The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong

In January 1673 a fourteen-year old servant girl made some of the most dramatic accusations in the history of English witchcraft and then disappeared. The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong calls up the lost voice of this mysterious girl who left behind her the enigma of what could have driven her to insist, in the face of rejection after rejection, on telling so strange a story – ultimately at the cost of her own life. Fantastic yet compelling, Anne Armstrong’s accusations against her neighbours in an isolated village were recorded in the Court Depositions which form the basis for this literary thriller. The novel recreates an actual seventeenth-century court room drama, exploring the religious and political controversies that inform the reactions of the Justices of the Peace to the extraordinary evidence Anne brings before them. Following an historian who becomes obsessed with tracking Anne down through each twist and turn of the legal proceedings, the reader is drawn into a world as eerie as the remote corners of Northumberland where Anne’s dark tale plays out to its devastating end.

The novel includes substantial back matter, including an essay entitled 'On Reflection: The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong as Practice Research'; representative archival research materials, a full bibliography; index. The original research was undertaken though an AHRC Fellowship: Ghosting Through: Ficto-Critical Translation as a Means of Resisting the Appropriations of History and Place
AH/J008192/1