for children to feel they could talk to adults and be believed. We didn’t want to do anything to discourage children from going to their parents” (“‘Sesame Street’ Will Emphasize Family” 1985).
Thus, the imaginary friend became a symbol of secrets that children harbor because they feel they won’t be believed, such as experiences of abuse. As the title of Richard Beck’s study of the ritual abuse moral panic, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s , makes clear, a major tenet of the era was to trust what children said, no matter how strange. As Mary de Young explains, “Believe the Children” was not only “the mantra oft-repeated to invoke the social honor of the accusing children, but a political banner under which some of their parents came together to form the Believe the Children Organization, a clearinghouse for ritual abuse information and advocacy center,” and the slogan was also blazoned on “bumper stickers and window signs” (2004, 38). Although it was later revealed that in most cases, legal officials or psychiatric professionals had coerced the children’s accusations, the fear that an abused child’s plea for help could go ignored remained firmly pressed in the cultural imagination. Stories about children with not-so-imaginary friends similarly reinforced that parents must be vigilant for signs of abuse and trust what the child says. As de Young notes, during the Satanic abuse panic in the 1980s, the importance of believing children’s stories was stressed via an “oft-repeated credo: ‘If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it’” (2004, 45). Likewise, believing in the ghost child has the effect, in many texts, of initiating rehabilitation for both the living and the dead.
For example, in The Sixth Sense (1999), the film that launched M. Night Shyamalan’s career, a young boy, Cole, reveals—in a line that is often quoted and even more frequently parodied—“I see dead people.” It is because of this ability that Cole is suffering from emotional and psychological problems. At the beginning of the film, when his ability to see ghosts is still a secret, Cole in many ways resembles an abused kid; at one point, he is even attacked by a ghost in a closet. However, once he finally confesses his ability to see the dead to his therapist, Dr. Crowe, Cole is finally able to gain control over his life. Crowe advises Cole to stop running away from the ghosts and to instead confront them directly. Cole follows through with this advice on his next encounter and becomes involved with the ghost of a girl names Kyra, whom we learn was a victim of Munchhausen’s syndrome by proxy. In solving the mystery of Kyra’s death, Cole also manages to save Kyra’s younger sister, who would have been her mother’s next victim. More importantly, Cole’s success gives him the confidence to tell his mother about his ability as well. It is only when Cole speaks the truth and is believed that he can begin to heal.
Symbolic references to the “cycle of abuse” become even more apparent in narratives involving malicious ghost children who pose as friends to a living child as part of their ploy for vengeance. Rather than simply taking revenge on their abusers, the ghost children in these stories victimize an innocent who is likely quite similar to the ghost child’s past self and, in doing so, shift from abused to abuser. In “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852) by Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, a ghost child keeps trying to lead an innocent girl into the freezing cold, the death the ghost child herself suffered when she and her mother were exiled from the family home. Although the child ghost vanishes once the story of her suffering is revealed—and once the aunt largely responsible suddenly dies—we still are left with the haunting image of her attempt to kill another innocent child in the same way she herself was killed. Similarly, in Cynthia Asquith’s “The Playfellow” (1929), an uncle allows his niece to perish in a fire so that he can inherit her estate. The ghost of the child later returns to ensure the death of his own daughter through an accident that very nearly duplicates the circumstances of her own death. In visiting the abuse she suffered on another innocent child, the ghost child acts out the cycle of abuse down to the very last detail.
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “In the Closed Room” (1904) offers an interesting take on the genre, as the not-so-imaginary friend seems less intentionally cruel. Best known for her three children’s novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885–1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911), in “Closed Room” Burnett is, according to Ann Thwaite and Jane Darcy, writing for an adult audience. The story at first glance resembles many of Burnett’s other tales. A strangely perceptive and probably psychic child, Judith is an enigma to her working-class parents, who remark on her similarities to an aunt who died inexplicably at a young age, “her face turned up smilin’ as if she was talkin’ to some one.” Judith, we learn, constantly dreams about her aunt and perhaps even enjoys visitations from her ghost. The family is given the opportunity to escape the city’s summer heat by serving as caretakers of an empty mansion. Only one room in the house is locked, the bedroom of a child who had died named Andrea. Judith, however, always finds the door open and the ghost of Andrea inside waiting to play with her. At the end of the story, Judith is discovered to have passed away in the room.
