Haunted Places in US Culture

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v15i2.4

Keywords:

haunted city, spirits, USA, cultural ontology, moral, social and cultural transgression, anthropology

Abstract

What makes a place haunted is the narrative of its ghosts: the curse of the place is expressed through the hauntings of that place by the ghosts of the people who died there. Ghosts are an expression of negative transgression, that is, a violation of social norms and cultural values that leads to the moral destabilization of the community: haunted places are places of tragedy, of deaths caused by violence and negligence. The basic features of haunted places in the US are liminality, the historical experience of what happened there, and the fact that they represent the boundary between the everyday and the impossible. The crossing of the existential boundaries by ghosts is analogous to negative transgression in social behavior. The liminality of ghosts thus corresponds to the liminality of haunted places in spatial, existential, ontological and moral terms. They appear as a kind of propaedeutic device in cultural communication, for the atrocities of their stories address what is good and bad according to the norms of cultural thought, and what is proper and improper in social behavior.

Several different types of places are featured in this discussion: private ones, like dwelling places, as well as numerous public places, including a public library, a quarry, a public park, a village lane, a teahouse, the site of one of the best-known battles in United States history, a former correction facility, a beech etc, across the entire country: Atchison, Kansas; New Orleans, Fort Leavenworth and plantations in Louisiana; Peoria, Illinois; Reelsville, Indiana; Little Bighorn, Montana; Washington DC; New York City; the San Francisco Bay area; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portage County, Wisconsin; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Forester, Michigan; Cape May, New Jersey; Tucson, Arizona; Mason, Ohio.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Alcorta, Candace S, Richard Sosis. 2005. “Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols: The Evolution of Religion as an Adaptive Complex”. Human Nature 16 (4): 323–359.

Arefi, Mahyar. 1999. “Non-place and Placelessness as Narratives of Loss: Rethinking the Notion of Place”. Journal of Urban Design 4 (2): 179-193.

Baker, Joseph O, Christopher D. Bader. 2014. “A social anthropology of ghosts in twenty-first- century America”. Social Compass 61 (4): 569 –593, DOI: 10.1177/0037768614547337

Beatty, Andrew. 2014. “Anthropology and emotion”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 20: 545-563.

Bendroth, Margaret. 2009. “Do the Puritans Still Matter? What Congregational History Has to Say about American Democracy”. International Congregational Journal 8 (2): 13-19

Bielski, Ursula. 2009. “What’s so Scary about the quarry?” Rock Products, October, 24-26.

Bloch, Maurice. 2010. “Death”. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, eds. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, 183-186. London and New York: Routledge.

Bratt, James D. 1998. “The reorientation of American protestantism, 1835-1845”. Church History 67 (1): 52-82, DOI: 10.2307/3170771

Burdick Harmon, Melissa. 2000. “Famous Faces, Famous Places: America’s Most Mysterious Sites”. Biography Magazine, October: 50-52.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York/ London: Routledge.

Csordas, Thomas J. 2019. “Specter, Phantom, Demon”. Ethos 47 (4): 519–529. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12253

Davidson, James D. 1994. “Religion among America's elite: Persistence and change in the Protestant establishment”. Sociology of Religion 55 (4): 419-440, DOI: 10.2307/3711980

Davies, Owen. 2007. The Haunted. A social History of Ghosts. Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Derida, Žak. 2004. Marksove sablasti: stanje duga, rad žalosti i nova internacionala. Beograd/ Nikšić: Službeni list SCG/ Jasen.

Eberhart, George M. 1997. “Phantoms among the Folios: A Guide to Haunted Libraries”. American Libraries, October, 68-71.

Fleischhack, Maria, Elmar Schenkel. 2016. “Preface: Ghosts – or the (Nearly) Invisible”. In Ghosts – or the (Nearly) Invisible. Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media, eds. Maria Fleischhack, Elmar Schenkel, 11-12. Frankfurt am Mein: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05962.

Frois, Jeanne. 2011. “Around Louisiana: Regional Reports from across the state”, 09/01/2011, https://www.myneworleans.com/around-louisiana-12/

Frois, Jeanne. 2012. “Around Louisiana: Greater New Orleans. Regional Reports from across the state”, 08/31/2012, https://www.myneworleans.com/around-louisiana-greater-new-orleans-7/

Frosh, Stephen. 2012. “Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmission”. American Imago 69 (2): 241–264.

Goody, Jack. 2004. Death, Property and the Ancestors: a study of the mortuary customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa. London: Routledge.

Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press.

Hames, Jacqueline M. 2012. “Fort Leavenworth: The Most Haunted Base in the Army?” Soldiers 67 (10): 1-3.

