Drowned Histories

Collective Memory in an Edinburgh Ghost Story

Abstract

This essay was originally submitted as an assessed short essay for The Invention of History course taught to 3^rd/4^th year undergraduate Anthropology students at Edinburgh University. It draws on one specific Edinburgh ghost story to explore the relationship between ghosts and collective memory, as well as oral histories and community belonging. In it, I argue that the ghost story represents an ‘unpacified remainder’ in Edinburgh’s social memory. Furthermore, it’s exclusively oral retelling generate a sense of ‘belonging’ through time and render it inseparable from the wider community networks it is transmitted in.