In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the ghost is the murdered child known as Beloved.
Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, lives with her daughter Denver in 124 Bluestone Road, a house haunted by a malevolent spirit. The haunting is connected to Sethe’s decision to kill her infant daughter rather than allow her to be captured and returned to slavery. Because the child’s tombstone bears the word “Beloved,” that name becomes attached to the ghost and to the young woman who later appears at the house.
Beloved’s arrival turns the family’s suppressed history into a physical presence. She behaves in ways that suggest both an adult visitor and Sethe’s lost child, allowing Morrison to explore memory, grief, guilt, motherhood, and the afterlife of slavery. The community eventually helps break the isolation surrounding Sethe and Denver, and Beloved disappears.
Some critics debate whether the young woman is literally supernatural or could be understood through mistaken identity and trauma. Morrison, however, described Beloved as Sethe’s dead daughter. The novel was published in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.