Project Framework – Ghost Excavations, Part I


This project is a vision of research that can liberate us from ordinary reality because traditional science, though refining our limitations, raises new questions. It also reveals new boundaries in which we cannot readily frame our current perceptions and understandings. It is a search for a more comprehensive science of reality where the past is still not completed, the present is unfixed and changeable, and the future “becomes” a CURRENT phenomenon, through the interplay of past-present exchanges. 

From an educational perspective, words and works become significant. Words become just as important as actions. They become “scientific instruments” themselves! It is time to end the “fluff” of current “ghost books”, which appear to be more a marketing tool for the tourism industry than anything else! Where are the scientific field reports, the ethnographies of field investigations, the substantive summaries of remains? The words and ideas in books should function as the primary instrument of a scientific approach to ghost research! Where are the theories, described and outlined in some books, put into excavation practices in the field? This project will add that “presence” (words, actions, works) at haunted locations in a field which is largely devoid of THIS manifesting presence!

This project is both a scientific AND artistic approach to the documentation of manifesting past interactive cultural presence. It will concentrate on the individual humanity of a haunting, within the structured frame of process, predictability, AND sometimes absence! It will be defined largely by a sensible non-evasive archaeological excavation strategy, a sensitive ethnographic immersion, and a scripted theatrical performance in the field at haunted locations.

Finally, we must accept that ghost research is simultaneously a pursuit of individual (sometimes buried) memories AND an attempt to make an increasingly closer contact with reality, one that is definitely NOT defined in paranormal terms!!