It is in one of Henry James's less well known short stories that the modern incarnation of the ghost as a representation of psychological haunting truly comes of age. ‘The Friends of the Friends’ (1896) illustrates so many of the facets of how ghost-seeing became something so psychologically ghostly in the nineteenth century that it can be considered a prime example of the underlying thesis of this study: that the ghosts which really haunt us today should be considered as spectres of the self, ghosts which are less real, and at the same time more real, than the type of traditional, restless ghosts that we read about in Homer's Odyssey or watch on popular television shows such as Most Haunted.

‘The Friends of the Friends’ relates the narrative of a lady who discovers that both her female friend and her fiancé have had a supernatural experience known to late-Victorian contemporaries as a ‘crisis apparition’. In the case of the friend, we are told that she had a vision of her father's ghost while in a foreign town and soon received a telegram of confirmation that he had unexpectedly died in England, hundreds of miles away, at the exact moment of her experience.