Medieval Monastic Ghost Stories for Modern Minds?

According to this History First article by Mark Bridge, "Dr. Michael Carter, senior properties historian at English Heritage, a specialist in medieval monasteries and leader of the tours", thinks one way to help modern non-believers appreciate the lives of monks and nuns in England's pre-Reformation monasteries and convents is through ghost stories and tales of the afterlife, including souls in Purgatory and Devils in the dormitory:

How do you help 21st century “post-Christian” audiences to get inside the heads of the monks, nuns and devout laypeople who created England’s great medieval monasteries? The answer, according to the custodian of sites such as Rievaulx Abbey, lies with ghosts and gore.

This October and November, English Heritage will offer free expert-led tours of five ruined monasteries in Yorkshire and Cumbria, telling of spectres such as the priest who rose from the grave to gouge out his concubine’s eyeball. The tours, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, are the first of their kind from the conservation charity and may be extended to other regions. They use dark tales from monastic manuscripts as a lens for understanding religious communities that flourished for hundreds of years before the Reformation.

Bridge quotes Carter:

“There’s this question of how do we engage people and make these belief systems understandable for an increasingly secular and, to some extent, post-Christian, audience? How do you get across concepts of death, damnation and, especially, the redemption of souls in purgatory? The role these monasteries played in the salvation of souls was so important — it was the whole purpose. One way of getting that across is through the ghost stories written by the Byland monk and at other monasteries.”

Please read the rest there. My first reaction was negative, especially because of the headline: "Ghosts of sinful monks and nuns illuminate England's monastic history". I thought that played into the view of religious people as being hypocrites, saying they want to be holy and dedicated to a rule of life and yet sinning and failing. So, what's the problem? Isn't that part of the human condition? 

But that's not really Dr. Carter's view of these stories and the way he wants to present them to his non-believing audiences, at least as evidenced by his comments in the article. 

I'm still not sure that this appeal to ghost stories of the past will move non-believers to gain more understanding of what the monks and nuns were trying to achieve as they followed their order's rule and fulfilled their vocations as monastics. 

Does the mere recognition that the monks and nuns believed there was life after death and that the way your soul (and later your body) existed after death depended how you'd lived help the non-believer? It is a good first step to gaining some understanding of these medieval lives?

Would a visit to a monastery or convent open now, with monks and nuns living by the same Rule, be a better way? This way of life is not gone, even though the glorious ruins of these monasteries may fool one into thinking it is.

I'm just not sure.

Of course, I'm believer. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor's elegy to the monastic ruins of England in A Time to Keep Silence resonates with my mind and heart just fine:

But, for us in the West, because of all such relics they are the most compelling mementos of the life that once animated them, the ruined abbeys of England that have remained desolate since the Reformation will always be the most moving and tragic. For there is no riddle here. We know the function and purpose of every fragment and the exact details of the holy life that should be sheltering there. We know, too, the miserable and wanton story of their destruction and their dereliction, and have only to close our eyes for a second for the imagination to rebuild the towers and the pinnacles and summon to our ears the quiet rumour of monkish activity and the sounds of bells melted long ago. They emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of the aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blueberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree-tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose-window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant has been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

What do you think? Please let me know.