The gothic and the soul

Throughout each of the readings, I keep finding myself asking what the authors and readers thought of death and the soul. Of course a phantom is not going to come snatch us away in the night (fingers crossed!) but these works deal with the idea of death and an afterlife in an interesting way. In Alonzo the Brave and its parody, the unfaithful female is swept off by the returned groom. This brings up questions of a soul returning to earth and a soul being kept on earth, which seems different than the typical "heaven or hell" question. The story of The Old Woman of Berkeley asks a similar question in, how long does a soul inhabit a body after death? The woman is in her coffin, supposedly dead, and yet the demon is able to take her away. Even in the  Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the crew's bodies are possessed by good spirits. There seems to be an emphasis on superstition and twisting religious thought to some degree in the gothic.