"That Box is Haunted!": English Paranormal Investigating and the Immateriality of the Past

Summary

Since the late 1990s, paranormal investigating has emerged as a popular means of seeking knowledge of the ghostly or paranormal in England. Paranormal investigators are self-fashioned experts who aim to balance scientistic and spiritual perspectives in hopes of proving or disproving the existence of ghosts from an objective perspective. They dedicate significant amounts of their leisure time to reading about, talking about, and researching ghosts or the paranormal. English paranormal investigators ground many of their research practices in engagements with the material remains of the past, including historical artifacts and architectural ruins. Some paranormal investigators believe that these physical objects can act as repositories of or triggers for spirits from the past. Drawing on my long term ethnographic research in the North of England, this paper examines paranormal researchers’ epistemological and practical engagement with these physical remains and shows how they produce narratives of the past. Here, I argue that juxtaposing the immateriality of spirits with the materiality of the physical remains of the past opens up an intellectual space in which paranormal investigators reimagine the past while challenging the expertise of orthodox researchers of the past, including historians and archaeologists.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeology and New or Alternative Religious Movements

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15214