The history of ghosts in English society has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years, though most of the focus has been on medieval and early modern religious cultures and nineteenth-century spiritualism. So Sasha Handley's excellent study of the meaning, recording and use of ghost stories in the ‘long eighteenth century’ is a refreshing and much needed study of the period in between. This is not the first major study of eighteenth-century ghost belief, but most of the earlier work has come from literary scholars rather than social historians, and Handley's research complements that by Terry Castle, Emma Clery and others very well. The book consists of six chapters with three principally concerned with various genres of literary ghost reportage, namely ballads, chapbooks, pamphlets and the periodical press. In these sections Handley contributes to the wider historiography on the cultural interplay of orality and popular literature in the seventeenth century by the likes of Adam Fox, Margaret Spufford, Bernard Capp and Tessa Watt. One of numerous perceptive observations concerns the geographical relationship between printers and hauntings in London during the second half of the seventeenth century (pp. 72–3). In chapter iv Handley also provides an excellent analysis of the relevance of local and national, private and public discourses on ghosts through a case study of the well-known ‘Apparition of Mrs Veal’. Ecclesiastical historians will be particularly interested in Handley's depiction of how ghosts were appropriated by Anglican and Dissenting clergy during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a bulwark against what was seen as the irreligion of increasingly influential materialist theologies. Handley also provides an illuminating survey (chapter v) of the continued relevance of ghosts in the public and private statements of some Anglican clergymen, Baptists and Quakers, as well discussing the more well-known opinions of Wesley on the matter. While some eighteenth-century Anglicans thought that the best way to counter the popular influence of Methodism was to denounce it as a source of pernicious superstition, others believed that they needed to support, albeit cautiously, a more providential conception of the spiritual. In identifying and unpicking the complex relevance of ghosts in the so-called Enlightenment, Visions of the unseen world makes a welcome contribution to the wider social, cultural and religious history of the period.