Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore - Softcover

Goldstein, Diane E.; Grider, Sylvia Ann; Thomas, Jeannie Banks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874216362 ISBN 13: 9780874216363

Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural.

In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Diane E. Goldstein is associate professor of folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and is cross-appointed to Memorial University's School of Medicine. She is editor of Talking AIDS: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, one of the earliest anthologies on AIDS, and has extensive experience working on AIDS policy-making initiatives with the Canadian government. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of American Folklore, Folklore, Ethnologies, Contemporary Legend, and The Journal of Applied Folklore.

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Haunting Experiences

Ghosts in Contemporary FolkloreBy Diane E. Goldstein Sylvia Ann Grider Jeannie Banks Thomas

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2007 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-636-3

Contents

Illustrations..........................................................................viiiAcknowledgments........................................................................ixIntroduction: Old Spirits in New Bottles...............................................1One: The Usefulness of Ghost Stories...................................................25Two: Scientific Rationalism and Supernatural Experience Narratives.....................60Three: Gender and Ghosts...............................................................81Four: Children's Ghost Stories.........................................................111Five: Haunted Houses...................................................................143Six: The Commodification of Belief.....................................................171Conclusion: The "Spectral Turn"........................................................206Notes..................................................................................228Bibliography...........................................................................234Filmography............................................................................250Index..................................................................................253

Chapter One

The Usefulness of Ghost Stories

Jeannie Banks Thomas

When I discuss supernatural narratives with my students, they inevitably ask me, "Do you believe in ghosts?" They're looking for some kind of vindication or refutation of the numinous. Nothing I can say will do either definitively. Sometimes I give them a poetic answer; I say that the DNA each of us carries in our bodies makes us all ghosts. This is the reverse of how we usually think about ghosts. That is, we imagine them as ethereal forms and as those who've died before us-and not as those of us who are alive today. However, our DNA makes us, in part, the ghosts of our ancestors. We embody scraps, fragments, and glimmers of our forebears. We are shadows of who they were.

This is not the answer that my students want to hear.

They want me to tell them unequivocally whether or not ghosts exist. Also, they secretly (or not so secretly) want me to support with tidy, scholarly facts their belief in either the existence or the nonexistence of ghosts. They want me, as the voice of authority, to take up and confirm the merit of their own views. But because of my training as a folklorist, making such arguments about the existence of ghosts does not interest me (see Dgh 1971). Instead, my focus is the stories about ghosts. These stories range from funny to powerful to mundane, but all are evocative. They communicate culturally or personally significant information to their audiences. It's true that belief is powerful in some of these narratives, and regardless of what scholars assert people will go on narrating anomalous experiences and choosing to believe in scientific or supernatural explanations-or some mixture of both. In fact, it is a deep cultural desire to mix both the scientific and the supernatural. To have scientific evidence for the supernatural, the existence of ghosts, and life beyond death would answer some of the most enduring questions of human existence. Folklore research, like other forms of scholarship, cannot sate that desire. From my folklorist's perspective, providing the answer to the question "Do you believe?" belongs to the people narrating or listening to a haunting experience. They decide what to believe or even if they want to engage with the narrative in terms of belief at all. What folklorists do is take supernatural narratives and belief traditions seriously; we pay attention to them and treat them analytically (see also Houran 2004).

In this chapter, I emphasize that there is much more to the realm of the supernatural than questions of belief, and I argue that ghost stories are a useful way to come to a better understanding of the worlds we inhabit. I present several ghost stories and describe a range of ways in which the narratives help us look more closely and analytically at culture, the environment, and the personal. This approach to ghost stories can help believers, skeptics, and those anywhere in between learn more from ghost stories than they might imagine possible. In making this kind of an argument, I am not attempting to explain away ghost stories-that is, to move from culture, nature, and the personal back into the stories to give some indication of their descriptive accuracy and credibility. Rather, I move in the opposite direction: I'm demonstrating how the stories-whatever their level of believability-can point us outward and take us into realms of interest and significance

For purposes of clarity, I separate the realms of culture, nature, and the personal from each other. I do so recognizing that ghost stories, thanks to their varying content, often differ in what they communicate. For example, some stories reveal the personal; others say more about the cultural. However, I realize that the three realms are often deeply intertwined, shape each other in lived experience, and can all be present in a given supernatural narrative. I also do not mean to imply that ghost stories tell us about only these realms. My focus on them is only meant to be suggestive, to provide a starting point for taking ghost stories seriously.

Like the other chapters in this book, this one also draws the stories from a range of contexts, including both the oral tradition and popular culture, to highlight the way ghosts materialize in contemporary times. So I present several different genres of ghost narratives-ranging from literary fiction to film to narrative (or memorate) to legend-and discuss the larger issues to which the stories direct us. I end this first section of this chapter with a ghost story from the contemporary oral tradition in order to establish some common characteristics of a story from the folk tradition. Gina, one of my students from Indiana, tells this story:

This ... had occurred just after we had moved into our new home. It was an old two-story home. It was dated back in the late 1800s. Our next-door neighbor was quite old and lived in her home since it was built in 1907. She said our house was there for a long time before hers was built. She remembered that, at one time, the owners had buried a horse out in the backyard. She showed us where, and from the looks of the ground, my Dad said, it was sunk in and in a perfect square-shaped hole. "Big enough to put a horse in," he said. She also told us that the owner's wife had died in that house. They only heated the house with the living room fireplace, and she froze to death one night sitting in her rocking chair. Well, we didn't pay much attention to if what she said was true or not. We went on about our business, until one night my sister and I noticed that as we went up the stairway, the attic doors that were on both sides of the stairs on the landing were wide open. I asked my sister if she had been up there; she said no, and I didn't do it [either]. We asked my...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0874216362
• ISBN 13: 9780874216363
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 270
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland