How Houses Become Haunted: Folklore Traditions as Archaeological Context

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anthropology and archaeology strive not only to reconstruct the physical characteristics of the past world but to understand how past people thought about the world around them. The way people think gets encoded in magical frameworks in both physical objects like monuments and dwellings, as well as in less permanent expressions, like music, foodways, and folklore. Folklore, and especially storytelling, acts as a transmission system between listener and audience in which story elements become cultural shorthand. As a part of folkloric traditions, ghost stories are not just superstitious entertainment pieces, but often have educational or moralistic value for the listeners. Even if the teller or their audience does not believe in the factual truth of the story, the pieces of the story emerge from a cultural lexicon of understanding. Ghost stories, especially when describing places, people, and things in the real world, indicate legitimate cultural relationships among those things. This paper explores a set of ghost stories from Missouri by modelling recurring story elements in relation to place and archaeological/historical sites to indicate how folklore informs understandings of culture and belief.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38171.0