It’s rare that breaking news coincides with an academic book review, but in January 2016, researchers announced that they had uncovered a key location from the Salem Witch Hysteria that had been lost to history. This revelation of an infamous execution ground in an unassuming plot of woods behind a Walgreen’s pharmacy highlights the continued importance of place in the active remembrance of history, something that ties directly into the themes of this volume, beyond just the ties to Salem specific research.
The individual chapters that make up Putting the Supernatural in Its Place revolve around a few linked themes. The first of these is folklore, interpreted through the lens of the hypermodern. Hypermodern folklore addresses human practices at the intersection of popular, consumer, and digital culture. Each of the articles addresses the ways in which these intersecting contexts have influenced the production of folklore. The second theme is place: all of the articles in some way tie to the concept of space. For some, the space is literal and narrow, a specific house, location, or small town. For others, the space is larger or more conceptual, a nation, a genre, or an online context. The final theme that links the essays in the book is the supernatural. These essays all touch on components of folklore drawing on supernatural legend and belief, ranging from ghosts to vampires to satanic nuns.
Frank de Caro’s chapter, “The Lalaurie Haunted House, Ghosts, and Slavery,” opens the book with an exploration of legend practices surrounding the home of Delphine Lalaurie, a notorious slave owner in New Orleans whose mansion is the site of a large number of ghost stories. De Caro’s analysis focuses on the ways in which these narratives have met shifting cultural needs in the history of New Orleans, functioning in different circumstances as a grim reminder of the evils of slavery or as a violation of the social order of antebellum New Orleans represented by the Code Noir. Overall, de Caro’s analysis focuses on how New Orleans is still haunted by slavery, as evident in the haunting of the Lalaurie house.
Editor Jeannie Banks Thomas’s own contribution to the volume, “Which Witch is Witch?” deals with tourism to Salem, Massachusetts. Thomas explores this through the lens of supernatural tourism, examining the effects this tourism has on the community. Salem’s visitors, who concentrate in the month of October, are seen as a simultaneously disruptive and lucrative group, fueling tourism but also outnumbering residents. As part of this, Thomas introduces the idea of the simulacrum trip, a sort of legend trip that is not directly connected to historical sites. Salem’s loss of original historical sites, sometimes to demolition, sometimes to disremembrance, renders any connections between legend and place primarily symbolic. In all, Thomas finds tourism to Salem to have more connections with generic supernatural experiences than with actual history, and much local controversy emerges from this disconnect.
Mikel J. Koven’s chapter “Tradition and the International Zombie Film” deviates the most from the concept of place in the examination of its subject matter. Koven uses an adaptation of the historic-geographic method to trace manifestations of traditions within the realm of international zombie films. Koven’s analysis shows a number of different general types of zombie films, such as the Zombie Slave (living people who lose their free will to zombie priests) and the Zombie Apocalypse (a critical mass of zombies destroys civilization) as well as relevant subtypes such as the Nazi Zombie (a subtype of the Zombie Army type involving Nazis). While Koven’s analysis does not have strong geographic ties, it does trace metaphorical movement of a supernatural tale through the virtual space of the film genre. A bit of a stretch, but one that does offer insight into the familiar.
Lynne S. McNeill focuses on the internet as a place for folklore in her chapter, “Twihards, Buffistas, and Vampire Fanlore,” examining the development of folk ideas and folk speech in fanfic communities revolving around Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight, two popular media franchises that deal with vampires. In McNeill’s analysis, the internet serves as a set of linked locations for participatory culture, where fans engage with the concept of the vampire story directly, using a set of established norms such as folk speech and metacommentary. McNeill sees fan fiction and participatory culture as a form of virtual ostension, engaging with supernatural ideas by using creative works to inhabit fictive space.
Lisa Gabbert’s “Legend Quests and the Curious Case of St. Ann’s Retreat” delves deeply into the “interanimation” of supernatural legend and locale when examining St. Ann’s Retreat, a former convent in Utah and the site of legend tripping. St. Ann’s Retreat was for a long time the locus of supernatural legends involving anti-Catholic tropes such as nuns practicing witchcraft and infanticide. In Gabbert’s examination, there is a complex interaction between the legendary space and the real space, a kind of feedback loop she describes as interanimation. In one compelling example, rumors of supernatural events led to legend tripping, which inspired the residents of the retreat to buy guard dogs, which inspired rumors of hell hounds, which inspired more legend tripping. One climax of this interanimation involved the capture of a number of legend-tripping youths at the site by caretakers, with the teenagers held at gunpoint, inspiring another set of legends touching on the events. In all, Gabbert’s exploration shows that the interaction between people and place in legend tripping is not just one-way.
Elizabeth Tucker’s chapter, “Messages from the Dead,” explores legend questing in the Spiritualist town of Lily Dale, New York. Tucker’s analysis points to legend questing as a form of legend tripping more directly tied to the exploration of meaning. Tucker’s analysis differs from many other studies of legend tripping partially because of the age of the participants. Travelers to Lily Dale are generally older women, traveling in groups, seeking connection with spirits of the dead. One of the other features of legend questing in Lily Dale involves a fairly new addition to the historic town, The Fairy Trail. Tucker examines the activities related to this path through the forest as a form of re-enchantment, a variety of connection with the numinous that takes the participant out of the everyday. Tucker’s analysis then turns to the analysis of several specific experiences, looking at the ways in which ghost narratives tie into understood norms.
The final chapter, Bill Ellis’s “The Haunted Asian Landscapes of Lafcadio Hearn,” explores a complex aspect of the hypermodern, examining the study and publication of Japanese folklore by Hearn. Ellis’s perspective on Hearn is rooted in the ways in which folklore in the modern world is often tied to localized experiences. Hearn’s examinations of Japan point not to a generalized view of a uniform culture, as many of his contemporaries did, but document localized tales experienced through ethnographic encounters, much closer to the hypermodern. Ellis sees Hearn’s collections as predicting the turn toward folklore as a response to modernity, a forward-thinking folklorist gesturing toward contemporary legend scholarship from the nineteenth century.
Overall, the book brings together a number of different perspectives on the relationship between contemporary legend scholarship and place, exploring the ways in which the hypermodern world is examined through localized encounters with the supernatural. These essays could find a valuable place in a course on contemporary legend or American folklore.
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[Review length: 1227 words • Review posted on April 20, 2016]