Twenty-First Century American Ghost Hunting: a Late Modern Enchantment
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Twenty-First Century American Ghost Hunting: A Late Modern Enchantment Daniel S. Wise New Haven, CT Bachelor oF Arts, Florida State University, 2010 Master oF Arts, Florida State University, 2012 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty oF the University oF Virginia in Candidacy For the Degree oF Doctor oF Philosophy Department oF Religious Studies University oF Virginia November, 2020 Committee Members: Erik Braun Jack Hamilton Matthew S. Hedstrom Heather A. Warren Contents Acknowledgments 3 Chapter 1 Introduction 5 Chapter 2 From Spiritualism to Ghost Hunting 27 Chapter 3 Ghost Hunting and Scientism 64 Chapter 4 Ghost Hunters and Demonic Enchantment 96 Chapter 5 Ghost Hunters and Media 123 Chapter 6 Ghost Hunting and Spirituality 156 Chapter 7 Conclusion 188 Bibliography 196 Acknowledgments The journey toward competing this dissertation was longer than I had planned and sometimes bumpy. In the end, I Feel like I have a lot to be thankFul For. I received graduate student Funding From the University oF Virginia along with a travel grant that allowed me to attend a ghost hunt and a paranormal convention out oF state. The Skinner Scholarship administered by St. Paul’s Memorial Church in Charlottesville also supported me For many years. I would like to thank the members oF my committee For their support and For taking the time to comb through this dissertation. Thank you Heather Warren, Erik Braun, and Jack Hamilton. I especially want to thank my advisor Matthew Hedstrom. He accepted me on board even though I took the unconventional path oF being admitted to UVA to study Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. He supported what some would view as an oddball project, and he helped me through some serious rough patches. I would also like to thank David Levenson, Matthew GoFF, and Nicole Kelley, my proFessors and mentors throughout my undergraduate and master’s degrees in religion at Florida State University. Their mentorship got me to this point. I would like to thank the Friends who have aided me with this project and supported me along the way. Joe Lenow, Matthew Carter, Melanie Pace, Isaac May, and Leah Wise accompanied me on ghost hunts. These same people, in addition to Peter Fraser-Morris, have also had countless conversations with me about my project and a couple oF them read some oF 3 the work in progress. Most important to me was probably the moral support these Friends provided. I would like to thank the many ghost hunters who opened up their lives to me, too many individuals and paranormal investigation teams to name From all over the country. They were almost always enthusiastic to talk to me about the paranormal, the proper and improper ways to investigate the paranormal, and what drove them to investigate the paranormal. I hope that any oF them who read this dissertation Feel I treated them and their words Fairly. Finally, I would like to thank my Family For their years oF support: my mother Kathleen Wise, my Father Robert Wise, his wiFe Donna, my sisters Elizabeth Wise and Rebekah Frazier. Thank you to my in-laws For supporting the wacky endeavor oF the guy who married into the Family. Thank you Gary Wells, Tracy Wells, and JenniFer Goodbred. My largest portion oF gratitude goes out to my wiFe Leah Wise. By the time I had Finished my dissertation we had been married For ten years, and I had been doing graduate work in religious studies that entire time. The entire time she supported my ultimate goal oF completing this dissertation. I cannot think oF a better partner. 4 Introduction If you moved into a new home and strange things started happening, or iF you completed a home renovation and unexplainable occurrences began cropping up, what would you do? Perhaps you hear Footsteps where no one is walking, or you see shadowy Figures out oF the corner oF your eye, or you hear someone or something whisper your name in the middle oF the night when everyone else in the house is asleep. Many Americans would call in a ghost hunter or paranormal investigator. They would probably begin this process with an internet search. Perhaps they would come across the website paranormalsocieties.com, which calls itselF “the online paranormal society directory!” The black background and the logo with spooky Font reminiscent oF a horror movie advertisement would indicate that the searcher had come to the right place to seek paranormal answers. On the website, the haunted individual would Find roughly 4,892 paranormal investigation groups listed in the United States, the majority oF which Focus on ghosts and hauntings. The searcher could locate ghost hunting groups by state and Find them listed by city. AFter perusing the site For a while and trying to contact some teams through Facebook, email, or phone, the searcher would probably realize that some oF the groups are no longer active; though more groups are being added to the site every week. A Few Google searches would reveal that paranormalsocieties.com is not even an exhaustive list oF the ghost hunting groups in a given area. Finally, an observant browser might notice that nearly all oF these ghost hunting groups were Founded within the past FiFteen years. 