A phantom coach: from folklore to fiction

The image of a phantom coach is very common in British folklore and, like its predecessors - Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Wild Hunt, it is closely associated with death and bad omens. Quite understandably, it was widely used in ghost stories written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are stories close to the folk tradition of storytelling, but much more often the authors create their own versions where the legends about phantom coaches are contaminated with other sources (such as ballads about demonic lovers) and lose certain elements which are essential for archaic mentality but can be easily neglected in modern fiction, e. g. death as punishment for doing or seeing something forbidden, church service as something that can drive away ghosts and demons. According to the rules of the genre, a coach turns into a kind of liminal zone, a subspace where the laws of the rational world do not work, a time capsule where the logic of a folktale prevails. There are versions where a coach is a means of communication between the world of the living and the world of the dead or demonic creatures. In later texts a coach gives way to a car, with all the functions preserved; this change is not connected with fears caused by the relatively new means of transport, the old image is merely transformed according to certain changes in everyday reality. The ancient themes of revenge, punishment, meeting the dead are recreated here, but sometimes the symbolism changes, it becomes more closely connected to the idea of time and memory. The analysis of how the image of a phantom coach works in ghost stories can help to understand certain tendencies in the development of the genre (what happens to folkloric sources, narrative principles, the ideas of time and death etc.).