Search Results (22)

As Villanova University students navigate campus life, ghost stories tied to specific buildings, paths, and rituals circulate as grassroots spatial narratives. This article argues that these stories involving haunted halls, underground tunnels, and ritualized practices surrounding seals, arches, and fountains, function as forms of Radical Placemaking, through which students collectively reinterpret, appropriate, and sometimes resist the university’s officially sanctioned spatial order. Drawing on 162 student testimonies collected in 2019, translated into Spanish, and analyzed using topic modeling, co-occurrence mapping, and GIS visualization, the study demonstrates how vernacular stories encode lived experiences, informal knowledge, and alternative claims to campus space. Nine thematic clusters emerge, organized into three narrative domains: supernatural encounters anchored to institutional buildings (including Alumni Hall’s Civil War history, the St. Mary’s nun legend, and Tolentine Hall hauntings), ritual and tradition practices that reinscribe or subvert formal authority (the Corr Chapel arch, the Driscoll Hall seal ritual, and student ceremonies), and hidden-space narratives that imagine infrastructures beyond official visibility (such as underground tunnels linking campus buildings). Analysis of narrative transmission reveals uneven power relations: institutional channels circulate curated traditions aligned with university identity. Peer networks and personal experiences generate counter-mappings that privilege exploration, embodiment, and affect. Villanova’s ghost stories constitute spatial perceptions that enable students to assert belonging, contest institutional narratives, and produce place through collective storytelling within an evolving and hierarchically governed campus landscape. Full article

This essay reads Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” as folk horror about the late-Victorian spiritualist debates. We read Allen’s story as not only sympathetic to spiritualism, but also as critical of the gendered and genred politics of fin-de-siècle scientific materialism which would preclude such occult experiences—or what we frame as feminine ways of knowing. In both form and content, “Pallinghurst Barrow” challenges masculine science by foregrounding the powerful influence (on Rudolph, the protagonist) of the Gothic ghost story (“gipsy” Rachel’s cautionary tale, repeated by young Joyce). Allen’s interest in the folkloric origins of religion can be traced back to Herbert Spencer’s “Ghost Theory,” a proto-sociological explanation for the cultural construction and transmission of myth (or spirits). A lifelong friend and devotee of Spencer, Allen employs his mentor’s sociology as a way to make sense of non-material forces, including the ghost story circle and its production of Gothic awe or wonder (the wonder tale). Ultimately, then, Allen’s infamous folk horror reads as an allegory of late-Victorian spiritualist debates and, more importantly, as a defence of feminine modes of knowledge and myth-making through collective story-telling. Full article

This paper examines Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1883 story The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ in light of his later intersecting interests in spiritualism and masculinity. Conan Doyle uses the Arctic as a space where scientific and spiritual ways of viewing the world struggle to co-exist, comparing ship doctor Ray’s official journal with the ‘superstition’ of the crew, examining the role of spiritual belief in an increasingly scientific age. The paper examines how the story focuses these themes through the lens of masculinity. By reading Ray and Craigie as embodiments of possible British futures—that of scientific rationality and Romantic spirituality, Ray’s rationality is ultimately confounded and unsettled by the spectral events of the story, leaving him haunted by the events on board the ship, unable to resolve them or prevent Craigie’s death. Meanwhile, Craigie’s Romanticism leads him to embrace the spectral, but at the cost of his own life. As a result, Conan Doyle depicts both definitive worldviews as ultimately cold and desolate, neither wholly sustaining on their own terms. The ghost, as a result, becomes key to determining what sort of man ought to usher in the future—whether we recognize it as having a rational explanation or a sublime supernatural one. Full article