Thwaite and Darcy read “Closed Room” biographically, relating it to the death of Burnett’s 15-year-old son, Lionel, in 1890. As a result, Darcy, for example, sees the story as “sad, even macabre…suggesting that death is never far away or necessarily ‘unreal’ for an imaginative child” (2009, 84) whereas Thwaite believes it expresses Burnett’s wish to believe that “Lionel was still Lionel, real, himself” (quoted in Darcy 2009, 84). However, I see something more sinister in Andrea’s ghost in the way she uses the working-class Judith for her own purposes and ends Judith’s life once that purpose is served. Throughout the story, Burnett repeatedly emphasizes the class difference between the two. Judith has “a shabby doll” whereas the ghost girl has “a very large doll, beautifully dressed in white lace.” Andrea—who, as an upper-class child, had more opportunity to play and more toys to play with—takes a dominant role in their fun: “She told Judith where to find [toys] and how to arrange them for their games. She invented things to do—things which were so unlike anything Judith had ever seen or heard or thought of.” And Judith appears to have been summoned not as a playmate but as a servant who can carry out Andrea’s wishes. On their last day together, she has Judith arrange the room to her exact specifications so that she can declare her presence to the family that she feels abandoned her: “They came and hid and covered everything—as if I had gone—as if I was Nowhere. I want her to know I come here. I couldn’t do it myself. You could do it for me.” Task accomplished, Andrea then touches Judith “for the first time. She laid her little pointed fingers on her forehead and Judith fell asleep,” never to awaken. Judith, it appears, was an expendable resource to Andrea, who whisks her away into the afterlife after she has served her purpose, presuming it will be far superior to a working-class life with her family. Although not acting out a cycle of abuse, Andrea does seem to have taken her sense of class privilege with her into the afterlife.
In discussions of the cycle of abuse, the common assumption is that “abuse does not end with the victim; it has a life of its own ” (my emphasis, Furedi 2006, 86). Similarly, in not-so-imaginary- friend narratives, the violent potential of the abused child becomes projected into another being and literally takes on its own life. These texts maintain the image of the abused child as victim by attributing the violence they might commit later in life as a result to the ghost. These narratives keep the abused child entirely separate from the abusive child and thus sidestep the emotional conflicts that may arise in real life if the cycle of abuse does indeed continue.
One of the most fascinating instances of this narrative pattern is a graphic short story posted on the web that then went viral. Initially called “Lisa’s Story,” the piece has now come to be known more widely The Pink Backpack , and the book version of the story carries that title as well. 17 Via childish drawings and writing, an unnamed narrator tells a story about her imaginary friend, Lisa. Lisa is clearly the ghost of a child who died as a result of violence; in pictures, she floats above the ground and is covered with what looks like bloodstains. We also receive hints that Lisa might have killed her family. For instance, Lisa reveals that “her daddy is sleeping” near the narrator’s sandbox, where he is presumably buried, and Lisa “helps” the narrator deal with many of difficult people in her life, presumably by killing them off as well. The teacher who punishes the narrator for her “lies” about Lisa disappears, as does the narrator’s father after he angrily denies the existence of Lisa. 18 The imaginary friend here carries out the wishes of the narrator to commit violence against those who oppose her. However, it seems that Lisa takes things a bit too far; at the end of the story, when Lisa says that “Mrs. Monroe and [the narrator’s father] are sleeping like [Lisa’s] dad,” the narrator’s last words are “I hope they wake up soon.” The ghost child, Lisa, herself a victim of violence, deals with anyone who opposes her through the same violent means, and her entrapment in the so-called cycle of violence ends up hurting the innocent narrator. Symbolically, the violent abused child is dissociated from the suffering child.
The 2005 Danish short film Lille/Little Lise , written and directed by Benjamin Holmsteen, also uses the trope of the imaginary friend to represent the cycle of violence but similarly separates abused child and abusive child into two figures. 19 The film begins with a little girl, the eponymous Lise, watching as her father loads the corpse of her mother into the trunk of his car. Though we never learn Lise’s age, she is young enough for her father to think that she will believe him when he tells her that her mother is “sleeping”; her youth and innocence is further emphasized by her pink rain jacket, her pigtails, and the doll she holds. Her father tells her they are taking a trip to the lake, clearly so he can dispose of the body. Lise climbs in the back seat, and her father starts to close the door, but Lise tells him to watch out for Louise, and he pauses to allow what appears to be an imaginary friend to get in the backseat with her.
