Elisa Oliver ---- Man Weasel Mogoose: Exploring site and meaning in the tale of the Dalby Spook

ABSTRACT ‘VANISHED’ AND ‘RETURNED’: RETRACING THE STEPS OF THE DALBY SPOOK This contribution approaches the idea of paranormal tourism from the perspective of debates around return and re-tracing in cultural studies and contemporary art practice: in particular their relation to memory, history and the fictionalisation of experience. The text asks what happens to the experience and interpretation of a site and events relating to it when anticipation, in relation primarily to something that never happened, is central to its engagement? That anticipation also furthers continued return, either to the site itself and/or, the material surrounding it, continuing to destabilize and re-position us in relation to its meaning, often moving between fact and fiction in the re-telling. Taking the 1930s tale of ‘Gef, the talking Mongoose, or the ‘Dalby Spook’, as its core, the text maps artistic strategies such as a ‘forensic aesthetic’ and the privileging of failure in recent art practice and theory to look again at these paranormal happenings and the way they have come to be performed.