What is it like to live in a haunted house? This is the intriguing question that Caron Lipman, who is a geographer, takes as her subject matter in this book. In order to answer this question, she interviews members of thirteen households across England and Wales. If this were a movie, we might get dramatic accounts of spirit marching bands or devilish pig spirits à la The Amityville Horror. However, this book is based on oral interviews, so we get more prosaic accounts of pictures askew on walls, feelings of presences, or a ghost who taps her grandson on the cheek when he forgets to turn off the television.
The stories are intriguing and delightful; their narrators are, of course, thoughtful and analytical. Lipman’s analysis is solid, and it’s good to see a geographer take up the liminal terrain of the home. Lipman also does a nice job of using the voices of her narrators to reveal what living with the uncanny, or the “strange within the familiar,” is like (9). The book is organized into three sections. The first section addresses the experience of space and time in haunted houses. The second part explores how people live with their ghosts, including how they discern ghostly gender, in addition to how they communicate with and distance themselves from the ghosts. The final section considers how inhabitants perceive their encounters and the evidence for their experiences.
Lipman’s analysis is to be commended for moving beyond the treatment of ghosts as fiction or metaphors, which is often found in literary analysis. Also, her work does not reduce the interpretation of ghosts to what David Hufford would call the cultural-source hypothesis. Nor does her analysis fall into the “ghosts: true or false?” mode, an approach that folklorists have argued against over the course of several decades now.
While she cites Gillian Bennett’s important research, a deeper knowledge of the scholarship of surrounding legend, ghostlore, and belief could have prevented the author from incorrectly using the terms myth, legend, and folklore. She sometimes uses the words interchangeably or as if they were synonymous with the word “false.” Elsewhere in the book, it’s clear that Lipman respects and values her interviewees, so it’s unfortunate that she includes sentences such as, “There appears an element of superstition” (117), or “He superstitiously suggests that there might be something more real to this sound” (170). Often folklorists either omit the word “superstition” entirely, or they will substitute the word “belief” for the word “superstition.” A superstition is simply a belief—but with a negative connotation. “Superstition” tends to get used for the other person’s beliefs to imply that his notions are irrational, untrue, silly, or devalued in some way (as in, “I have beliefs; he has superstitions”). The word “belief” simply provides an accurate description without the negative associations.
Folklorists interested in legend, belief, and the supernatural will probably want to hear more about the narratives, the narrators, and the performative contexts than the book provides. Also, one set of stories stands out for its dramatic content: in the house in Wales, words (which are sometimes in Welsh) are written in a “brown stain” on the walls (35). Given this dramatic motif and its difference from the details in the other stories, these narratives seem to call out for more contextualizing and commentary (a photo, if available, would have been a nice touch). Folkloristic concerns aside, however, a scholarly contribution from the perspective of a geographer is a welcome addition to the literature on the haunted house
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[Review length: 588 words • Review posted on September 15, 2015]