From this point on, scenes showing their trip to the lake and disposal of the body are interspliced with flashbacks that explain how the situation came to be. The first shows Lise’s mother explaining to her that she is leaving because she and Lise’s father no longer get along. The father interrupts to say, “Mummy has found a new family whom she loves more than us.” The two begin violently arguing. In another flashback, it appears that the father physically attacks the mother, but then she appears, alive and well, and orders Lise to her room. As Lise clambers up the stairs, she says to herself, “Bad Mummy!” The parents’ fight escalates, during which both make mention of Lise’s mental well-being, which has been called into question by the existence of her imaginary friend. Then, suddenly, it is morning, and the father is awakened when his wife falls into bed with a knife in her chest.
Other flashbacks show Lise tossing in her sleep until she is wakened by a voice, presumably that of her imaginary friend, Louise. Her eyes go black, signalling her possession by Louise. We then see her stab her mother and, with a strength well beyond her years, drag her body upstairs. In the bathroom, Lise washes her hands and then watches as the soap floats into the air by itself, giving us further evidence of a supernatural presence. We move back into the present and see that Lise’s father is now in the trunk, dead, and Lise is in the passenger seat, watching as the ignition turns on by itself. “You can do it by yourself now, Louise!” Lise exclaims and laughs. As the car drives off, Lise says: “You’re my best friend in the whole world.” However, there is then a pause, and we hear Lise ask: “Are we still best friends? Louise?” The film ends on this ominous note, implying that Louise perhaps has more malicious plans for Lise.
Little Lise obviously shares many qualities with possessed films, the most evident being that evil spirits gain access to children when family dysfunction weakens the familial stronghold. Holmsteen’s own summary of Lille Lise on IMDb directly supports this reading: “The message of this film ‘LILLE LISE/LITTLE LISE’ is about taking care of your children. Give them lots of love, respect and responsibility. Otherwise they will be open to comfort and recognition elsewhere.” In addition, although the identity of Louise is ambiguous, Holmsteen’s several shots of the car’s license plate, “NT 13 018,” give us a pretty clear clue that the being is demonic; the New Testament Book of Revelation 13.18 contains the famous passage about the “the number of the beast” being 666. That connection made, we can then realize how closely Louise sounds like Lucifer.
At the same time, Louise is referred to as an imaginary playmate, often operates independently of Lise, and by the end of the film seems to not require the “vessel” of the child at all. Little Lise also shares with the not-so-imaginary-playmate narrative a heavy focus on the cycle of abuse theory in that Lise ends up duplicating the violence she witnesses to the extreme. Louise becomes the embodiment of Lise’s pent-up rage. However, rather than gaining power or comfort from her friendship with Louise, Lise ends up losing all control to Louise, suggesting that her anger has now taken on a life of its own and is beyond her control, in much the same way that the cycle of violence theory proposes that abused children cannot help becoming abusers. Furthermore, with no caretakers left, Lise’s life will now be entirely in Louise’s hands, just as the cycle of violence proposes that abused children are defined by their abuse for years to come. And yet Lise remains largely innocent in the story via the trope of the imaginary playmate. Although she may have wished violence on her parents and certainly doesn’t seem very sad about their deaths, it is Louise who actually commits the murders. 20
In many imaginary playmate films, tragedy results from an unwillingness to recognize and properly deal with a child’s problems, which are signaled by the appearance of the imaginary friend. However, some films question whether a quick dose of therapy will always fix the problem. One of the earliest films to play with these tropes is Don’t Go to Sleep (1982). In this film, a young girl named Mary begins interacting with the ghost of her sister, Jennifer, who died in a car accident caused by her father’s drunk driving (which is brushed over, a sign of the very different norms that informed the 1980s). Because Mary and her brother had tied Jennifer’s shoelaces together as a prank, Jennifer was unable to escape from the burning car, and Mary, in a moment of spite at her prettier and petted older sister, slammed the car door in her face instead of helping her out. As a result of her communication with Jennifer, Mary plans and executes the deaths of her grandmother, younger brother, and father and very nearly manages to kill her mother. At the end of the film, Mary is in a mental health facility and confesses to a psychiatrist what really happened to Jennifer during the car accident and, with that, Jennifer disappears. The suggestion is that Jennifer was a figment of Mary’s imagination that she created in order to cope with her guilt. However, in the last few minutes of the movie, Jennifer’s ghost rises up at the end of her mother’s bed in a surprising twist that confirms that she was real all along. The quick and obvious therapeutic approach fails to understand or resolve the situation, and the movie suggests that sometimes trauma requires more than talk therapy.
The film Hide and Seek (2005) also calls into question the efficacy of therapy in resolving cases of abuse. In the wake of her mother’s supposed suicide, a little girl named Emily appears to be struggling with depression, much to the concern of her father, David. Emily only starts to perk up when she gains an imaginary friend named Charlie. Soon, though, a series of increasingly disturbing events take place, beginning with the drowning of a cat in a bathtub and leading up to the murder of a local woman that David had just befriended. All signs suggest that Charlie is Emily’s invention, a way for her to act out all of her repressed rage. Eventually, however, we discover that Charlie is actually David’s alter ego, a personality he constructed to deal with his wife’s infidelity and his subsequent murder of her. Ironically, David is a psychologist, but rather than easing his daughter’s suffering, he exacerbates it and is the last one to even understand what is actually going on. The ending of the movie calls into question the effectiveness of another therapist; after being adopted by a family friend and psychiatrist, Katherine, Emily is shown at breakfast happily drawing a picture of what we presume to be her and Katherine holding hands. Emily, it seems, has made a full recovery from her trauma. However, a slow pan shows us that in the drawing, Emily has two heads, implying that she, like her father, now has an alternate personality that will prove just as dangerous. And all of this is happening right under the nose of her adoptive mother, who is supposedly trained to detect just these sorts of signs. Hide and Seek suggests that abuse cannot always be easily dealt with by experts in mental health.
The trope that the ghost child is simply seeking justice and will quietly go on its way once appeased has also been outright subverted in some films. 21 For example, in Peter Straub’s novel Julia (1975) and its cinematic adaptation The Haunting of Julia/Full Circle (1977), the eponymous character is a mother who has just lost her daughter to a terrible accident. Julia begins to see visions of a terrifying little girl. Initially believing she is being haunted by her own daughter, Julia then discovers that the woman who lived in her house before her stabbed her daughter, named Olivia, to death. Though we are likely to assume that the ghost child is simply tormented by the trauma of her own terrible murder, we discover that in life Olivia was actually a horrible child. Not only was she the ringleader of a group of children who suffocated and sodomized another four-year-old child, but one of the survivors of that group explains that Olivia required its members to go through a most perverse initiation: “The first rule was you had to kill an animal. Aycroft killed his dog. He brought it to her and she ripped it open with her knife and made him drink some of its blood.…Then we had to light fires. We had to burn a house or a shed, something in that line.…Then we had to do lots of thieving and give it all over to her.…We learned all about sex from her, in her bent little games” (1976, 193). Although Olivia may be a vengeful child ghost, she doesn’t fit the mold of wronged innocent; rather, as one character explains, “Olivia was evil. She was an evil person. Evil isn’t like ordinary people. It can’t be got rid of. It gets revenge. Revenge is what it wants, and it gets it” (145). The abusive child, the narrative suggests, cannot always be traced back to abuse. Some children, it seems, are born bad.
The Ring (2002), a remake of the Japanese film Ringu (1998), also mocks the idea that there is a simplistic solution to ghost children and the abused children they symbolize. The story contains a ghost child, Samara, who was supernaturally gifted while alive. Killed by her mother, she created a videotape from beyond the grave that curses those who watch it to death after seven days. The main character of the story, Rachel, is a journalist who begins investigating the story when her niece becomes a victim. In the process, Rachel manages to subject herself and her son, Aidan, to the tape’s curse. Although she largely neglects her own son, Rachel takes on the duty of soothing Samara’s unsettled spirit. Aided by Noah, her former lover and Aidan’s father, she finds Samara’s corpse hidden in a well, cradles it lovingly, and makes sure she receives a proper burial. Confident that she has thus ended the cycle of abuse, Rachel then recites some simplistic psychiatric platitudes that attempt to explain away the acts of violence that Samara committed as being the actions of a child who “just wanted to be heard. Sometimes children yell or cry or draw pictures—” Recognizing how she has similarly ignored Aidan, who has been drawing some disturbing pictures of his own, she hurries home, resolved to be a better mom and to quickly solve all of Aidan’s issues, with Noah by her side, who is now apparently ready to assume his fatherly duties.
However, as Karen Lury writes, this “false ending…plays exactly on the audience’s pre-existing understanding that the ghost in a horror film is a problem that can be solved and thus escaped from” (2010, 20). At home, Aidan asks: “What happened to the girl?…Is she still in the dark place?” Rachel proudly tells him: “Nope, we set her free.” “You helped her?” he asks. “Why did you do that?” Although Rachel believes she successfully put Samara’s tormented soul to rest and that’s why she was spared Samara’s revenge, it turns out that Samara is only interested in perpetuating her curse; copying the tape, which Rachel did during the investigation, is the only way to avoid its fatal consequences. After discovering that Samara has killed Noah and that Aidan is next, Rachel has Aidan make a copy of the tape, knowing full well that doing so will only bring death to another person. Through the tape that is passed along from victim to victim, the movie literalizes the cycle of violence and poses that no easy intervention can bring a peaceful close to the cycle. 22 Sometimes restless spirits cannot be appeased and frankly don’t even want to be. And while we might like to believe that abuse has an easy solution, sometimes it doesn’t.

