Episodes of ghost-seeing press to extremes a key device of Walter Scott’s historical fiction, in which cultural difference submits to a developmental logic of historical difference. In Waverley, the apparition of the clan spectre portends the death of the individual ghost-seer as well as a larger, historical extinction, that of the life-world in which supernatural phenomena count as real. Later novels complicate this historicist logic. In The Bride of Lammermoor, ghostliness is endemic to a liminal time, unmoored from historical purpose, in which the present is suspended between a past that fails to pass and a future that fails to arrive. Scott's ghost in The Monastery interferes in the novel’s plot amid the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation – a discontinuity more violent, in its impact upon knowledge, belief, and the imagination, than revolutions of dynasties or political regimes.