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“I Must See Her Face”
Sympathy, Haunting, and the
Victorian Scottish Ghost Story
Zoom Presenter: M. Grant Kellermeyer
Date: October 14, 2026, at 6 p.m. EST
As Halloween approaches and the nights lengthen, old stories begin to stir. In Scottish tradition, the border between the living and the dead can feel especially thin—and Victorian ghost stories often use that eerie threshold in ways that differ sharply from their English and Irish counterparts.
In this atmospheric Zoom presentation, M. Grant Kellermeyer explores how the Scottish Enlightenment concept of sympathy helps explain that difference. Drawing on Adam Smith, David Hume, and their contemporaries, he considers sympathy as an uncanny force: one that can comfort the restless dead, uncover buried truths, or summon a ghost from silence into view.
Through eerie readings of stories by Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, this talk reveals sympathy as a distinctly Scottish mode of haunting: intimate, morally charged, and unsettlingly close to the living.
RSVP: Reserve your place for this spooky seasonal session at https://www.houseofburnett.org/event-details/sympathy-and-haunting-in-nineteenth-century-scottish-ghost-stories
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