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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.
Our contemporary world is not centered on what is perceived as
reality in the West. That is too ethnocentric. Similarly, the
definition of (and distinction between) life and death are not
solely based on Western scientific realities. That is very
egocentric. There is so much more to the world, reality, and the
concept of "life" than what we read, hear about, view, and learn
from various mediated forms. Out there, beyond the "box"
constructed by a materialist science, there is an entirely
different social realm. This is an "other" culture. It is a "ghost
culture," but it too exists today. It is a culture that is grounded
in thousands of years of experienced situational encounters. This
quite sensible and perceivable world is an old way of looking at
the world, and sensing "who" is still there amongst us. That
journey back to the old continues in the "ghost excavations" in
this book.
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