Review of A Ghost in the Room: Supernatural Adventures in Historic Houses by Ann McDougall

I don’t believe in ghosts, yet I love hearing about them. (I highly recommend my Duluth podcaster friends Left of Skeptic for fun ghostly tales.) So when a friend recommended Ann McDougall’s A Ghost in the Room, I was intrigued. Canadian author? From Thunder Bay? Writing predominantly about Spiritualist traditions in Canada? Count me in!

Comprising thirteen chapters (no coincidence there, I am sure), this book is subtitled Supernatural Adventures in Historic Houses, which led me to initially assume each chapter would be about a different haunted house. McDougall has worked in historic houses and museums in Toronto and brings this personal experience, along with meticulous research, into the book. However, the actual contents are somewhat more meandering than they first appear. This is more a book about Spiritualism, that peculiar nineteenth-century spin-off of Christianity that’s all about talking to dead people. McDougall does tell some tales of historic houses and their haunting stories (both pedigreed and ersatz). She also discusses her own experiences seeking out supernatural experiences, presumably for the sake of this book. All in all, it’s an intriguing albeit somewhat scattered tour of this corner of the occult.

For such a slim book, McDougall covers a heck of a lot of ground—yet I am also struggling to recall what my favourite facts were. Each chapter builds on the last, often introducing a new locale before resuming the ongoing discussion of Spiritualism, seances, mediums, etc. Some chapters stand out for their deep dives into the history of Ouija boards or certain mediums, like the Fox sisters. Nevertheless, I’m not a huge fan of the book’s organization. I long for a robust index, and I wish McDougall had provided a bibliography as well—just from the way it’s written, I can tell A Ghost in the Room is well-researched, but I would love to hear more about her sources.

Indeed, this book is an interesting mixture of primary and secondary sources along with McDougall’s own firsthand accounts. She subjects herself to numerous seances and Spiritualist meetups, goes to classes and retreats designed to make a medium of her, etc. She is, as my podcast friends would say, left of skeptic: she wants to believe, yet she is always willing to entertain more rational and mundane explanations before she accepts an outright supernatural one. I appreciate both of these desires, and I enjoyed the open-mindedness on display, even if sometimes I found her willingness to extend that open mind to obvious charlatans and frauds somewhat beyond the pale.

On the other hand, I appreciate this comes from the same place of compassion and empathy that allows McDougall to write about this entire topic so sensitively. As she notes on more than one occasion, it is easy for us in the twenty-first century to dismiss people of Ye Olden Times as gullible, stupid, etc. Not so—they were just as shrewd as we are. In every era, humans have fallen for scammers or succumbed to a belief in the supernatural because we want to believe. We take comfort in thinking we can contact those who have moved on, find closure, reach out to loved ones. McDougall’s stories herein are a good reminder of that.

If a history of the supernatural from the Victorian era onward is one of your special interests, this book will definitely hit for you. I quite enjoyed it as a diversion, yet I am also spending a lot of time now telling myself not to wish for it to be what it is not. Such yearning, I think, is similar to what McDougall so perfectly articulates when discussing contacting the dead.