John Aubrey FRS (12 March 1626 - 7 June 1697), was one of the first known collectors of ghost stories, antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey's compilation, Miscellanies, was published in 1696 and is packed with eye-witness accounts of ghostly sightings gathered from all points of Great Britain.
John Aubrey was also an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer, and was a pioneer in archaeology, who recorded (often for the first time) numerous megalithic and other field monuments in southern England, and who is particularly noted as the discoverer of the Avebury henge monument. The Aubrey holes at Stonehenge are named after him. He had a wide interests in applied mathematics and astronomy, and was friendly with many of the greatest scientists of the day.
The only work published by Aubrey in his lifetime was his Miscellanies (1696; reprinted with additions in 1721), a collection of 21 short chapters on the theme of 'hermetick philosophy' (i.e. supernatural phenomena and the occult), including "Omens", "Prophesies", "Transportation in the Air", "Converse with Angels and Spirits", "Second-Sighted Persons", etc. Its contents mainly compromised documented reports of supernatural manifestations.
Aubrey's interest in the supernatural was reinforced by his own personal experiences. In Miscellanies, Aubrey writes about strange knocking sounds on the walls of his house a few days before his father died. 'Three or four days before my father died,' he wrote, 'as I was in my bed about nine o' clock in the morning, perfectly awake, I did hear three distinct knocks over the bed's head, as if it had been with a ruler or ferula.' This mysterious incident, when combined with his interviews of others who had encountered ghosts, utterly convinced Aubrey that the spirit world existed.
