Does T.S. Eliot's Ghost Haunt New England?

The Guardian warns readers that a recent phone-in to NPR might prove that the ghost of T.S. Eliot could actually be haunting Dana Hawkes's house. But, as The Guardian infers, this might simply be because Eliot's ghost doesn't have a memorial stone or shrine: a final resting place. Do you have a flashlight? Let's start exploring:

Last September, listeners to National Public Radio, the US equivalent of Radio 4, heard an elderly New England widow, Dana Hawkes, describe how, at home in New Hampshire, her late husband would sometimes say “he used to see TS Eliot’s ghost.”

There is something apt in this claim. The author of Four Quartets and Murder in the Cathedral, who was born in St Louis on 26 September 1888, but lived and died in London, has always projected a rather spectral persona.

From his haunting recitation of The Waste Land (“Unreal city …”) to his cadaverous alter ego, Old Possum, and his fascination with clairvoyants such as Madame Sosostris, Eliot has always been a sombre, other-worldly figure in the literary landscape.

In his afterlife, as an Anglo-American literary giant with a long shadow, the poet’s psychic exile has never been quite fully commuted. Despite a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner and the kind of instant recognition known to Shakespeare, Keats and Wordsworth, TS Eliot has no shrine to equal Stratford, Hampstead or Grasmere.

Even in his native America, Eliot has remained homeless. In New England, Concord celebrates Henry Thoreau. Emily Dickinson is remembered in Amherst, and Nathaniel Hawthorne in Salem.[...]

Continue at The Guardian.