What occurs in a haunting is a manifesting fragment of mental content and mental process of a dead individual. When externalized, it creates a “substitute situation” of a life that once existed at a particular place. The REAL existence of this situation allows contemporary human activity to interact with “something” that is normally absent, or otherwise unavailable.

These substitute situations are characterized by:
-the suppression of concrete details. A haunting is a visual, auditory, olfactory, etc. fragment of what once was; and
-it relaxes temporal constraints on reasoning and activity. Time unfolds. There is no “past”. “Death” did not occur, or “dying” is still an ongoing event.

This makes it physically possible (not a paranormal possibility) for the human mind to experience something that would not ordinarily be experienced. Cultural resonance provides the mediational means to understand AND communicate within this embedded “substitute situation”.

This is a” radical idea that human cognitive, affective, and emotional states and/or processes, literally, comprise elements in their surrounding environment”( L. Malafouris & Colin Renfrew in their book, “The Cognitive Life of Things”, 2010:8). Manifestations of past presence are not only EXPRESSED in material cultural remains (as residual recordings), but now can also be experienced as CONSTITUTED (in a fragmented form) by past cultural behavior.

Past presence can now be directly studied with material cultural behavior furnishing parts of (no longer functionally-complete) human minds. This centers cultural immersion and resonating contextual activity into the frame for documenting a manifesting intelligent entity. Such an idea forces ghost research to take material culture, immersion, and resonance as serious elements in any excavation of haunted locations!