Haunted Ground: Journeys Through Paranormal America by Darryl V. Caterine (review)

In Haunted America, Darryl Caterine offers a reflexive description of his travels across the continental United States visiting sites associated with paranormal cultures. The text is framed as a kind of picaresque describing visits to Lily Dale, a Spiritualist community in New York State, a UFOlogy convention in Roswell, New Mexico, and a convention of the American Society of Dowsers in Killington, Vermont. While his investigation of three communities constitutes the heart of the book, Caterine also describes stops in such places as Point Pleasant, West Virginia, home of a creature known as the Mothman, the 2008 X Conference on UFOs in Washington, D.C., and the birthplace of Joseph Smith in Vermont.

As a scholar of American religious history, Caterine draws on the work of historians such as Catherine Albanese, author of A Republic of Mind and Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), to argue that the so-called paranormal is an important component of America's cultural legacy. The paranormal, he argues, is "an integral part of what it means to be a modern American" (xix). It is not the sole concern of the cultural fringe, but a public discourse in which most Americans are more or less conversant. He frames the American response to the paranormal using Freud's notion of "the uncanny": it is eerie because it is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.

Caterine is not shy in describing his own experiences of the uncanny. Haunted Ground is as much a work of reflexive anthropology as it is history, drawing on copious field notes made with a tape recorder while driving across the country. Caterine describes his participant observation with the various communities he studied, including his attempt to serve as a medium in Lily Dale, volunteering for an experiment in "neuro-linguistic programming" with an alleged former CIA employee at Roswell, and learning to dowse in Vermont. He is quite forthcoming about his feelings during these processes: he describes the vulnerability he felt while engaged in séances, his rising anxiety while discussing alien conspiracy theories with abductees, and his sense of disorientation when discussing alternative views of prehistoric America near Stone Age ruins in Vermont. Despite the peripatetic nature of Caterine's research, he was able to form relationships with these communities over a period of years in order to provide the sort of anthropological "thick description" offered here.

This approach—"anthropology as history"—yields a number of useful insights and connections that would likely not have been noticed by traditional historians. For instance, Caterine frames his experience of attending a Spiritualist camp in terms of Victor Turner's work on communitas, drawing particularly on the notion of the loss of individuality during pilgrimage. He suggests that the decline of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century may have been as much due to the séance's ability to break down personal defenses and compromise one's sense of individual autonomy as it did with the exposure of frauds and hucksters. Similarly, Caterine observed discussions of "exo-politics" or political movements relating to government policies toward extraterrestrials.

Scholarship sometimes assumes that people who hold paranormal beliefs regard ideas such as UFOs as a private affair and compartmentalize these beliefs from "public" discourses such as politics. Caterine's fieldwork suggests that UFOlogists may not make such distinctions. After working with dowsers in Vermont, Caterine concludes that dowsing is connected both to an American tradition of "pastoralism," which celebrates agricultural life, and to anxieties about a secular apocalypse in which the forces of modern technology will collapse.

Caterine's most interesting discovery is that much of American paranormal culture is anchored on a constructed motif of Native Americanism. Spiritualists frequently claim to encounter the ghosts of Native Americans during séances. Likewise, the Vermont dowsers incorporate elements of Native American tradition and language into their rituals, and claim to be drawn to sites left behind by the prehistoric inhabitants of New England. And for their part, UFOlogists...