Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past by Michele Hanks, and: Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles (review)

Haunted Heritage and Tales from the Haunted South both shine a scholarly light on ghost tourism, but they take different approaches and draw different conclusions. Whether ghosts do or do not exist is the central concern of neither.

As Michele Hanks tells readers in the introduction, Haunted Heritage aims to address what the increase of ghost tourism reveals and asks, “How does what Derrida called the ‘critical space of spectrality’ in ghost tourism support and reconfigure understandings of history, national belonging, and knowledge itself?” (16). Readers looking for a page-turning book of ghost stories will be disappointed. Hanks, a sociocultural anthropologist, researched this book in Britain during the summers of 2006, 2007, and 2012, with an additional eighteen months of fieldwork between 2008 and 2009. She focused on ghost tourism, including ghost walks, commercial ghost hunts, and nonprofit ghost hunts. Her participant-observer approach included interviewing ghost hunters, paranormal investigators, and tourists on ghost walks, and spending quite a few nights in allegedly haunted places. She became involved with four ghost-hunting groups on a long-term basis and got to know members well. Despite being a participant-observer, the language in her book is extremely scholarly and detached. When she refers to some of the ghost hunters as “friends” a couple of times, it is jarring, as though she has suddenly collapsed the telescope through which she observes her subjects.

In contrast, Miles’s writing is more personal, immediate, and engaging. A University of Michigan professor, Miles became obsessed with Molly, the ghost of a slave girl, while spending a weekend in Savannah, Georgia; Haunted South focuses on ghost stories about slaves in Savannah, New Orleans, and Louisiana’s The Myrtles plantation. This book was an unexpected detour from Miles’s other research; as a modern African American woman, she was disturbed by the Southern ghost tourism industry’s processing of slaves’ lives into lurid consumer products.

One of the big differences between these books is that in Haunted Heritage, the ghost hunters are portrayed as underdogs, while in Haunted South, ghost hunters exploit the underdogs. Hanks sketches out the class divide between British amateur paranormal investigators and more educated people. These investigators—who put a huge amount of time, money, and energy into their passion—do not get the same respect as scholars with doctorates in parapsychology. Nor do the heritage gatekeepers always give them access to England’s most promising haunted spots. But the most interesting divide in Haunted Heritage is around questions of history. Hanks explains how paranormal investigators add to England’s body of knowledge by conjuring up details of ghosts, mostly through mediums that accompany the group. She gives fascinating examples of how pubs, museums, and other places—unhaunted, as far as anybody knew—suddenly acquired enduring ghosts after an investigation. Word spread among enthusiasts until the new ghost was accepted as common knowledge. This is, of course, at odds with how historians learn about the past. The paranormal researchers felt they could cut out all those hours poring over primary documents and go straight to the source.

In Haunted South, Miles sides with the slave ghosts. She takes many ghost tours and listens critically to how guides interpret race, gender, and enslavement. She notes the use of the word servant instead of slave and the depiction of chronically raped slave women as seeming equals in love affairs with their owners. Like Hanks, Miles notes how ghosts are added through the years. Both authors search out ghost guidebooks from previous decades and see that newer ghost hunters claim contact with previously unnoted ghosts, adding...