Ghost Culture: Theories, Context, and Scientific Practice

By John G. Sabol Jr.

This book is part of a series of ethnographic studies in cultural hauntings and ghostly landscapes. The first book, Ghost Excavator: Unearthing the Drama in the Mine Fields, was a personal excavation of the haunted Mahanoy Area. In this second book, a theory of cultural hauntings is presented that serves as a framework for investigative fieldwork. Specific techniques are introduced as a means of scientific practices to evaluate the data observed and recorded at haunted locations. This book is meant to form the infrastructure of a developing ghost science, one built from the "bottom-up". The integrated symmetrical approach of theory and scientific practice that is outlined here is a beginning point for the continuing evolution of the ghost science of the future. This search and analysis of haunting phenomena is seen as an approach that can be participated in by the many and who, through their continuing efforts, will help fill-in the "blanks" of a "ghost map" of what Shakespeare has called the "undiscover'd country".

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2007
• ISBN: 9781467087889

John G. Sabol Jr.

John Sabol is a cultural anthropologist, archaeologist, actor, and "ghost excavator". He has extensive fieldwork experience in all of these areas. This includes ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, and archaeological excavations and surveys in England, Mexico, Tennessee, and South Dakota. He has appeared in more than 35 films, TV shows, "soaps", and commercials. He has done post-production film work in "Dune" (1984), and "Conan the Destroyer" (1984). He has conducted "ghost excavations" at Gettysburg, in the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, at Eastern State Penitentiary and Ft. Mifflin in Philadelphia, and at various other sites in Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and New York. He has recently appeared in two episodes of the A&E series, "Paranormal State". He taught Anthropology, Sociology, Tourist Planning and Development, and English for 11 years in Mexico. This is his 9th book. His other books include "Ghost Excavator" (2007), "Ghost Culture" (2007), "Gettysburg Unearthed" (2007), "Battlefield Hauntscape" (2008), Anthracite Coal Region" (2008), "Politics of Presence" (2008), "Bodies of Substance, Fragments of Memories" (2009), and "Phantom Gettysburg" (2009). He has a MA in Anthropology/Archaeology from the University of Tennessee, and a B.A. in Sociology from Bloomsburg University. For more information on his books and investigations please see his websites: www.theghostexcavator.com,www.myspace/ghostexcavator.com, and http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeoqapc/ghostexcavator. You can contact the author at [e-mail].

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Contents

Introductory Remarks

Preface

Introduction

Ghost Theory and Scientific Practice

Scientific Practice and Application

Summary

About the Author

"Whenever we couldn’t conceive of what’s out there

It was because we didn’t yet understand

What the preconditions might be

That were restricting our view.

Richard Panek

Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope

Opened our Eyes and Minds to the Heaven

This book is my orientation to those preconditions as I use them as a framework for investigative fieldwork. This is based on developing a ghost and haunting theory and testing its application, through scientific practice, in the field.

Introductory Remarks

"In essence whiteness is not so much a color

As the visible absence of color, and at the same time

The concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons

That there is such a dumb blankness,

Full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows?

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The blank cover of the present work signifies that only a beginning (not the beginning) of a ghost science has begun. However, there will continue to be blank spaces beyond the borders of the present work. This book was designed with this frame in mind. In it, I do include a map for orientation. But it is up to the investigative reader to fill-in the boundaries of this map, and to insert their own evidential content. In this process, however, one must remember that maps (even ghost maps), though defined by what is included, are, nonetheless, only valuable by what is still not there.

The present map is built around fragments (target articles) that force the ghost investigator to imagine (and search for) the larger (more complete) context, to go back out into the field and make, then test, the haunting assumption fragments made here. With this approach, investigators can organize countless more frames of inquiry, and rewire, as it were, the flow of data acquisition and its analysis. What I have constructed is not a direct path from here (theory) to there (practice), nor is it a narrative that has a beginning, middle, or end. What this book contains is a single point (a node) in a symmetrical investigative design by which connections and relationships are plotted, and networks are built. This is the construction of an infrastructure of a ghost science, built from the bottom-up, by a force of many, and using all the resources that are available (at the present time). This is a beginning point for the continuing evolution of the ghost science of the future. This journey is an imaginable adventure (Anne Carson), and, as such, is the reason why the cover of this book is published blank. It is up to you, the reader, to fill in the blanks through fieldwork, using some (or all) of the ideas and practices outlined here.

The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions

This book is dedicated to two researchers and visionaries: Elliot O’Donnell (ghost hunter), and Loren Eiseley (anthropologist and poet).

Elliot O’Donnell (1872-1965) spent a lifetime hunting ghosts, writing one book after another. He personally spent many endless nights at lonely, out of the way places. He explored these haunted locations decades before ghost hunting became popular, and the hauntploitation of today. His legacy is that Great Britain is regarded by many today as the most haunted region in the world. He found ghosts everywhere, and he brought them back to life through convincing and vivid accounts of others, and his own experiences. He once remarked:

I am merely a ghost hunter. One who lays a stake by his own eyes and senses… and who is, and always has been, deeply and genuinely interested in all questions relative to phantasms and a continuance of individual life after physical dissolution.

I can readily identify with his work and efforts, as it closely parallels some of my own career decisions and actions:

But when, after….spells of acting and school teaching…..I gradually became… a writer…my activities in the ghostly field increased; until I came to be positively identified as that rarity of the time, a ghost-hunter who did not rest on his own stories alone, but who also went out to investigate and record factually the experiences of others.

He was a true professional in his work, keeping many notebooks, reading extensively, meticulous in his analysis (as to accuracy and detail), diligent, and objective.

Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) was an anthropologist, best known for his poetic essay style (hidden essay) who, through previously-regarded hidden teachers, complex phenomena and scientific ideas were discussed in his writings, making them accessible to the general public. It was a scientific exploration, combined with a deep sense of humanism, poetically expressed. The world-view: of an archaeologist, as he envisioned it, closely parallels that structure of feeling" that the presence of haunting phenomena as sensed by a ghost researcher, would acknowledge:

An archaeologist is a man who knows…that from the surface of rubbish heaps the thin and ghostly essence of things human keep rising through the centuries until the plaintive murmur of dead men and women may take precedence at times over the living voice. A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally.

There are many haunting stories in Eiseley’s prose and poetry. Death was the night country (the title of one of his books, and one which greatly influenced my own writing), and a place he often visited. Death sleeps in graveyards, to which he was frequently drawn (as an archaeologist, I can be both a good citizen and a frequenter of graveyards). Death haunts his poetry (life may exist in yonder dark, but it will not wear the shape of man). He warns, as a Shakespearian haunt, that whoever next would occupy his office to take heed (henceforth I shall linger about here).

Yet, the most important influence for me was the humanness of his excavations into (of) the past. This is no more evident than in a remark he made concerning the discovery of a child’s burial in a cave in Texas. He writes: I could have spent a day up there on the great range, just listening to the wind, and talked to the child, murmuring to it across the centuries (All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life). This is the structure of feeling of a true ghost hunter.

Both men, long physically dead (and their writings ended), have their spirits continue on, as their voices still communicate and influence future generations of investigators, and those interested in an objective, yet humanistic, approach of inquiry and instruction. Through their physical work on this earth has past, they continue to influence the present and serve as an inspiration for future generations.

Preface

"To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from those whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have . . ."

William Shakespeare

The undiscovered country that Shakespeare mentions is his conceptual world of ghosts, whose inhabitants are frequently encountered in his plays (mostly notably, in Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III). Contrary to popular belief, these phantoms are not mere literary devises, or a mirrored reflection of 16th c. thought. Shakespeare’s ghosts serve a purpose, and they are characterized by human qualities they still retain from their former life. In Hamlet, when the king returns, he acts like his familiar (living) self: My father, in his habit as he lived. The ghost of the king is the same individual, with the same thoughts and emotions, he had in life. The same can be said of the ghosts that appear in Richard III. They are portrayed by Shakespeare as living people (without physical bodies).

The ghosts in the Shakespearian plays are rational and natural entities, and there is always a reason for their appearance. They are always presented as true situational portraits of reality, and not as concessions, by the playwright, to the superstitions of his times. According to L.W. Rogers, in his book, Ghosts in Shakespeare, the simple truth is that (ghosts)… appear only where it naturally belongs and for the purpose of teaching the lesson that is being presented (p. 183). Their return from the undiscover’d country" means a message is being sent, and is based on something that was learned.

The undiscover’d country should be viewed in its proper context. It is undiscovered because it is largely unexplored, many who have traveled there have no returned to tell their experiences. Thus, undiscovered means still largely unexplored. The undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns is used by Shakespeare as a poetic reference to death-land in the terms of a life journey (Rogers, p.11) that does not necessarily end with physical death. The ghost of Hamlet’s father is meant to be a literal return (not a literary devise) to show us how things really are, and not as those who see only with physical eyes imagine them to be (Ibid: 20). I propose that this undiscovered (unexplored) country is an untapped resource that is more available than most think. This, I believe, is because everyone has the capacity to explore it. This undiscovered country, can be perceived as a wilderness which each man (and woman) possess, and for which they often journey into and back through a capacity to recall events and activities (attachments to specific places) from the past. These individual hauntings are usually dormant (and dead and forgotten) until recalled again in the present. The content, significance, and expression of each individual’s own personal wilderness of hauntings is governed by the intensity of experience, the variety of encounters, and the particular state of mind or mood in which they are engaged. There is a purpose for these recalls. Loren

Eiseley once stated: the important thing is that each man…consider what marvels are to be observed there (1957:13 The Immense Journey. Vintage Books: N.Y).

This book is my personal story of those excursions and recalls into that unexplored region and back. I am on a ghost hunt, and these trips involve the symmetry of traveling between two worlds. My normal being is a liminal state (betwixt and between), and these journeys are undertaken knowing the implications the travels entail:

The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, Yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it. We cannot know all that has happened in the past, Or the reasons for all of these events… we will travel As far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all We would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know (Eiseley 1957:12)

This book is an attempt at a preliminary map of this unexplored region, a research design meant to excavate the wilderness of ghosts and haunting phenomena. It is a first step, albeit a small one (and knowing one’s limitations as Eiseley states), to understand the context of these hauntings, framed in scientific practice. As such, it is subject to revision and chance, as investigations continue, and the results of new data are analyzed. It is the creation of a documentary record, and is meant to communicate a context for the researcher to explore his (her) own wilderness and construct his (her) own map. This is a landscape of unexplored depths and untapped resources, full of mystery and containing exciting possibilities. Its contexts are still an open book, largely devoid of significant text and illustrative (evidential) value. This is a journey of a scientific practice in humanness: what it means to live (and sometimes) relive the experiences of a lifetime. This understanding makes the undertaking a