Is this a toasting fork I see before me?

Ghosts are fashionable just now. There are two productions of Ibsen’s play and a movie. At dinner parties, if conversation falters or begins to move down forbidden (by me) tramlines, I ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Instantly there is a babble. Nobody believes in ghosts personally. But everyone knows somebody who does, and provides an instance of what happened to him or, more often, her. This illustrates Dr Johnson’s dictum on haunting, ‘All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.’ Dr Johnson was torn between his great fear of death and confidence in supernatural agency, and his contempt for credulity and the delight he took in exposing imposture. He played a leading role in detecting the fraud of the Cock Lane Ghost in 1762 and described it in the Gentleman’s Magazine. But he would never willingly sleep in a house believed to be haunted. Neither would I.