Negative heritage: the material-cultural politics of the American haunted history tour

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the defining features and cultural significance of the haunted history tour as it has come to be practiced in American urban spaces. A distinctive cultural form that has risen to prominence in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and other places, haunted history taps into public fascinations with “dark” history and ghosts, but does so to engage unresolved and troubling elements of local history and memory. Practitioners engage creatively with problematic histories that otherwise might be forgotten or suppressed, attending especially to their material-folkloric traces. Drawing on participatory and analytical research in several U.S. cities, in particular St. Louis, New York, and Savannah, the article moves from a characterization of the defining modes and interpretative conventions of haunted history, which are drawn from mainstream tourism and others from more-activist public history, to an analysis of its preoccupation with haunting “remainders” of the past, which, I contend, form an unacknowledged narrative and epistemological core of an experimental memory project whose primary quarry is the domain of “negative heritage”.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• dark history
• public history
• haunting
• materiality
• memory
• thanatourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributor

Heidi Aronson Kolk is Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts and Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Assessment at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research explores the intersection of memory and materiality, particularly as they relate to race, heritage, public culture, and the history of American cities – all subjects considered in her book, Taking Possession: The Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019).

Notes

1 A German immigrant named John Adam Lemp introduced lager beer to St. Louis in 1838. The family-owned brewery was the largest in St. Louis before Prohibition (it closed in 1920), and for years Falstaff beer, Lemp’s best known brand, outsold Budweiser in St. Louis (O’Neill 2019).

2 The tour in question was conducted by the founder of the St. Louis Paranormal Research Office in August 2018, and included sixteen participants (including the author). See St. Louis Paranormal Research Society (n.d.).

3 Selzer recently published his own book on H.H. Holmes, which led, among other things, to an appearance on the History Channel’s docudrama, American Ripper. He also hosts a dark history podcast whose contents suggest he means to expand his franchise beyond Chicago.

4 Sturken (2016, 21) hypothesizes that this uniquely intimate quality is why shoes have often been chosen for display at sites of collective remembrance – most famously, at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and also the September 11 Memorial Museum, where they evoke the brutalized bodies and lost souls, but also the everyday humanity, of their owners.