Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, brightly colored forms seemed to swirl and spread. It was February, 2013, the evening of the opening of "Hilma af Klint-A Pioneer of Abstraction" at Moderna Museet, in Stockholm. Among the attendees was Kurt Almqvist, a white-haired man in his mid-fifties. Though Almqvist considered himself something of an expert on fin-de-siècle intellectual history-he had written a book on Carl Jung-he was seeing af Klint's paintings for the first time.
Still, the idea that the spirit of a dead person or animal could return to the land of the living was present as far back as the ancient world, according to Morton, the author of Ghosts. The 19th century ushered in a cultural obsession with spiritualism. Ghosts peppered Victorian literature, and séances soared in popularity. The supernatural rituals, in which participants called upon the spirits of their deceased loved ones and others, challenged the idea that the living couldn't communicate with the dead, said Morton.