Phantom Gettysburg
Alternative Histories on a Civil War Battlefield
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The Contemporary Gettysburg Story: Ghosts in the Film
The pre-production work that is involved in making movies is analogous to a preliminary survey of haunted space, be it on a tour or doing a "ghost hunt". Both use a process of fragmentation. This involves making choices regarding location, content of story, direction, duration of story, and performative acts. The use of video cameras by the tour or "hunt" participants mirrors filmmaking, and these recordings are an integral part of the mapping of a haunted landscape for the tourist or ghost hunter.
These visual actions are forms of landscaping the horizontal plane before any deep considerations are made to build and create avenues of interpretive flow. In the selection and editing (analysis) of this mapping, there is a production of spaces and orientations for the audience and future participants. These orientations are used to visualize and test the elements of the haunting behavior that was told, recorded, or read about.
Like a master storyteller, the director (or the investigator/tour guide)knows exactly what performative practices to use to maintain interest. These practices involve the use of resonating elements that the "targeted" audience can relate to because understandings are developed and come from similiar experiences. This is called "theatrical ghosting", and it is just as important in ghost tourism at Gettysburg as it is in filmmaking.
In Gettysburg, this myth-making production has become a top (the top) box office attraction in local Civil War (and world-wide paranormal) history. Yet this film, "Haunted Gettysburg", is a fictional story because its principal actors are not real, nor are their stories. The result is a phantom experience for the audience........
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About the Book
Phantom Gettysburg discusses the contemporary alternative version of a perceived haunted battlefield. In order to understand this alternative perception, contemporary anomalous phenomena must be affixed to and analyzed within their exact historical setting and social context.
An ethnographic model of mid-19thc. American culture is used as the basis for this analysis. Specifically, the cultural beliefs relative to the concepts of death and the afterlife, as it was envisioned by these soldiers, is the basis for this model. This historical ethnographic analysis serves two purposes. First, it is a means to legitimize the methodology and fieldwork practices of ghost research. Second, it is meant to analyze the Gettysburg experience and its haunting uncertainty in its historical and sociocultural environment.
The conclusion that is drawn from this comparative approach alters the reality and representation of an interactive ghostly battlefield presence. A Gettysburg haunted by Civil War soldiers is considered, for the most part, a phantom experience.
About the Author
John Sabol is a cultural anthropologist, historical archaeologist, actor, and "ghost excavator". He has been participating in (and directed) scientific field investigations since high school. He has conducted extensive non-evasive ghost excavations on the Gettysburg battlefield and in the town for a number of years. He is the author of three other books on Gettysburg: Gettysburg Unearthed (2007), Battlefield Hauntscape (2007), and the Politics of Presence (2008). He has written four other books: Ghost Excavator (2007), Ghost Culture (2007), Anthracite Coal Region (2008), and Bodies of Substance, Fragments of Memories (2009). He has appeared in the A&E TV series, "Paranormal State", "Ghosts of Gettysburg" episode. For more information on his investigations and books, please see his websites: www.theghostexcavator.com and http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeoqapc/ghostexcavator.