Lovely bones and settled scores: Contemporary women's interweaving of ghost and crime stories

Ghost stories are often, essentially, crime stories, opportunities for those in the know, the victims, to return to haunt those guilty of their deaths. Outsiders now become insiders. Ghosts have the crucial detailed knowledge although often only limited (if any) physical power to bring the guilty to justice. Some, however, recruit the power of the living while others have supernatural powers and take direct revenge. These unsettled victims of crime are often tied to a location, stuck forever haunting the place of their untimely death. These ghosts expose domestic violence, revealing smothered babies (In the Red Kitchen, Michele Roberts, 1990), evidence of how the vulnerable, children, the sick or the elderly were wilfully ignored, pushed off high places or down wells, drowned ('The Small Hand', Susan Hill, 2010), abused, and murdered (The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold, 2002). Ghosts show where and how wayward or unwanted wives were disposed of, walled up in the houses which should have been homes. The hauntology of places and spaces tethers in numbers the un-revenged dead to grand colonial buildings built from the blood money of slavery, battlefields scored by the bones of the fallen fighting over land rights, unmarked graves in schoolgrounds where orphaned, unwanted, illegitimate, or stolen indigenous children met untimely deaths and were hidden from history. Evil reappears down the ages until it is exposed, punished, settled.