Conclusion

The ghost child is a symbol of the dark potential of the abused child. If in life the child was a wronged innocent, in the afterlife he or she returns as a specter eager to perpetuate the cycle of violence. Not-so-imaginary-friend narratives function similarly. The living child symbolizes the abused child whose cries for help go unanswered; the not-so-imaginary friend is the shadowy future of that child, who is destined to become an abuser. These stories thus solve the emotional conflict aroused by the abused child, who deserves our sympathy, who then abuses others, an act that provokes our outrage. Although the original suffering of The Child enrages us, his or her abuse of others effectively banishes him or her from that realm of innocence. By dividing the abused-child-turned-abuser across two figures, these narratives manage to keep the abused victim free from the taint of his or her later abusive self, which the cycle of abuse claims is inevitable.
Lury argues that the ghost child is by its very nature and actions banished from the realm of childhood: “The terrible deeds they commit and the secrets they known mean that we can no longer consider these ghastly figures as children, as they surely know too much and are no[] longer innocent” (2010, 40). The same could be said of the boys and girls who come into contact with ghost children—their own “membership” in the realm of childhood comes into question as well. Although Cole in The Sixth Sense , for example, is ultimately a positive character in that he helps ghosts pass peacefully into the afterlife, he still remains a creepy kid. Kevin A. Wisniewski writes that Cole’s “access to…knowledge…makes him a threatening force” (2014, 18), a tendency that he believes is true of most of Shyamalan’s child characters: “Parallel to the monstrous Other, the mysterious nature of the child’s potential is equally terrifying; therefore, the child represents, or is at least temporarily transformed into the Other” (2014, 17). Having dipped their fingers into the dark side, children who consort with ghosts can never come completely clean. Tragically, the same is often true of our perception of abused children. While they may secure our sympathy, the cycle of abuse theory also ensures that they earn our wariness, as we wait for their abusive side to surface.

Notes

  1. 1.
    The videogame Limbo captures these types of agitated spirits, who attempt to kill the child player character as he weaves his way through a landscape of puzzles.
     