Harding, Susan F. 2009. “American Protestant Moralism and the Secular Imagination: From Temperance to the Moral Majority”. Social Research 76 (4): 1277-1306

Hertz, Robert. 2004. Death and the Right Hand. Abingdon, Oxon UK: Routledge.

Hildebrandt, Maik. 2016. “Medieval Ghosts: the Stories of the Monk of Byland”. In Ghosts – or the (Nearly) Invisible. Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media, eds. Maria Fleischhack, Elmar Schenkel, 13-23. Frankfurt am Mein: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05962.

Jones, Janet. 2018. “Eastern State Penitentiary”. American Road 16 (3): 39.

Kovačević, Ivan. 2007а. „Sremski berberin u vremenima promena“. Etnoantropološki problemi 2 (1): 11-28, DOI: https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v2i1.1

Kovačević, Ivan. 2007b. „Porše i kolači – advokatski advertajzing ili etnojurisprudentski saveti“. Antropologija 4: 7-21.

Koven, Mikel J. 2007. “Most Haunted and the Convergence of Traditional Belief and Popular Television”. Folklore 118 (2): 183-202.

Laplantine, François. 2015. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. London/ New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Le Gof, Žak. 1992. Nastanak čistilišta. Sremski Karlovci/ Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića

Lincoln, Martha, Bruce Lincoln. 2015. “Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (1): 191–220, doi:10.1017/S0010417514000644

Logan, Dana W. 2015. “Republicanism: Religious Studies and Church History meet Political History”. Church History 84 (3): 621-624, doi:10.1017/S0009640715000554

Lusted, Marcia Amidon. 2012. “Take a Tour of Haunted America”. Faces 29 (2): 22

Malone, Mike. 2018. “Higbee Beach”. American Road 16 (3): 47.

McCloud, Sean. 2013. “Mapping the spatial limbos of spiritual warfare: haunted houses, defiled land and the horrors of history”. Material Religion 9 (2): 166-185, DOI: 10.2752/175183413X13703410896690

Meier, Lars. 2012. “Encounters with haunted industrial workplaces and emotions of loss: class-related senses of place within the memories of metalworkers”. Cultural Geographies 20 (4): 467–483, DOI: 10.1177/1474474012469003

Musharbash, Yasmine. 2014. “Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies”. In Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, eds. Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen, 1-24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rahimi, Sadeq. 2019. “Specularizing the Object Cause of Desire of the Dead Other: A Ghost Story”. Ethos 47 (4): 427–439, DOI: 10.1111/etho.12259

Rattini, Kristin Baird. 2004. “Haunted City”. National Geographic Kids, October, issue 344.

Rattini, Kristin Baird. 2015. “Haunted New York City”. National Geographic Kids, October, issue 454.

Repp, Thomas Arthur. 2018a. “Minnie Quay’s Pier”. American Road 16 (3): 33.

Repp, Thomas Arthur. 2018b. “Boy Scout Lane”. American Road 16 (3): 39.

Shanafelt, Robert A. 2011. “On the Supernatural and Extraordinary Experience: Multiple Views and a Call for Synthesis”. Reviews in Anthropology 40: 312–335, DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2011.625608

Shay, Talia. 2005. “Can Our Loved Ones Rest in Peace? The Memorialization of the Victims of Hostile Activities”. Anthropological Quarterly 78 (3): 709-723.

Stinson, Bob. 2011. “Five Hautned Hotels of the West”. Wild West, October, 34-41.

Straight, Bilinda. 2010. “Death, Grief, and Cross-World Longing”. Reviews in Anthropology 39: 127–147.

Strasburg, Karras. 2018. “Kings Island”. American Road 16 (3): 34.

Thiele, Sophie. 2016. “’I Know not who these Mute Folk Are’ – Ghostly Houses in Early Twentieth Century English and American Poetry”. In Ghosts – or the (Nearly) Invisible. Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media, eds. Maria Fleischhack, Elmar Schenkel, 115-123. Frankfurt am Mein: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05962.

Valk, Ülo, Daniel Sävborg. 2018. “Place-Lore, Liminal Storyworld and Ontology of the Supernatural. An Introduction”. In Storied and Supernatural Places. Studies in Spatial and Social Dimensions of Folklore and Sagas, eds. Ülo Valk and Daniel Sävborg, 7-24. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21435/s¡.23.

Žikić, Bojan. 2018. Antropologija tela. Beograd: Odeljenje za etnologiju i antropologiju Filozofskog fakulteta i Dosije studio.

Downloads

Published

2020-06-25

How to Cite

Žikić, Bojan. 2020. “Haunted Places in US Culture”. Etnoantropološki Problemi Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology 15 (2):449-68. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v15i2.4.

Most read articles by the same author(s)

1 2 3 4 > >>