John Sabol’s new book, The Politics of Presence: Haunting Performances on the Gettysburg Battlefield

Available at your local book store or through this LINK

 John Sabol’s upcoming book, Ghost Archaeology: Excavations in the Fields of Haunting Uncertainty will be available February 2009.

John Sabol will present a workshop at Harper’s Ferry on July 17^th, 2009.

For information click on the following LINK.

The Refleshing of a Haunting Discipline:

                 Bringing the Skeleton out of the Closet and Reconstructing It

Frequently, ghost research is mono-vocal. Information (and instruction) comes from the mouths of the few, who dictate to a largely non-embedded (though enthusiastic) audience. Ideally, the investigation of ghosts and hauntings should be multi-vocal, representing many and varied voices, including more marginalized groups (so-called “ghost hunting groups”), and even the “voices” of those we investigate. The construction of knowledge should be based on rendering “haunt realities” in terms of alternative modes of representation, different ethnic and cultural traditions, and different practices. We should talk about “refleshing” the historical present, as we continue to excavate the remains of still “living” beings. This is a humanistic quest, rather than a search for still more recording and measuring devises. We record and measure physical manifestations, but underlying these surface phenomena lie the remains of a very human drama. Our goal should be to unearth the significance of this drama through an understanding of its historical and ethnographic context. Ghost research is a study of cultural hauntings, not the transformations of energy from one form to another.

This is the type of research that is being done by the C.A.S.P.E.R. Research Center. We are working on the conceptualization of haunted space (“hauntscape”) as an operational performative environment in which ghosts and haunting phenomena can co-exist in contemporary symmetrical space. There are antecedents to this type of philosophy. It is found in the work of symmetrical archaeologists, pioneered by Michael Shanks (among others) at Stanford University. That is why C.A.S.P.E.R. labels its field research an “ethnoarchaeoghostological” approach: the concept of an unfolding of past/present material remains in contemporary physical spaces (individual “pastscapes”).

Whether this haunted space, and the activities that occur within it, should be analyzed as components (either partially or otherwise) controlled by physical laws, functional exchange phenomena, a perceptual geography of particular spaces, an informational or culturally- coded phenomena, an archaeological grid coordinate, or the ethnographic reality of a still continuing social universe, is a question we are exploring in our field investigations.

The question of “bleeding” (recurring haunting phenomena) and “suppression” (non-recurring haunting phenomena), and their frequency and causality, is also being investigated through fieldwork experimentation. The concept of “silences” (“ghostspeak”) during field investigations is a significant avenue of exploration. Finally, this “refleshing” of ghost research is viewed by us as an active pursuit by all investigators (and interested parties) working “together”. Only then, can we reconstruct what was once a mere skeleton (of past material remains) and develop it into an emerging (and relevant) scientific discipline!    

Ghosts are interactive and integrated systems of contextual sensory assemblages.  They are not isolated individual attributes of visual ("orbs", "mists", "tracers", etc.), auditory (EVP recordings), tactile ("touch and gone") manifestations.  Rather they are fields of drama and emotion.  Each haunt has its own particular and unique script.  It is our job, as the investigative audience, to read, attempt to interpret, and respond to that script.  We do this through historical research and excavation of the  layers of accumulated haunt fields of activities and events. On this website, you will not see subjective and non-contextual "anomalous light" photos, nor non-contextual communicative recordings of EVP. These types of "evidential data" will not presented until the location, and its contextual haunt drama, is thoroughly analyzed under strict "controlled" conditions.