This paper investigates the increasingly popular practice of ghost tourism comprising urban ghost tours and organised paranormal investigations. Set in the context of modern forms of enchantment, wherein audiences engage in a knowing and reflexive sense of ‘delight without delusion’, the paper explores the various infrastructures, (discursive, affective, and material) that engender a sense of supernatural possibility. I argue that practices of legend-telling, legend-tripping, ostension, and play produce affective assemblages of supposition and wonder that momentarily transform space into something charged with the strange and anomalous. This infrastructure relies on the engineering of dispositions that are both shaped on and brought to the tourist event itself. As such, those with deeply held beliefs in ghosts and the afterlife, as well as those for whom the infrastructures fail to generate wonder, place limits on the artifice of modern enchantment. The paper uses examples from participant observation on ten ghost tours across the UK, an overnight vigil in a Tudor mansion, and interviews with tour guides.
AndersonBWylieJ, 2009, “On geography and materiality”Environment and Planning A41318–335
3.
BakhtinM M, 1986Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (University of Texas Press, Austin, TX)
4.
BarnettC, 2008, “Political affects in public space: Normative blind-spots in non-representational ontologies”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series33186–200
BellM, 1997, “The ghosts of place”Theory and Society26816–836
7.
BennettJ, 2001The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)
8.
BinnieJEvansBHollowayJMillingtonS, 2008, “Playing with theory: interdisciplinary approaches to geographies of play”, paper presented at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston, 16 April; copy available from the author
9.
BriggsJ, 1977Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (Faber and Faber, London)
10.
BusePStottA (Eds), 1999Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hants)
11.
CarterSMcCormackD, 2006, “Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention”Political Geography25228–245
12.
ComaroffJComaroffJ (Eds), 1993Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL)
13.
CrangM, 1996, “Magic kingdom or a quixotic quest for authenticity?”Annals of Tourism Research23115–131
14.
DaviesO, 2007The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hants)
15.
DéghLVázsonyiA, 1983, “Does the word ‘dog’ bite? Ostensive action: A Means of legend-telling”Journal of Folklore Research205–34
16.
DixonD, 2007, “I hear dead people: Science, technology and a resonant universe”Social and Cultural Geography12189–210
17.
DuringS, 2002Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)
18.
EdensorT, 2005, “The ghosts of industrial ruins: Ordering and disordering memory in excessive space”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space23829–849
19.
EdensorT, 2007, “Mundane mobilities, performances and spaces of tourism”Social and Cultural Geography8199–215
20.
EdensorTHollowayJ, 2008, “Rhythmanalysing the coach tour: The Ring of Kerry, Ireland”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series33483–501
21.
EllisB, 1981, “The camp mock-ordeal: Theater as life”Journal of American Folklore94486–505
22.
EllisB, 1989, “Death by folklore: Ostension, contemporary legend, and murder”Western Folklore48201–220
23.
EllisB, 2003Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS)
24.
FoleyMLennonJ, 1996, “JFK and dark tourism: A Fascination with assassination”International Journal of Heritage Studies2198–211
25.
GentryG W, 2007, “Walking with the dead: The place of ghost walk tourism in Savannah, Georgia”Southeastern Geographer47222–238
26.
GeschiereP, 1998, “Globalization and the power of indeterminate meaning: Witchcraft and spirit cults in Africa and East Asia”Development and Change29811–837
GordonA, 1997Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, MN)
29.
HallG, 1973, “The big tunnel: Legends and legend-telling”Indiana Folklore6139–173
30.
HarkerC, 2005, “Playing and affective time-spaces”Children's Geographies347–62
31.
HemmingsC, 2005, “Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn”Cultural Studies19548–567
32.
HollowayJ, 2003, “Spiritual embodiment and sacred rural landscapes”, in Country Visions Ed. ClokeP (Prentice-Hall, Harlow, Essex) pp 158–175
33.
HollowayJ, 2006, “Enchanted spaces: The séance, affect and geographies of religion”Annals of the Association of American Geographers96182–187
34.
HollowayJKnealeJ, 2008, “Locating haunting: A Ghost-hunter's guide”Cultural Geographies15297–312
35.
HorkheimerMAdornoT, 2002Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA)
36.
HuffordD J, 1995, “Beings without bodies: An experience-centered theory of the belief in spirits”, in Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural Ed. WalkerB (Utah State University Press, Logan, UT) pp 11–46
37.
InglisDHolmesM, 2003, “Highland and other haunts: Ghosts in Scottish tourism”Annals of Tourism Research3055–63
KatzC, 2008Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
40.
KnealeJ, 2006, “From beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the place of horror”Cultural Geographies13106–126
41.
KovenM J, 2007, “Most haunted and the convergence of traditional belief and popular television”Folklore118183–202
42.
LennonJFoleyM, 1999, “Interpretation of the unimaginable: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., and ‘dark tourism’”Journal of Travel Research3846–50
43.
LennonJFoleyM, 2000Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (Continuum, London)
44.
LightD, 2007, “Dracula tourism in Romania: Cultural identity and the State”Annals of Tourism Research34746–765
45.
LindahlC, 2005, “Ostensive healing: Pilgrimage to the San Antonio ghost tracks”Journal of American Folklore118164–185
46.
LuckhurstR, 2002, “The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the ‘spectral turn’”Textual Practice16527–546
47.
McEwanC, 2008, “Avery modern ghost: Postcolonialism and the politics of enchantment”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space2629–46
OppenheimJ, 1985The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850 – 1914 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
50.
OwenA, 2004The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL)
51.
PelsP, 2003, “Introduction: Magic and Modernity”, in Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment Eds MeyerBPelsP (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA) pp 1–38
52.
PileS, 2005Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (Sage, London)
53.
PileS, 2006, “The strange case of Western cities: Occult globalisations and the making of urban modernity”Urban Studies43305–318
54.
PineB JGilmoreJ H, 1999The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA)
55.
PowellA, 2005Deleuze and the Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh)
56.
SalerM, 2006, “Modernity and enchantment: A Historiographic review”American Historical Review111692–716
SchneiderM A, 1993Culture and Enchantment (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)
59.
SharpleyRStoneP R, 2009The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (Channel View, Bristol)
60.
StoneP R, 2006, “A dark tourism spectrum: Towards a typology of death and macabre related tourist sites, attractions and exhibitions”Tourism: An International Interdisciplinary Journal54145–160
61.
StoneP RSharpleyR, 2008, “Consuming dark tourism: A Thanatological perspective”Annals of Tourism Research35574–595
62.
StrangeCKempaM, 2003, Shades of dark tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island”Annals of Tourism Research30386–405
WalkerB, 1995Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural (Utah State University Press, Logan, UT)
68.
WarnerM, 2006Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford University Press, Oxford)
69.
WilbertCHansenR, 2009, “Walks in spectral space: East London crime scene tourism”, in Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity Eds JanssonALagerkvistA (Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey) pp 187–203