  2. 2.
    As Beck explains, Barbara J. Nelson has demonstrated that in the decade before Kempe’s article, only 9 others on child abuse appeared in professional research journals; in the decade following, 260 articles were published, not to mention the countless newspaper and magazine pieces on the subject.
     
  3. 3.
    One of the first of these guides appeared in 1985 with a far more substantial manual published in 1993 (Faller 2015, 39–40).
     
  4. 4.
    As many feminist critics have pointed out, the concept has many problematic gender assumptions. Sarah Nelson argues that feminists reject cycle of abuse theory because “it ignores major political, social and cultural influences, particularly gendered power relations” and “has also been seen to excuse male behaviour, reducing impetus for measure to combat sexism and violence against women and children” (2016, 352). Judith Lewis Herman similarly writes: “Applied to sexual assault, the most glaring weakness of the cycle of abuse concept is its inability to explain the virtual male monopoly on this type of behavior” (1990, 181).
     
  5. 5.
    Some child ghosts help the living recover lost memories and thus become psychologically whole, as in The Awakening (2011); others try to give them information that can save their lives, as in The Unbroken (2012).
     
  6. 6.
    I only write about a few stories by women during this time period, but using Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar’s Ghost Stories by British and American Women: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography , I have been able to identity many more, which run well into the twentieth century, including Josephine Bacon’s “The Little Silver Heart” (1925) and “The Children” (1913); Mary Fitt’s “The Amethyst Cross” (1952); Elizabeth Walter’s “The Little House” (1975); Dorothea Gibbons’s “The Crying Child” (1943); and Nina Hoffman’s “Coming Home” (1990). Vindictive ghosts appear in Agatha Christie’s “The Lamp” (1933) and “The Last Séance” (1933); Rosemary Timperley’s “Harry” (1955); Ellen Glasgow’s “The Shadowy Third” (1923); Alison Lurie’s “Another Halloween” (1994); Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s “Kentucky’s Ghost” (1868), and Pamela Hansford Johnson’s “The Empty Schoolroom” (1950). Jane Gardam’s “The Weeping Child” (1975) features a ghost child who represents a sinful moment in the past of a still living adult.
     
  7. 7.
    Beth Fisken writes that “Rose-Bush” “is a story of frustrated maternity, the unhappy situation of a woman whose circumstances are finally such that she can care for a child, but for whom that opportunity has come too late, just as marriage and a home had come too late for Mary Wilkins Freeman” (1991, 57). I think it is possible to read “The Lost Ghost” as providing the missing happy ending to “Rose-Bush,” in which a woman finally discovers her opportunity to be a mother.
     
  8. 8.
    Another film that seems to require a bit too much in the way of maternal sacrifice is The Orphanage (2007). In this film, a child goes missing. As the mother, Laura, solves the mystery of his disappearance, she also learns that her childhood friends from the orphanage in which she grew up were killed after she herself was adopted—this she discovers with the help of a psychic/therapist. Laura commits suicide so that she can mother all of them, leaving her husband behind all alone in the land of the living. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)—and its 1998 cinematic adaptation—demand far less of its mother; she is able to reintegrate with the community and move toward a fulfilling life once the spirit of Beloved, the child she killed to save from slavery, disappears.
     
  9. 9.
    For an in-depth discussion of the yingling , see Mark Moskowitz’s The Haunting Fetus . Particularly interesting are the descriptions Moskowitz gives of texts featuring yingling , including a movie simply titled Yingling , released in 1980.
     
  10. 10.
    The Locker was a direct response to the “trend” in Japan of leaving the bodies of unwanted babies in coin lockers, following their installation in the early 1970s. According to Akihisa Kouno and Charles F. Johnson, the term “coin-operated-locker baby” was first applied in 1975 and remained a major issue for years to come: between 1980 and 1990, over 3000 such children were found.
     
  11. 11.
    Joseph Schaub argues that the popularity of this type of ghost in Japanese Horror (J-Horror) is due to changing feelings about the shōjo , or Japanese girl: “The same qualities that made the shōjo the master sign of carefree personal consumption and self-indulgence during the height of the bubble economy in the late 1980s guaranteed its success as a signifier for all the anxiety that accompanied the loss of productive potential in the depressed economy of the late 1990s” (2008, 408).
     