The literary career of Lettice Galbraith (1859–1932) coincided with a transformative period in British intellectual history, when the boundaries between scientific rationalism and occult epistemologies were being vigorously contested. This paper argues that Galbraith’s supernatural fiction represents a sharp challenge to Victorian medical science, using Gothic tropes to expose its deeply gendered structures of power. Situating her work within what Alex Owen has termed “modern enchantment”, it contends that Galbraith does not merely use the supernatural as a metaphor for social critique, but treats spiritualist practice as a legitimate methodology, a way of knowing that privileges embodied experience, and the testifying power of the material world over the cold, isolating rationality of institutional orthodoxy. Through a close reading of “In the Séance Room” and “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”, and by employing a theoretical framework that combines feminist theory with new materialist perspectives, this analysis demonstrates how Galbraith’s stories reconfigure the séance as a ‘feminist counter-laboratory’. In this space, women—both as mediums and as spectral presences—reclaim agency from male dominated medicine and psychiatry. Matter itself becomes an agential force: objects, sounds, and even atmospheres intra-act with human participants to produce truths that medical authority cannot access or suppress. Ultimately, Galbraith’s stories deliver a powerful and enduring claim, that systems of power designed to silence and erase will be undone by the vibrant presence of the material world itself. Full article

This study analyzes the award-winning documentary film Searching for Rodakis, directed by Kerem Soyyilmaz, produced in 2023. The aim of this study is the historic comprehension and analysis of this filmic narrative in the field of social–semiotic literacy and its utilization in historical studies for approaching issues of conflict in modern history, otherness, collective experience and trauma, and collective memory. The research material is the documentary Searching for Rodakis (produced by Denmark, Turkey 2023; screenplay/director, Kerem Soyyilmaz; duration, 57’), which received the following awards: Adana Golden Boll FF 2023 Turkey | Best Documentary, Thessaloniki International Doc. Festival 2023 Greece, Greek Film Festival Los Angeles 2023 USA, and Istanbul Documentary Days 2023 Turkey. As regards the historic context, the year of production, 2023, coincides with the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, where Turkey’s current borders were set and the “population exchange” legally sealed, i.e., the violent expulsion of 400,000 Muslims, citizens of Greece, many of whom spoke only Greek, and 200,000 Orthodox citizens of Turkey, who in the majority spoke Turkish. At the same time, the Treaty of Lausanne ratified and finalized the expulsion of approximately one million Orthodox who were forced to leave the Ottoman Empire, as well as 120,000 Muslims who had fled Greece since the beginning of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). About two million people were deported and lost their citizenship and property, in the context of “national homogeneity” (which connotes an ethnic cleansing), with the official states ignoring the criticisms of lawyers and academics who spoke of violations of constitutional rights. Mohammedan Greeks, estimated at around 190,000 as early as 1914, based on ecclesiastical statistics in the Pontus region, did not receive attention from the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne, even though linguistically and culturally (origin, customs, culture and traditions) they did not differ in any way from the Orthodox Greeks. In Turkey, there was general indifference to the thousands of desperate people who arrived, with the exception of a few academics and the Lausanne Exchange Foundation. The filmic scenario is as follows: as a Greek tombstone of unknown origin is discovered underneath the floorboards in an old village house in Turkey, an almost forgotten story from the country’s creation unravels—the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The engraved Greek letters tell of a woman, Chrysoula Rodaki, who died in 1887. Thus the search for her descendants begins. It leads director Kerem Soyyilmaz to local archives, where his own family’s role in history is laid bare; to abandoned ghost towns, and through the memories of older villagers—all while Soyyilmaz meets massive support for his quest from Greeks on the other side of the border. The stone becomes a portal to the past—and for a while, the trauma becomes redeemed when the previous owners of the village house return. Searching for Rodakis is a movie that reconnects people, culture, and the stories that were discarded in order to build a strong, nationalist state—told through the director’s personal experiences. The research questions, as they arise from the cinematographic material itself, are as follows: How is the historical memory of traumatic events of the previous century, such as the exchange of populations according the Treaty of Lausanne, recorded in the cinematographic narrative? What are the historical sources? To what extent did the origin, ethnicity, and geographical location of the narrators as participants influence the preservation of historical memory and the historical research? What are the criteria of the approach of the creator, and what are the criteria of the participants? Methodologically, we apply historic and socio-semiotic analyses in the field of public and digital history. The results: The types of historical sources found in filmic public discourse include the oral narration of testimonies, of experiences and of memories, as well as the director’s historical research in state archives, the material cultural objects, and the director’s digital research. Thus, historic thematic categories occur, such as the specific persons and actions in Turkey/Greece, actions on-site and in online research, and the types of historical sources, such as oral testimonies, research in archives, and objects of material culture. Sub-themes such as childhood, localities and kinship also emerge. These cinematic recordings of biographical oral narratives as historical and sociological material help us understand the political ideologies of the specific period, between the years 1919 and 1923. The multimodal film material is analyzed to provide testimonies of oral and digital history; it is utilized to approach the historical reality of “otherness”, seeking dialogue in cross-border history in order to identify differences, but above all the historic and cultural similarities against sterile stereotypes. The historic era and the historic geography of the Greek and Turkish national histories concern us for research and teaching purposes a hundred years after the Treaty of Lausanne which set the official borders of the countries. Full article

