This article focuses on the relationship between the history of spiritualist séances in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the introduction of film. It examines in particular two cases: the convergence of psychological studies on magic and spiritualism with early film theory, signalled in particular by Hugo Münsterberg's involvement in both fields; and the trajectory from spirit photography, a spiritualist practice that was based on the appearance of spectres on the photographic plate, to the trick movies of early cinema. The conclusion sets the relationship between beliefs in spirit and fictional representation of ghosts in film as a promising field of inquiry for contemporary film studies.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Ethnohistory 2009
In 2003, construction began on a graving dock that would bring marine projects to the Olympic Peninsula and provide family-wage jobs. It appeared to be a good fit for the city of Port Angeles, Washington, and its surrounding communities. Shortly after construction began, workers unearthed an approximately 2,700–year- old Coast Salish village and cemetery, claimed by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe as an ancestral site. Significantly, indigenous reports of being haunted by the spirits of their disturbed ancestors and nonnative desires to bury the past and move forward resulted in intercultural conflicts and misunderstandings. Such struggles speak to the contested nature of history and the deeply rooted concerns about the region’s socioeconomic future following the decline of natural resource industries.

Objective The project aims to explore Ottoman notions and belief systems concerning the supernatural. Its major objectives will be to explore the meaning and content of the perceptions of the "supernatural" , to localize such beliefs in the various Ottoman systems of thought, to analyze the changes that took place and to associate them with emerging or declining layers of culture and specific social groups. The project will address larger debates in recent historiography about the relevance of the " disenchantment " and " enlightenment " paradigms, integrating Ottoman intellectual history into the broader early modern cultural history. The research team, composed of the PI, three post-doctoral fellows, four collaborating researchers, five postgraduate students and a technical assistant, will explore these objectives and produce a web portal (containing crowd-sourced dictionaries and bibliographies, open access papers and other material), three international meetings, monographs and papers, and an annual open-access periodical journal. Specific research modules will study the rationalist trends in Ottoman science, various aspects of the Ottoman occult and magic, and the formation and development of the Ottoman cosmological culture. A monograph will be written by the PI and dwell in: the various conceptions of the supernatural/preternatural and their development, the presence of spirits/jinn in Ottoman world image, theory and practice of Ottoman magic, attitudes toward folklore traditions, saintly miracles, and " marvelous geographies ". Monographs will also be produced by the post-doctoral fellows. The project proposes an innovative approach in many ways, in a subject very much in the frontiers of the field; by exploring the supernatural and the occult in the context of the Ottoman Weltanschauung, the project will address a wider problématique on the Ottoman culture and its place in early modernity, especially as it will focus to the role of different cultural and social layers.

The article proposes a hermeneutic approach to the films of M. Night Shyamalan based on a study of the convergence of three parallel processes: the detailed use of planning and, most of all, the shotcountershot, and the dialectic between field and out of field, the open construction of otherness; and, lastly, the narrative motif of the dead person who returns. The director manages to link those three aspects with a detailed investigation into the possibilities of the fantastic genre in order to metaphorically approach the problems of contemporary society and a new involvement of the viewer in the suspension of disbelief required by fiction.

This essay examines a particular class of ghost movies: those where the ghost is ultimately refused and relegated to the realm of human imagination and trickery. It focuses on the case of Paul Leni’s 1927 The Cat and the Canary, to show how this film remediates a long tradition of spectacular entertainments based on the rejection of supernaturalism, and how such rejection has important consequences in the narrative frame and in the nature of the gratification invited in their audience. The chapter applies the concept the “spectralization of the mind,” proposed by literature scholar Terry Castle, in order to explain the narrative and conceptual role played by ghosts in this film. Particular attention is also given to the use of superimposition techniques and to the interpretation of noise as a sign of ghostly presence.

4. President’s Letter
New SPR President, Prof. John Poynton, asks whether the tide has turned for psychical research.
  6. The Medium
Dr Leo Ruickbie talks to Kai Mügge about his life and work as a physical medium, including the question of investigation.
12. The Séance
After the table levitated, what happened next? Dr Leo Ruickbie details his recent experience of a séance with Kai Mügge and the Felix Circle.
16. Listening to Tea Leaves
Ann R. Winsper asks whether electronic voice phenomena are genuine spirit communications or ‘audible tea leaves’.
19. Voices from Pennsylvania
Dr Peter McCue details his analysis of audio files purporting to be communications from the spirits of the deceased.
|22. Auditory Hallucinations
Dr James Paul Pandarakalam poses the question whether the source of auditory hallucinations lies beyond the material brain.
26. The Enfield Saga
Guy Lyon Playfair chronicles the history of the Enfield poltergeist from This House is Haunted to the TV drama The Enfield Haunting.
28. Macfadyen on Enfield
Actor Matthew Macfadyen reveals what it was like to play Guy Lyon Playfair in the recent Sky Living mini-series The Enfield Haunting.
30. The Enfield Effect
SPR Council Member John Fraser considers the increased interest in the SPR and asks what should be done about it.
31. No Coincidence
What happened when the Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes went to Crete? Callum Cooper tells all.
33. Ex Libris
SPR Librarian Karen Patel reveals what is new on the library shelves.
34. Ghosts in the Machines
Brandon Hodge searches for the remains of the famous spirit room of Jonathan Koons.
36. Letters
Prof. Peter Mulacz responds to criticisms of his article in PR74.
39. Contributors
40. Events

