We must respect the ruin and its presences for what they were. As we enter someone's familiar space, we must not bring an unfamiliarity to our exploration and expectations. Once inside that landscape, we are crossing perhaps multiple temporal and social boundaries. Space and time, as two fragmented walls, can inhibit our interactions with someone else's experiences and memories of that place. This is Centralia, as it was, and as its remains are visualized today.

All battlefields are haunted by the memory of what occurred there. Some, however, are haunted by more than remembrance, memorialization, and heritage events. There are American Civil War battlefields that remain "active" with the ongoing manifestations of past military behaviors. A theory of American Civil War battlefield hauntings is presented here, tied to mid-19th c. concepts of (and belief in) a "good death" and the importance of home and family. Fieldwork exploring these ideas shows, in many battlefield manifestations, a direct relationship between these concepts and battlefield interactive hauntings.

It is proposed that the habits learned in pre-battle drill of the "culture of war," and the cultural patterns that were followed of the "culture of death" of mid-19th c. American Society became future manifesting possibilities (with purpose) on Civil War battlefields today. They form part of a habitual, culturally-patterned "normal" world that we can "unearth" in a "ghost excavation." This makes that world predictable and representative of continuing "signs" of forms of life on these battlefields. In this sense, haunting manifestations are habits about habits, and a "ghost soldier" is an emergence of a form of life that connects us today with their past beliefs and practices.

Robert Lewis Stevenson once remarked that some landscapes cry out for a story. Centralia is one such landscape. These are the stories that were inspired by what happened there and the lack of presence in the landscape today. These are fictional accounts of Centralia's history that serve as a counter-current to the real dangers of anthracite coal mining. There are fictional accounts of vampires, dragons, and other supernatural beings that lurk in the abandoned mine shafts beneath the town of Centralia. They form in the imagination of various authors and represent a different version of the Centralia landscape.