The Ghost of St. Albans and Matthew Paris

Record summary

Matthew Paris’s works contain accounts of visions, prodigies, and apparitional events associated with St Albans and its religious community. These materials are useful for studying how a monastic chronicler classified extraordinary reports alongside political and natural history. They can provide comparison with later haunted-place evidence, especially concerning authority, exemplarity, and manuscript transmission. The narratives are not a single modern-style haunting case, and individual episodes require identification in the relevant manuscript or edited text before being used as discrete leads.