This paper is an exploration of how language perpetuates culture through the act of mythmaking in the character Kwan from Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses. I view the ghosts within this text as distancing mechanisms, becoming conduits for trauma, in order for fears and desires to be discussed. The ghosts in this novel are members of the uncanny, allowing enough distance from reality for secrets to be revealed. Lies transform into truth, myths into facts, through Kwan and her yin eyes. The yin world is examined in this paper as an object of the imaginary, created as an explanation for moments of the sublime. By viewing the ghosts through this lense, and by recognizing the fear and desires the ghosts reveal, one can come to a better understanding of  Tan’s representation of rural Chinese and urban American cultures. Little exists in terms of scholarship on The Hundred Secret Senses, despite the worth this text holds. By adopting an anthropological approach one can understand the value in her representations of language and culture.

As a mostly straightforward mystery/ghost story, The Supernatural Enhancements qualifies as genre fiction yet opens itself up to uninitiated readers. In fact, expectations will probably only interrupt the gratification readers are likely to get if they go along for the ride. Edgar Cantero’s novel isn’t the brain-twisting puzzle of a book that I imagined it to be. Reading it, I found myself less an amateur sleuth and more a kid sitting at the campfire, waiting to be encouraged to sneak into the woods alone at night.

Reprise revue, corrigée et augmentée sous forme d'ouvrage de« Exemplum et histoire. Césaire de Heisterbach (v. 1180-v. 1240) et la croisade albigeoise », dans Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes, 147, 1989, p. 49-86. A été ajouté un long chapitre sur un nouveau témoignage extrait des Otia imperialia de Gervais de Tilbury, composés vers 1215. Les propos d'un revenant, à Beaucaire, font en effet écho aux propos du légat. Ce qui abonde encore dans le sens de la plausibilité des paroles d'Arnaud Amaury. L'ouvrage, destiné à un public cultivé, est illustré de photographies inédites, de cartes, et d'un index des noms propres.

Can memory and emotion be animated after death, as some perceived hauntings appear to be? If so, then such hauntings involve extended emotions across space and time. In certain circumstances, can the places we once inhabited include this 'afterlife' memory, even though significant changes in cultural, physical, and technological resources have occurred? Can we animate past memory (of an 'attached' presence) through forms of 'cultural cues' that help to recall past experience, and the memory of those experiences? If so, it means that both the emotions and the memories of lived and shared situations and events inhere partly in the places where they occurred. They reflect not only 'imprints' on the environment, but also 'imprints' in memory that may produce, in particular cases, interactive past presence.

Das Gespenstische hat Konjunktur, auch in der Welt der Wissenschaft. Seit einigen Jahren, deutlich verstärkt zu Beginn unseres noch jungen Jahrtausends, fällt die Zunahme einschlägiger Titel in profilierten akademischen Verlagen und Zeitschriften auf. Gespenster - Erscheinungen-Medien-Theorien, Gespenster und Politik, Gespenster und Gelehrte, Kultur & Gespenster, Gespenster der Migration, Kollektive Gespenster, Diskrete Gespenster, Jelineks Gespenster, Rousseaus Gespenster... Setzt man die Suche mit Schlagworten wie Geister, Wiedergänger, Untote im deutschen Sprachraum fort, oder international mit Ghosts, Spirits, Haunting, Uncanny, Specter, Spectral, Spectrality, so staunt man, auf welchen akademischen Feldern überall Geisterhaftes gesichtet wird: in Literatur-, Film-, Theater-, Medien-, Geschichts- und Politikwissenschaft, post-kolonialer Theorie, Gender- und Migrationsforschung, den Queer Studies, und selbst in der Soziologie trifft man hier und da auf Ghostly Matters. Fast könnte man meinen, man hätte es mit einem weiteren cultural turn zu tun, womöglich einem spectral oder ghostly turn.

