OEITH #111 Haunters and the Haunted

Occult Experiments in the Home

We drape ourselves in an old, white sheet and consider the nature of ghosts and hauntings: how no one knows what a ghost is; crisis apparitions; poltergeists; the changing criteria for manifestations of ghosts; technological manifestations; the lack of any knowledge about ghosts; Barrie Colvin's poltergeist hypothesis; occultism and the non-existence of ghosts; paranormal investigation as a form of magical ritual rather than science; Hellier as a example; why we should care about ghosts; the persistence of ghosts; Martin Wall and a ghost of his childhood; the intrusiveness of ghosts; a semblance of being; "to haunt" as neither an action nor a way of being; the persistence of nothingness and the failure of being; the ghost as a desire in search of being; when living humans haunt; the difference between ghosts and the dead; finding our relationship to the dead inside ourselves; the ghost as coming from outside ourselves; our lack of a relationship to the ghost; ghosts in search of relationships; when a ghost joins the dead; the potential deceptiveness of ghosts; not all ghosts are the dead; why we should be wary of external manifestations of the dead; motivations for externalising the dead; a recap on the ghostly; the possibility of many different forms of haunting; hauntology and the ghosts of lost futures; the postponement of the future promised to us in the 1970s; Mark Fisher on haunting as failed mourning; the difficulty of mourning what we never had; the future imperfect tense and interruption as aspects of the ghostly; how, when haunted, we become like ghosts; the Zeigarnik effect and how it manifests in experience; haunting as the persistence of interrupted desire; some possible responses for when we find ourselves haunted; Mark Fisher on becoming outcasts from our own time.

Barrie G. Colvin (2010) "The Acoustic Properties of Unexplained Rapping Sounds", Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 74: 899, pp.65-93.

Mark Fisher (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books.

Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers & Frank Podmore (1886). Phantasms of the Living. London: Society for Psychical Research.

Martin Wall (2019). The Magical History of Britain. Stroud: Amberley.