Ghost Culture
Theories, Context, and Scientific Practice
by
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"to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscover'd country from whose bourne no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have...." William Shakespeare
This undiscovered country that Shakespeare mentions is his conceptual world of ghosts, whose inhabitants are frequently encountered in his plays. 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 the human qualities that they still retain from their former life...
This "undiscover'd country" should be viewed in its proper context. It is undiscovered because it is largely unexplored... I propose that this undiscovered (unexplored) country is an untapped resource that is more available than most people think. This, I believe, is because everyone has the capacity to explore it. This undiscovered country can be perceived as an wilderness which each man (and woman) possesses, 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....
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) to understand the context of hauntings, framed in scientific practice.... The map of this haunted landscape is based on individual time, consisting of its own unique geography, dialect, and cultural knowledge. It is the retention of a personality, as Shakespeare describes in his plays, and is definitely human in nature. This humaness is the key to both the understanding of this unexplored world, and the manner in which to navigate through it....
This book is an attempt to "resurrect" the image of ghost research, returning it to its rightful place among the social sciences as a discipline of both scientific practice and textual narrative. This book is for people for whom "the way things are" is not reason enough to continue the way things are. Essentially, the investigation of ghosts and haunting phenomena is the study of different ways of life and "living", both past and present. This is a fundamental, and anthropological, spirit of inquiry and investigation....
Culture is the integrating concept of anthropology and, I suggest, ghost research. Reconstructing that past culture (through EVP and other socially communicative techniques) puts ghost research squarely in the discipline of anthropology...
This is a framework for communication, and is concerned less with "being" (alive or dead) than with "becoming" (an understanding between two entities). Shakespeare was right to ground his ghosts on a solid human foundation. A ghost map is designed in this manner...(but) the coordinates of this map are unique because it is a personal cartography, and is vertical (full of stratagraphic roles and situational personalities). We cannot develop (ad hoc) "rules of engagement" applicable to all hauntings. There are no natural "laws" relative to cultural responses in these haunting dramas...the rules of engagement have to be excavated. This involves a cultural conext within a scientific practice, and is characterized by a holisitc and comparative approach.....
This engagement is a participatory-observer investigative process...I am both an observer and recorder of the excursions, and a participant in their eventual outcome. I am both a ghost excavator, unearthing past dramas, and part of the drama itself. I am the future ghost of my own haunt drama. For I am (we all are) the "ghost within"....
For ghost researchers, there is no tomorrow. Tomorrow is today, and today is really the historical present. In this day of tomorrow, we can begin a change that affects our vision of that historical present. Here, we will "see" in a mirror of our own reflection, the shadows of those from the past, and a past. Both are contained within us, as we gaze deeply within that mirror and view the reality of a symmetrical world, a memory of former selves, and an image of the repetitive nature of past realities. The material subject and the material object create, in our reflection, a performative pattern that comes together in space and time....
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About the Book
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".
About the Author
Born and raised in Mahanoy City, John Sabol has been participating in, and directing, scientific field investigations in such varied disciplines as archaeology, ethnography, folklore, historical, and ghost research since 1969. He has done fieldwork in England, Germany, Mexico, and in various parts of the United States. He has also been an actor, and has appeared in more than 35 films, tv shows, "soaps", and commercials. He has taught at various universities in Mexico. He has written numerous articles, and has published in various scientific journals. He is the author of Ghost Excavator: Unearthing the Drama in the Mine Fields. He has a M.A. in anthropology, and a B.A. in sociology. He currently resides in Mahanoy City with his daughter, Melissa, and his two lady friends, Lacy (a dog) and Tazia (a cat).