Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (review)

Seeking spectral sites from haunted houses to haunted toilets, and examining genres from contemporary legends and jokes to cinema and television, Haunting Experiences places its subject matter at the intersection between folklore and popular culture, belief and fiction, asking the question: What is new in contemporary ghostlore, and what is appropriation and recontextualization of the old? The opening metaphor of the book captures the range of its subject matter. It begins with the image of a bottle-tree wind chime set, available for sale in the gift shop of San Jose, California’s Winchester Mystery House. The collectible is modeled on the southern African American tradition of hanging empty bottles from defoliated branches in order to distract—or perhaps capture—evil spirits before they can enter the house. But like so much of the book’s subject matter, it is a tradition transformed—abstracted and made sculptural as a metal tree, hung with colorful, decorative drink receptacles that have never actually been filled. The wind chimes retain some of their cultural resonance, some of the ghosts of their past. But they are simultaneously remade anew, repurposed as art, even as they are distanced from belief.

Like the bottle-tree wind chimes, the discussion of ghostlore in Haunting Experiences oftentimes revolves around transformations through commodification. In the chapter titled “Commodification and Belief,” authored by Diane Goldstein, there is discussion of the influence of ghostlore on real estate and tourism, and the transformation of that lore as a result of the context in which it has been put to use. Goldstein discusses the impact of spectral belief—stigmatization, as realtors might say—on the property market. She examines its influence, writing that in some cases, the presence of ghosts might be a selling point, while in others, knowledge of death associated with a property might keep buyers away. And she speaks similarly of hotels where haunted rooms and hallways, a history of violence and death, often draw a certain kind of tourist. In these cases, a transformation in the nature of haunting narratives occurs as they are written into pamphlets and brochures and either toned down or further dramatized for popular audiences.

Commerce is not the only locus for these sorts of transformations. In her examinations of children’s ghostlore and haunted houses, Sylvia Ann Grider shows readers the intersection between ghostlore and popular culture, as well as the ambiguity of genre between haunting as belief narrative and folk fiction. The latter is the case especially in her discussion of children. Grider outlines several genres of children’s folklore, including games, jokes, and anecdotes, that utilize ghostly characters without relying on belief. They are, she writes, strategies by which children deal with their peculiar circumstances and learn the art of narrative. The former—the nexus of folklore and popular culture—Grider illustrates using haunted houses. She writes that our image of the haunted house—the Victorian manse, isolated on a hillside and capped by turrets or towers—is literary in origin, though it owes its ubiquity to popular representations like the Addams’ Family house. But it is folklore as well: though domiciles from castles to suburban split levels can have haunted reputations, this image has become the American de facto standard; it has gained traditionality, marking everything from the telling of stories to the creation of amateur Halloween haunted houses.

The book’s purpose is not simply to demarcate the boundaries of contemporary ghostlore, however. It suggests that perhaps folklorists have paid inadequate attention to contemporary hauntings, and that these phenomena deserve more and better attention. The problem here is that even as the book’s authors make this argument, they cite other scholars who are currently doing the very thing the authors suggest. They rely heavily on Gillian Bennett, whose 1999 Alas, Poor Ghost! looks seriously at experiences of the paranormal. They draw on scholars like Peter Narváez and Mikel Koven, who both address the meeting point...