Whether taken as literal phenomena or as loose semantic suggestions, ghosts make their mark on virtually every piece of Bowen’s writing. This chapter focuses on the more suggestive ghostliness that spans her oeuvre by way of the threat and realities of a haunting dispossession. Her treatment of dispossession uncannily exposes a relation between the social and the physical or the public and the private. Embodied, subjectively lived experience conjoins with the forces of history, ideas, and conventions. In forging these relationships, the always unsettling crises of modern dispossession at the heart of Bowen’s work articulate her astute theory of historical change and the problem of historical accountability in the aftermath of traumatic events. This essay proposes two ideas – claustrophobia and flight – for thinking about ghostly dispossession in her short stories and novels. The unviable past makes itself known through an unsettling claustrophobia, and those who have been dispossessed and find no workable alternative haunt in their turn, projecting ghostliness into the future via the urge to flee. No one escapes the effects of dispossession, making it, for Bowen, the condition of twentieth-century modernity.