The Precursors of Modern Ghost Hunting
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The concept of ghosts is an ancient one and raises many profound and unanswerable questions about culture, physics, metaphysics, theology and the nature of reality both perceived and unperceived. Our modern ghost and American ghost stories are the product of that struggle to answer: "What happens when we die?"
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Christianity
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What a ghost or Ghost Hunter is has changed across time and place. Christian cosmology has been deeply influential on the Western concept of the ghost, dating back to the saints and prophets who would become the first recognizable example of mediumship. The figure of the medium acts as an intermediary between worlds and acts as a guide for the living, and later the dead. The version of the afterlife portrayed by modern Ghost Hunters is distinctly related to Christian concepts of death, afterlife, binary morality, punishment, and salvation. An investigation may use Holy Water, prayer, or the Bible as tools to sooth or antagonize an entity and cleanse a space (Eton 2015: Potts 2003: Meckley 2007).
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In the 1600s, Joseph Glanvil began his hunt for ghosts. He believed proof of ghosts could be used to prove the existence of God. Glanvil was unsuccessful, but his writings and findings have made him perhaps the earliest recognizable ghost hunter. It would not be until well into the Victorian Era that we see the hunt for spirits and the paranormal codify into what would become the basis of modern day Ghost Hunters (Meckley 2007: Davis 2007).
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Industrialization
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The rapid inventions of the industrial revolution upset longstanding ideas of the natural world. The uncertainties of time and heightened visibility of death lead to a cultural draw towards spiritualism and the nature of death. With the advent of electricity, homes were filled with new technology that were prone to producing strange, unfamiliar noises and light that might be perceived as unnatural or otherwise unexplainable. If radio waves, heat, electricity, and voices from across the world were able to be carried through the ether, why not the voices of the dead? Studies of the ether engaged with these ideas, seeing scientific value in the paranormal. William James, often called the father of American psychology, was one of these scientists. His experiments with Leonora Piper, a medium who practiced somatic writing, lacked any conclusive explanation. The concept of “The Ether”, or a place or frequency in-between worlds, endures in modern American ghost hunting ethos ( Peters, 1999: Timms 2012).
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The inventions of photography and the phonograph made the faces and voices of people immortal. The ability to preserve the visage and voice, not just the words, of the dead made them, in many, ways undead. Death occupied the forefront of Victorian minds, with Séances, mediumship, and spiritualist societies becoming more and more popular as the Civil War began. It is here we see the ghosts and the ephemeral become further intertwined with technology. The inventions of photography, sound recording, and film had a profound impact on death, memory, and mourning. Recordings and photographs became cemeteries, holding the voices and bodies of the dead preserved in perfect, uncanny detail (Colin, 2007: Mackley, 2007: O’Halloran 2012)).
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Spirit Photography
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Spirit photography was an accidental innovation of WIlliam Mumler, after developing a photo using an old plate that already had an image. His image was taken very seriously among spiritualist communities, often embellishing the photo’s history. In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, death became highly visible. The collective trauma could not be soothed by traditional mourning. Mumler decided to turn spirit photography into a business. The creation of a ghostly photo was easy to do, relatively cheap, and in high demand. As the war continued, people sought closure in the form of one last look at their lost loved ones for the price of $10 per photo, today about $300. Though he was eventually sued, spirit photography had become an industry of its own, with imitators rising to meet the growing demand (Timms 2012: O’Halloran 2012) .
Chasing Ghosts and Fame
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Harry Price (1881-1948), a British psychic researcher, is considered to be one of the first celebrity Ghost Hunters. An avid skeptic, Price cultivated a character act and reputation as a serious investigator of unexplained phenomena. His performances maintained the delight of mystery while creating a sense of respectability. The role of the skeptic is not to disprove the paranormal, but to raise the stakes of an investigation. Price was but a precursor of what ghost hunting would become (Timms, 2012).