UT Blog

Ghost tours exist within the nebulous categorisation of dark tourism, which is characterised as visiting sites of death and catastrophe as a leisure pursuit. As grim as this might sound, ghost tours are consistent across the international stage in making up part of the cultural backdrop we wander past on a daily basis.

How many of us have gone on a ghost walk as a fun activity to do with friends, perhaps as a seasonal activity you associate with autumn or winter? The walk was probably in a city you know, or a city much like the next, where you have never seen anything you would be tempted to call paranormal or spooky. Yet on a ghost walk there is new appreciation to be found for aspects of the, usually, historic urban landscape which are often otherwise marginalised or described as being a non-specified element of the overall landscape.

It was on UT’s Folkloristics and Applied Heritage Studies master’s course that I finally had the chance to look at how the material and immaterial aspects of the landscape can be manipulated in order to craft a particular perspective. I took the opportunity of the master’s thesis to create a project which paid special attention to often-overlooked sonic aspects of the environment in shaping perception.

Tangible and intangible elements make up the paranormal potential

It is the job of the guides of ghost tours to draw out both tangible and intangible elements of the historic urban landscape and combine them in such a way as to provide the impression of paranormal potential. The tangible heritage incorporated is typically anything deemed to have a mnemonic association to what we culturally find spooky.

Some examples might include old stone buildings, maybe sites where people were executed, graveyards and shadowy alleyways. Examples of the intangible heritage drawn out of the same landscape could be the narratives attached to the place, story-telling techniques such as pitch and intonation, and local folklore, as well as sounds (imagine an eerie susurrus in a churchyard, or the tolling of bells as you stand on the edge of an old plague pit) and bodily sensations such as the smell of damp stone and the feel of cobblestones underfoot.

How the tangible aspects of the environment are selected, drawn out, and emphasised for use in these tours is therefore determined by the intangible imaginative values in which we decide what is ‘spooky.’ These values are identified by the managers and tour guide and it is up to them to find anchors for these in the available environment in order to create an overall impression of space, resulting in meaning being attached to hidden possibilities in a more flexible arrangement.