Has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

I've given up writing "why oh why oh why" posts about the decline of Bonfire Night and the rise of Halloween.

In part this is because, while it's rather fun to play the old fogey when you're young, it's less fun when your older. You start to fear that you really are an old fogey.

But it's also because we British seem to have found a way to adapt the reimported American Halloween so it's more to our liking. So there's lots of M.R. James but very little Casper the Friendly Ghost.

For myself, I never miss a chance to post a rendition of Carl Orff's Trees and Flowers that sounds, as I always say, like something from the soundtrack of a lost folk horror classic.

But as Halloween is behind us, we can be a little more analytical about things that go bump in the night.

In the current London Review of Books, Jon Day reviews, alongside another volume, How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines.

Baines, says Day, identifies the writer Horace Walpole as the father of our modern idea of a haunted house through Stawberry Hill, "his kitschily Gothic Twickenham retreat":

Before Walpole, ghosts in English literature tended to haunt people, or generic geographic locations: crossroads, bridges, graveyards. After him, they came inside, haunting domestic spaces.

And there were socio-economic forces behind the rise of the haunted house too:

Baines’s central argument is that the rise of the haunted house in the popular imagination coincided with the emergence of the modern home as a physical and psychic reality: a building designed specifically as a dwelling, separate from farm or workplace, where a single nuclear family lived together in isolation from the rest of society. This led to a turning inward of domestic experience that is, as many historians have argued, reflected across culture more broadly. ...

Most ghosts, in the UK and America at least, are still domestically coded. Gruesome ghosts and body horror are rare. Instead there are female spectres who walk the same paths night after night searching for lost loves, or dead children who peer unnervingly through windows. Poltergeists are a relatively recent addition to the haunted house pantheon, only really gaining ground in the second half of the 20th century (and exploding in popularity after The Exorcist was released in 1973). 

Unlike fully embodied ghosts, which tend to favour grander backdrops, they often attach themselves to "dysfunctional, disenfranchised or otherwise unhappy families", Baines writes, so that parapsychic researchers and ghost historians sometimes call them "council house ghosts". 

This attachment might be exacerbated by the presence in the home of a "young, emotionally volatile female family member" – as with the Enfield Poltergeist, the haunting of a family with two young daughters in London between 1977 and 1979 – to whom such ghosts might be attracted (or who might themselves be responsible for the reported hauntings). 

But as Baines sees it, lack of ownership is also a significant factor in ‘purported haunted house cases, with people living in borrowed or rented houses tending not to properly “bond” with their place of residence, causing them to feel perpetually ill at ease’. If you’re more likely to be haunted if you rent than if you own, has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

There's more about How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines on the Profile Books website.