5 The beginning oF the twenty-First century has seen a ghost hunting boom in America. In October oF 2004, the reality television show Ghost Hunters premiered. It Focused on two Roto- Rooters plumbers who investigate hauntings in their spare time. This show and similar reality shows that Followed sparked a craze.1 Thousands oF Americans began to think oF ghosts and hauntings in new ways. Thousands more began Forming paranormal investigation teams and investigating public and private locations reported to be haunted. These ghost hunters would largely view themselves as scientiFic investigators. They would sometimes rely on spirit mediumship and psychic sensitivities as spirit investigators had done For centuries, but more oFten they relied on sophisticated electronic equipment. They would measure energy Fluctuations in the environment with electromagnetic Field meters, try to capture video Footage oF spirits with Full spectrum or inFrared cameras, and try to catch anomalous spirit voices with electronic voice recorders. A slew oF new, more and more specialized equipment with Flashing lights and beeping alarms used to detect energy and communicate with spirits would follow. Though always claiming to maintain a healthy skepticism, the majority oF these ghost hunters would become convinced that they had captured empirical evidence oF the paranormal and would strive to strengthen their cache oF evidence in the hopes that it might one day be acceptable to mainstream science. This dissertation is about contemporary American ghost hunting, but more importantly it is about enchantment in late modernity. Enchantment is a term critical to my research and it is a term used and debated by scholars oF religion For more than a century. I will deFine and 1 Clearly American culture was ripe For the debut of these paranormal reality television shows. My chapter on ghost hunting and media, however, will show that a generation oF contemporary ghost hunters trace the beginning of their own ghost hunting endeavors to watching the shows. 6 discuss it in detail below. I aim to use twenty-First century American ghost hunting as a model to Further understanding oF what it looks like to have an enchanted worldview in late modernity. At the beginning oF the twentieth century, pioneering German sociologist Max Weber observed and predicted the disenchantment oF the world (Entzauberung der Welt) as modernity advanced. Later in the twentieth century, sociologists and other observers became skeptical that modern Forces lead to a decline oF religion and magic. Instead, many scholars have turned toward analyzing how disenchantment and re-enchantment go hand-in-hand even in the modern West, while others have Focused on how modern societies are not so much disenchanted as diFFerently enchanted. Weber’s observations are Far From without merit, however. Traditional religion and religious institutions have certainly seen a decline in the late- modern West. Modernity has certainly changed enchantment even iF it has not Forced it to recede. This dissertation analyzes how enchantment has changed in late modernity. In light oF the shiFting contemporary American spiritual landscape, an exploration oF ghost hunting will help us understand how enchantment appears and Functions in late modernity. Ghost hunting is a model late-modern enchantment. Few would deny that a worldview that sees the world as haunted by spirits oF various types is enchanted. On the other hand, ghost hunting bears the marks oF modernity. For example, it is scientistic, it is deeply shaped by mass media and the internet, and it draws on alternative spiritual ideas and practices in an eclectic and combinative manner. Ghost Hunting and the Contemporary American Religious Landscape Ghost hunting is especially instructive as an object oF study in the twenty-First century’s shiFting American spiritual and religious landscape. Traditional religious afFiliation is on the 7 decline while the percentage oF the population that claims no religious afFiliation is rapidly climbing. For over forty years, the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative survey oF American adults, has asked: “What is your religious preFerence? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” The percentage oF people who answer “no religion” has risen at an accelerating pace since 1990, and that acceleration is especially clear in the last two decades. In 1990, 8% oF respondents replied that they adhered to “no religion.” By the year 2000, this had risen to 14%. The latest data From 2018 shows that 23% oF respondents chose “no religion.”2 Those who identiFy with no religion do not seem to be primarily atheists or agnostics.