In this episode, Matt begins what will be an intermittent and ongoing effort to summarize what he has learned from the time he has spent collecting stories and talking with others about them. He starts by defining the term “ghost story”, which is more slippery than you might think, and then talks about ghost stories as entertainment and as stories that serve a social function.
This episode was written by Matthew Armstrong with music by Matthew Armstrong and production assistance from Kaylia Metcalfe.
The transcript for this episode can be found here.
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Show Notes and Sources
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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Culture (Seven Theses). In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Crockett, I’Nash. 2018. Twentieth-Century Voodoo – Black Culture, Cultural Geographies, and the Meaning of Place. In The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History, edited by Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Finucane, David J. 2001. Historical Introduction: The Example of Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century England. In Hauntings and Poltergeists, Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by James Houran and Rense Lange.
Force, William Ryan. 2018. Toward a Cryptoscience. In The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History, edited by Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Freud, Sigmund. 1955 (date of translation). The Uncanny. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17: 1917-1919. Translated by Alix Strachey. The Hogarth Press, London, UK.
Hanks, Michele. 2015. Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past. Routledge, London.
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Pirok, Alena. 2016. Spirit of the season. Post on the National Council on Public History blog, October 24, 2016. Accessed online on April 7, 2022 at https://ncph.org/history-at-work/spirit-of-the-season/
Pirok, Alena. 2017. Ghosts In The Archives: Communing With The Virginia Historical Inventory. Post on the Library of Virginia’s blog The Uncommonwealth, October 18, 2017. Accessed online on April 7, 2022 at https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2017/10/18/ghosts-in-the-archives/
Pirok, Alena. 2019. Goodwin’s Ghosts: Colonial Williamsburg’s Uncanny Legacy. The Public Historian, Vol. 41, No. 3 (August 2019), pp. 9–30.
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