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This essay focuses on the book "When Alice Lay Down with Peter" by Margaret Sweatman. The book focuses on a pair of Scottish settlers and their descendants in the Canadian West and is preoccupied with the fraudulence of their presence, using ghosts to raise postcolonial questions about claims to the land. The book illustrates Sweatman's belief that ghosts, as reminders of change, of mortality, of the hazards of political fanaticism, are allies of people in a struggle against a political and historiographical absolutism that has only deepened repressed rather than resolved.