  12. 12.
    Critics like Collette Balmain, Linnie Blake, and Jay McRoy have also argued that the Japanese ghost story is more frequently about collective concerns rather than simply individual matters: Balmain writes, “[T]he trope of the vengeful ghost is not a mere embodiment of individual guilt, but rather is a collective projection of societal guilt. All the films discussed…meditate on the prevalence of domestic violence as a result of socio-economic transformations in the very nature of Japanese society” (2008, 147). McRoy, too, considers these films a response to “the impact of late industrial capitalism on the various (re)constructions of the ‘family’ in contemporary Japan” (2008, 76). Blake specifically reads Sadako from Ringu as “that which will not be eradicated by US colonialism in Japan or by the Japanese refusal to acknowledge the sins of its own past” (2008, 54).
     
  13. 13.
    Another story in which a haunting is more about societal sins than psychological ones would be Out of the Dark (2014), an English-language Spanish film starring Julia Stiles and Stephen Rea. In the movie, the ghost children are former victims of mercury poisoning who come to take revenge on the family which now owns the responsible factory.
     
  14. 14.
    That people who have recently lost a loved one are especially sensitive to ghost children is a common device, appearing in The Crying Child (1996), for example. As Emily D. Edwards writes in “Ghostly Narratives,” “The grief of parents over the death of a child creates environments that energize ghosts” (2001, 93). In some folklore tales, as Jacqueline Simpson points out, parental grief actually binds the child’s spirit to this world, making it unable to pass into the afterlife (2000, 18). Such is the case in The Lovely Bones , both the 2002 novel by Alice Sebold and the 2009 film adaptation.
     
  15. 15.
    Read as a ghost story, Flatliners (1990) takes the interesting perspective that an abuser can make amends. In the story, three medical students, eager to know more about what happens after death, willingly stop their own hearts to explore the afterlife, trusting that their friends can resuscitate them. However, what they encounter is karmic justice: all are haunted after their visit to the afterlife by embodiments of sins for which they have not answered or psychological issues that remain unresolved. Nelson suffers a particularly terrible experience in that he is haunted by the ghost of a child whose death he and his friends inadvertently caused when they were young. The ghost is appeased once Nelson experiences the boy’s death for himself in the afterlife. Nelson can then revive and live free of that burden of guilt on his soul. Facing your worst self and the victims of that self is the solution to the ghost child in this film.
     
  16. 16.
    Such thinking is behind shows such as The Ghost inside My Child (2013–), in which children remember past lives, and A Haunting (2005–2016), which investigates experiences with ghosts; in the show, children are frequently affected by the presence of spirits.
     
  17. 17.
    For background from the author and the complete text, go to http://​popcornhorror.​com/​story-lisa/​ .
     
  18. 18.
    Order the book at http://​leviviridae.​com /, and you get the supplemental “Lisa’s diary,” in which we discover that Lisa’s alcoholic mother killed her father, then locked Lisa in her room. Fearing for her life, Lisa killed her mother in a fugue state and then appears to have killed herself.
     
  19. 19.
     
  20. 20.
    Another film in which imaginary playmates turn a child into a killer is Shattered Lives (2009). In the film, a child, Rachel, is subjected to incredible psychological abuse from her mother. Two of her toys, a pair of harlequin dolls, convince Rachel to murder her mother, and she does. Later, when her father is killed, a now teenaged Rachel goes on a homicidal rampage. It is never clear, however, if the harlequin dolls are actual evil entities or simply projections of Rachel’s imagination.
     
  21. 21.
    In Don’t Look Now (1973), a man believes he sees the ghost of his dead daughter, but it is revealed to be a dwarf who is also a serial killer, and he becomes the dwarf’s next victim. Essentially, the man dies for believing that his daughter is an unsettled ghost who needs his help passing.
     
  22. 22.
    According to Laurie K. MacKinnon, Neil Parton argued as early as 1985 that the “cycle of abuse thesis…is used to justify a greater emphasis on intervention into particular families” (1999, 23), especially lower-class ones.