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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.
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