Bleeding is a rare but serious complication of pancreatitis, significantly increasing morbidity and mortality. It can arise from various sources, including erosion of blood vessels by inflammatory processes, formation of pseudoaneurysms, and gastrointestinal bleeding. Early diagnosis and timely intervention are crucial for patient survival. Imaging modalities such as computed tomography and angiography are essential for identifying the bleeding source, where endoscopy may help in detecting and treating intraluminal hemorrhage. Management strategies for patients with extraluminal bleeding may involve angioembolization or surgical intervention, depending on the severity and location of the bleeding. While advances in diagnostic and therapeutic techniques have improved outcomes, bleeding in pancreatitis remains a challenging clinical problem requiring a multidisciplinary approach. This review aims to focus its attention specifically on the bleeding complications of pancreatitis. Full article

Hitherto unnoticed similarities between two short stories by Gustav Meyrink and two of the most renowned and widely read ghost stories of M.R. James are detailed through comparative literary analysis. Specifically, one early occult horror tale of Meyrink, The Plants of Dr. Cinderella (1905), shows no less than about 15 congruences beneath the plot level (concerning specific story requisites) with M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904), as does, to the same extent, a later, widely known Meyrink tale (The Cardinal Napellus, 1914) vis-à-vis M.R. James’s Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance (1911). Although direct, conclusive evidence is unavailable, a nexus of circumstantial evidence, building on extensive biographical and bibliographical inquiries, convergently attests to these assumed literary influences on Meyrink: for both cases, the chronology is intact and thus possible; Meyrink was expertly fluent in English and well-connected to England and English literature; and, these borrowings are reminiscent of other, already known originality issues surrounding Meyrink’s work. Altogether, these new discoveries shed fresh light on idiosyncrasies of Meyrink’s creative process, imagination, and literary production; on his still under-researched literary inspirational sources; as well as on the early reception of M.R. James’s ghostly fiction beyond the anglophone sphere. Full article

In the Netherlands, there was always a clear distinction between Protestant and Catholic folklore. That is visible in witchcraft accusations, but it is also visible in ghost lore. This lore is here reconstructed applying a not always used source, to wit newspaper articles. Here, I will discuss how accounts of hoaxing on the one hand and misinterpreted experiences on the other, help to understand how, in this case people in the Netherlands of roughly a century to a century and a half ago, realized their imagination of the dead. Not in a paradisical kind of afterlife, or as rotten corpses in the ground, but as specific entities which permeated the boundaries between the living and the dead. These newspaper reports are confronted with the stories (or jokes) collected by folklorists. I will also discuss content, with a special focus on the phenomenon of the hoax. Hoaxsters, however, allow the researcher to engage with an extra dimension in the encounter, between the ghost and the observer there is now a third party interacting with both. (How this involves the researcher, is always a problem in historical research.) Was there an overall ghost picture? What was the reaction of bystanders? Moreover, this essay will move between story and history, between the past as it was experienced and as it was related to contemporaries, between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ to give it another name. As it will appear, the boundary between the two seems blurred but in the end turns out rather precise. Full article

