Michel De Certeau, a French Jesuit scholar, believes that places are “haunted by many different spirits, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not…” (1984:108 – The Practice of Every Day Life University Press: Berkeley.)
The questionable tactic in many ghost hunts especially those recorded for broadcast on TV is that they do not invoke, they provoke! They do this through demands (“Show us a sign!”) and commands (“Do something!) in order to record and measure something (anything) on their instruments for a TV audience. This is not a sensible or ethical approach to past interactive cultural presence.
It is not sensible because such provocations do not establish identity or cultural context. Ghost hunters become ‘outsiders’ and are immediately identified as such. They are not participants in the ghosts past culture through their use of technology at historic haunted locations. There is no human context when one uses tech devices to do the job of a field worker! It is not ethical if we assume that an interactive past presence was (and continues to be) “human” and the actions of an interactive haunting are human cultural behaviors.
Because of our imperatives to “bury” the past, and replace it with new advanced tech. devices, the investigation of interactive past presence is ‘haunted’ by its contemporary manifestations (the “ghost hunt”) moreso than the entities themselves! There are sites, only now being investigated by archaeologists, where remembering can be experienced, practiced, and articulated on an interactive basis. These are alternative sites of memory practices that require a ‘ghost excavation”, no merely a tech. scan. If interaction is sought in these particular places a tech device is not the correct or adequate tool of initial contact or continued communication.
Most of these haunted historic sites are in ‘ruins’, in one form or another (multiple past occupations; traumatic histories and events; unoccupied/disused spaces). Here, the supposedly “over and down with” remains, as both residual and interactive presence. Haunted by multiple and varied presences, they continue a past with remembered cultural memories! They haunt the resident, visitor, or investigator with traces of the past which deny fixity, and in these symmetrical spaces of occupied layers of presence and absence, they remain fluid, not tied to one culture or period of history!
A horizontal tech. scan does not (cannot) establish social relations with any of these cultural levels, except in the form of recording and documenting monuments and other “memoryscapes” – mediated spaces outlined in books, on TV, and internet, heritage sites, and museums. A haunting is a recorded practice, or a physical memory of a past practice, event, or experience. An interactive haunting is a memory practice in action! What precipitates this action as a perceived manifestation, in most cases, I propose, is a resonating, contextual activity, not a demand and command. (“Show us a sign…do something”!)
In particular case, the Gettysburg Battlefield (which I have “excavated” numerous times), is a monumental “memoryscape” with more than 1300 battlefield monuments!..See and imagine at Gettysburg.
At Gettysburg, and other “popular” (frequently visited on ghost tours and ghost hunts) haunted locations, the haunting uncertainty has been detached from its previous historical and cultural contexts. They now become videos of ‘orbs’ on YouTube, ‘paranormal’ photos on Facebook, “evidence” on websites, and unseen and unheard TV ‘reveals’! Where is the human cultural context in any of these mediated forms? This is not sensible nor is it ethical!
