James Thurgill --- Placing the Paranormal

Placing the paranormal James Thurgill As interest in the paranormal continues to grow, the practice of ghost hunting is becoming far more prevalent within popular culture; from an abundance of television shows aimed at locating the spectral to a rise in ghost tours and amateur led investigations, ghost hunting is ubiquitous within contemporary cultural activity. Paranormal investigation forces a confrontation with history, with its permeable nature; time and place become ‘out of joint’. However, there have been seldom attempts to analyse ghost hunting as an engagement with the landscape. The practice of ghost hunting calls for the development of what might be determined as a spectral ecology, a specific vista of the environment as reiterated, temporally unstable, uncanny even. The ghost is a revenant, a return of the past in the present; ghosts are bound to places, anchored to precise locations. As such, we might want to think about place hauntologically; that is, as performative reiteration. Ghost hunting itself could be analysed through the same framework; the paranormal finds itself in vogue on a cyclical basis throughout history. This work aims therefore; to place the paranormal, moreover ghost hunting, as a conduit for engaging with place and time, locating the practice within the wider context of a spectral fetishism that mobilises hauntology.