Altered States

It's time to end the popular "ghost hunting" trope of exploring haunted space. This popular movement has too long been characterized by contemporary entanglements between cultural myths, "legend-tripping", New Age philosophies, and mysticism in the form of a "paranormal world". Ghost hunting has become a form of "object animation" tied to electronic devices, calling the entanglement a scientific approach. There is a need for character emplacement as social interactional entanglements with past fields of memory and social behaviors. Promoting a type of fieldwork called "ghost excavations", we focus on the human past, not a "para-history". What remains (and manifests) at these haunted sites is, in many instances, human culture, and not paranormal in nature. This intent and research stance requires an altered state of mind and behavior, one that crosses borders. It "jumps the fence" that has long restricted our vision of contemporary reality.