This essay examines the placement and displacement of Nahua labor in the architectural history of Mexico’s early colonial monasteries. It takes as its point of departure the story of a ghost in the Tlaxcala monastery as told by a Franciscan missionary to analyze the discursive and spatial dimensions of emergent racial ideologies in Mexico’s earliest Catholic missions. While the ghost’s appearance signals the eruption of unresolved tensions between the missionaries and the Tlaxcalans in a cohabited religious complex, the specter also animates settler colonial domination. Cross-referencing Nahuatl and Franciscan documents reveal the ghost story as a whitewashed tale of monastic ritual life wherein the ghost effaces Indigenous labor at precisely the moments and places missionaries deemed it most threatening. In so doing, this study illuminates how racial ideologies were structured discursively and experientially at the missions and contributes to urgent debates about how the history and preservation of Catholic architecture in Mexico conceals and represses the lived experience of Indigenous peoples. Full article

In this experimental text that critically juxtaposes autoethnographic narration, reflection, and analysis with theoretical engagements, I suggest that the power dynamics that diminish and dispossess the lives of refugees and other displaced people also constrain and censor critical refugee epistemologies. Refugees are frequently impelled to speak, implored to speak, coached to speak, interrogated and ordered to speak, but on the condition that we consent to having our voices policed. Our narratives are welcomed if they affirm the humanitarian liberal order, but the knowledge we possess challenges it. Presented as benevolent and caring, the incessant demands for refugee stories and trauma erotics are also mechanisms of putting refugees in place: they assign the refugee a subject position of a conditionally accepted narrator who is refused authorship and self-possession. Our narratives fail to count as knowledge unless they are converted into writing by citizen ghost writers or coauthors. And when we refuse to recite trauma stories and instead disrupt the order of things by critically analyzing violent regimes of refuge and liberal complicity, we are censored. Refugees have things to say as ethnographers of their own lives, analysts of upside-down mobility, and critics of violent bureaucracies. This knowledge is needed and wanted. Rather than orienting our work to liberal publics, we are creating alternative, self-authorized structures that uphold displaced people as knowledgeable and world-building subjects, as people able to host others. Full article

Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around songlines: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ (2011), the idea of songlines provides a performative framework with which to both travel with music memory and to map/unmap the travelling of music memory. The theoretical focus of the work builds on empirical studies into music, place and cultural memory in the form of interviews conducted across the UK in 2010–2013. The interviews were designed to explore the way peoples’ musical pasts—memories of listening to music in the domestic home, for example, or attendance at concerts and festivals, music as soundtracks to journeys, holidays or everyday commutes to work or school, music at key rite of passage moments—have coloured and given shape to the narratives that structure a sense of embodied selfhood and social identity over time. Songlines, it is shown, tether the self to spaces and temporalities that map a tangled meshwork of lives lived spatially, where the ghosts of musical pasts are as vital and alive as the traveller who has invoked them. Analysis and discussion is centred around the following questions: How should the songlines of memory be mapped in ways that remain true and resonant with those whose spatial stories they tell? How, phenomenologically, can memory be rendered as an energy that remains creatively vital without running the risk of dissipating that energy by seeking to fix it in space and time (to memorialise it)? And if, as is advocated in the paper, we should not be in the business of mapping songlines, how do we go about the task of singing them? Pursuing these and other lines of enquiry, this paper explores a spatial anthropology of movement and travel in which the un/mapping of popular music memory mobilises phenomenological understandings of the entanglements of self, culture and embodied memory. Full article