Quarrd les àmes errantes sortent de I'ombre (lornrnc chez Maury, le rêveur démystifie ses revenants au cours même de son rÔvL:. Unc autre analogie, cette fois-ci bien évidemment ignorée de Freud, pourrnit être tracée entre l'auteur français et I'auteur viennois. De même que Maury assigne au fantôme paternel un statut d'origine dans ses Souvenirs, dc même, dans la deuxième édition dela Traumdeutung, en 1909, Freud révèle après coup que son livre peut être lu comme un fragment d'autoanalyse déclenché par la mort de son père. Mais, contrairement à Freud, Maury demeure dans l'implicite, alors que Freud insiste pour donner cè nouveau sens à son livre. Et, bien entendu, comme on I'a vu, Maury ne confère à ses hantises ni une fonction de modèle généralisable à tous les humains ni un sens aedipien avant la lettre.

Erik W. Davis’s book Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia is an important and brilliant study that seeks no less than “to represent a portion of the Cambodian religious imaginary through a study of rituals involved in the management of death and spirits” (pp. 8-9). Deathpower is a seminal contribution to the field of Mainland Southeast Asian religious studies as well as a superb ethnography of everyday religious life in contemporary Cambodia.

This paper presents a study and the first edition from a chapter of the "Anales de los carmelitas descalzos de la provincia de san José en el Principado de Cataluña", work copied by its own author, brother John of St. Joseph (1642-1718), in University of Barcelona Library, Ms. 991. This chapter belonging to the tradition of revenants from purgatory was examined by clergy. It was taken as a true story, proven by statements under oath. The events of this case go back to the city of Vic and its surroundings in 1677-1681, by setting an important precedent of the tale of the priest’s ghost who returns from the other world to say a mass forgotten or not celebrated when alive.

Throughout nineteenth-century Britain, female writers excelled within the genre of supernatural literature. Much of their short fiction and poetry uses ghosts as figures to symbolize the problems of gender, class, economics, and imperialism, thus making their supernatural literature something more than just a good scare. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain recovers and analyzes for a new audience this “social supernatural” ghost literature, as well as the lives and literary careers of the women who wrote it.

The paper draws on the speaker’s 25-year history of busking in UK city centres, and notes the increasing importance of playful loitering in the urban space. It notes the changing attitudes of the general public to costumed performance in the city in recent years and considers the role of leisure technology, CCTV and the roving nature of street-policing in influencing public response to live urban performance. It suggests that singing– particularly acapella singing – brings a necessary breath to the streets and is essential to maintain. The paper further argues that costumed performance in the current climate effects a disruptive and transgressive intervention that troubles the British public with an uneasy nostalgia. It considers whether buskers increasingly provoke 'unheimlich' conditions with song, and asks how performers can adapt to changing social and legal conditions that render the simple act of public singing ghostly, subversive and queer. The paper reflects on the history of street-singing in the UK, suggesting that it has always enjoyed an ambivalent relationship to commerce, and brought mixed responses from the public and from city authorities. It considers the recent imposition of £1,000 fines by Camden Council, London on buskers performing without a license. It asks what cultural or economic values street-singers represent and whether these values are increasingly in tune or at odds with the British public’s perception of normalcy, performance and the function of city spaces. Noting Michael de Certeau’s ideas on space, the paper asks whether buskers effect a necessary delinquency to the ‘practiced place’ of the street, and how the singing, busking, performative body can resist marginalisation and ‘inscribe itself into the interstices of the codes’ of the urban space it both ‘undoes and displaces’.

Urban legends are stories that have been fabricated and interwoven into the history and essence of a city (Young,
2016). An urban legend usually lies in part truth, an incident or the ambience of a place is given prime importance and
a tale builds up. They have their origins in folklore (Ashcroft et al. 2000). Urban legends have a strong historical and
cultural setting (Biswas, 2010) even though they are mostly fictional in character. Hence, some of them have been
documented in books, others remain in the oral form while many are slowly lost with time and a change in the city’s
character (Bird, 2002).

The word paranormal comes from the words "para" meaning beyond, and normal. So the term paranormal really means something that is beyond the normal scope of science or being beyond a scientific explanation.
Paranormal Investigating can be excited and scary at the same time. It takes a certain type of person to search for paranormal activity and if you really think about it, searching for ghosts or other paranormal activity is quite frankly, a pretty scary situation, which is why a Paranormal investigator must have a strong mental attitude, and be ready to not panic in stressful or dangerous situations.
This book is ideal for those who are new to paranormal investigation and also for more experienced investigators who want to learn more about how to apply a critical-path scientific approach. Perhaps most importantly, the book contains an entire chapter of information about precautions to be taken during paranormal investigation.

Some ghosts pass away quietly, their evocative call to story and thought (“speak to it, Horatio”) a fading whisper. Other ghosts keep questions of justice open. These ghosts promise an exchange between the crimes of the dead and the desires of the living.

Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s Turner (1995) exemplifies this second type of haunting logic. The poem (or verse novel) is an extended narrative emerging from the drowning figure in J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting Slave Ship. Dabydeen’s intention to provoke questions of justice is explicit, but so too are his acknowledgements about the difficulties of such a poetic enterprise. As he writes, when the African lost to the sea awakens into his poem, “it [the African voice] can only partially recall the sources of its life, so it invents a body, a biography, and peoples an imagined landscape” (7). Here, when the exchange between invention and recollection becomes one between a living desire and a paralytic history, the poem becomes a haunted reflection on aesthetics and identity: consciousness, the poem’s creation through language, displays itself as “a garment of invention.”

With theoretical models from Agamben and Derrida, my paper examines the spectres of Dabydeen’s poem to articulate the connections between the poem’s inventive voice and its haunting exchange between desire and an impossible justice. In this analysis Turner is a transatlantic tour of passage where spectropoetics translate the images—the phantasms—of Slave Ship into a different medium, provoking a vibrant if impossible passage towards restitution, justice, and a new kind of vision where, as the poem’s voice admits,  “Words are all I have left of my eyes” (IX). This paper thus works in the broad field of transatlantic literatures and employs the theory of hauntology to describe a form of contemporary poetics.

The Author would like to point out Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology which perfectly describes the experience of literature and contemporary world as haunted. Therefore, he follows closely the psychoanalytical concepts of phantom and crypt made by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Then the Author shows how the notion of specter was absorbed and could be use in literature studies (Esther Rashkin, Nicholas Royle, Jodey Castricano). Derrida's theory makes it possible to perceive literature not as homogenic and coherent but as open structure, inhabited by voices of Otherness.

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. A...

This article explores the potential significance of the suburbs as a liminal space in both ancient Greek and Roman literature, focusing on literature from the imperial period. It will be demonstrated that in these texts the suburbs recur as a setting of preternatural stories, such as those found in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, in Lucian's Philopseudes, and in Petronius's Satyricon, as well as in many other loci. In all of them, the "demonic" in various forms operates on the outskirts of town. Such a setting is no coincidence. The suburbs comprise a specific area that both literally and figuratively constitutes the limen of the city, and demons are commonly regarded as liminal beings; hence, by virtue of this symbolic connection, the urban periphery appears as an ideal location for the demonic.

Depicted as a floating woman’s head with drawn out and bloody entrails dangling beneath it, phi krasue is one of the most iconic uncanny creatures of Thai horror cinema. However, despite its position as one of Thailand’s most striking and well-known phi, there is very little research investigating this specific phenomenon. This is remarkable given the commonality of encounters with this uncanny being in ‘real life’ and the continuous presence of its ghostly images in popular cultural media. Relating empirical data gathered during anthropological fieldwork in a rural community of Thailand’s lower north-east to the analysis of two Thai ghost films that take this ghostly image as their main subject and narrative force this article argues that the knowledge of vernacular ghostlore is essential to decipher the cinematic representations’ full symbolism. Thai ghost films are produced for the ‘knowing spectator’ who has implicit knowledge of the cultural logics structuring ghostly classification in contemporary Thailand. This embodied knowledge allows Thai audiences to make sense of phi krasue’s ghostly image despite its cinematic transformation from ‘Filth Ghost’ to ‘Khmer Witch’. Based on Kristeva’s theory of abjection I will show that Thai audiences continue to see phi krasue first and foremost as uncanny ‘matter out of place’.

This article provides an analysis of the relation between tourists' experiences, affect, and bodily perceptions, together with processes of remembering and forgetting, focusing on (dark) touristic practices in haunted places in contemporary Japan. It highlights the social features of oblivion, processes in the creation of memories and discourses of war, and their entanglement in the "meshwork" that constitutes a particular place. I draw on ethnographic data of a guided ghost tour that visits Kiyotaki Tunnel, one of the most renowned haunted places in Kyoto. I describe tourists' experiences, analyze the rumors about the haunting, and show that, among the locals, memories of the death of and discrimination against Korean laborers in the tunnel were strategically forgotten. Yet, these memories were "unearthed," appropriated and spread on the internet by visitors, attracted by the haunting. I point out that haunted places emerge as "affective meshworks" primarily as a result of bodily correspondences with affordances in the environment, rather than from narrative and belief, and that (dark) touristic practices can contribute to the construction of new discourses, thus unsettling power relationships. I argue that a focus on affect in shaping meshworks of bodies, environments, memories, and discourses through (dark) touristic practices, can provide an understanding of the experiences of visitors to places related to war and death, and that visitors contribute to the construction of new memories and discourses.