In at least two aspects, Buddhist Avadāna literature shares a strong affinity with Chinese literature. One type of stories can be seen as parallel tales that bear striking resemblances to Chinese tales, while the other type has been assimilated by Chinese writers and transformed into Chinese tales. Regarding the first kind, there are many parallels between Buddhist and Chinese stories throughout the Six Dynasties (222–589), and it was only later that these stories were somehow compiled into collections that brought these parallels to light. As an example of the second type, in linggui zhi 靈鬼志 (The Record of Magical Ghosts) of the Jin Dynasty (265–402), the story of waiguo daoren 外國道人 (“the Foreign Master”) adapts the magical plot in which a man throws up a jug from the story of fanzhi tuhu 梵志吐壺 (“a Brahmin Spits a jug”) in the Buddhist text, yet it changes certain objects of the story to items with Chinese characteristics and develops new meaning. In Xu qixiezhi 續齊諧志 (Further Records of Qixie [Supernatural tales]), the famous e’long shusheng 鵝籠書生 (“the Goose Cage Scholar”, also known as the yangxian shusheng 陽羨書生” (the Scholar from Yangxian)”), takes the same story to another level. The structure of the story is changed, and a number of literati aesthetic interests are added, improving the literary color, smoothing down the language, and making substitutions in the text’s specifics, thus, bolstering the sense of realism and history. Meanwhile, in Liu Yiqing’s 劉義慶 (403–444) Xuanyan ji 宣驗記 (Records Manifest Records of Manifest Miracles), the Avadāna tale yingwu jiuhuo 鸚鵡救火 (“the Parrot Putting Out the Fire”) that he collected is not only associated with Buddhism but can also be seen as a commentary on the turbulent times and a hint of literati optimism if we view it in the context of Liu Yiqing’s Youminglu 幽明錄 (Record of the Hidden and Visible Worlds). The literary elites of the Six Dynasties drew inspiration from Buddhist Avadāna sources and imaginatively mixed them with historical circumstances to create Chinese fiction with new intentions. The rich resources of Avadāna literature from India and the fable tradition in Chinese literature create cultural conditions for these two sources to combine and mutually develop, forming a world of literature with colorful and meaningful stories. Full article

Belief in the existence of spiritual entities is an integral part of many people’s religious worldview. Angels appear, demons possess, ghosts haunt. But is belief that such entities exist justified? If not, are there conditions in which it would be? I will begin by showing why, once one clearly understands how to infer the best explanation, it is obvious that neither stories nor personal encounters can provide sufficient evidence to justify belief in spiritual entities. After responding to objections to similar arguments I have published in the past, I will go on to show that there is at least an imaginable circumstance in which belief in spiritual entities would be justified but then point out that it is not reasonable to think that such conditions will ever be met. In short, if such entities were real, it would be theoretically possible to demonstrate their existence scientifically, and in doing so, one could make belief in their existence justified. But doing so would require and entail a scientific revolution equivalent to proving that the Earth is flat. Full article

The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” of the Exeter Book reveals a long process of creating intelligibility and order out of a complicated and obscure manuscript context. Understanding this history of reception allows us to see the influence of Old English poetry on modern creative medievalism, including the unexpected influence of medieval “enigmatic” poetry on the modern genre of supernatural fiction. Specifically, it is argued that the scholarly reception of folios 122v–123v of the Exeter Anthology was instrumental in inspiring one of the acknowledged classic ghost stories of the twentieth century, M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Full article

An overview is given of how beetles are utilised, perceived, and experienced in daily life across sub-Saharan Africa. More than 300 people from 27 countries were interviewed and the results were compared with literature findings. Both the adults and larvae of many beetle species are eaten, mainly from the families Curculionidae, Buprestidae, Cerambycidae, Dytiscidae and Scarabaeidae. Some beetle species are used for medicinal purposes. The use of breast-shaped water beetles by adolescent girls to stimulate breast growth could be due to superstition or the effect of the defensive secretion containing steroid hormones. Blister beetles contain cantharidin, which influences the urinary tract, and is therefore used as an aphrodisiac and for treating venereal disease. Throughout Africa children play with beetles by letting them fly on a string. In the Sahel, the hard work of dung beetles is an inspiration for stories. Fireflies are generally associated with ghosts and witches, likely because the glowing of the beetles is interpreted as magical. Many beetle groups are brightly and attractively coloured and are therefore used in ceremonies and commerce. This type of indigenous knowledge, revealed in stories provided by older people, is rapidly disappearing due to urbanisation. Full article