This book is a ghost story, meant to be read on cold, dark, windy, and snow-covered wintry nights. These are not traditional tales of haunted houses, but rather are personal narratives of cultural hauntings of long forgotten histories of ethnic struggles, and Native American beliefs. It is an image of a landscape (and its people) that goes far deeper than the mere surface manifestations of ruined and abandoned structures, and the bits and pieces of broken dreams and aspirations. This is a different kind of embedded narrative. It is an excavation that penetrates to the very heart of ghostly drama. Experiences, conceptualized as a form of haunting, provide a framework for the recall of various incidents of personal memory and emotional resonance at specific places. This serves two purposes: It creates a personal landscape characterized by elements of spookiness (once dense forests, abandoned structures and mineshafts, coal patches); uncertainities that result in episodic haunting dramas (the socioeconomic impact of ethnic migrations); and ghostly presences (interpretations of these ethnic groups as a response to their physical surroundings); It provides a framework (in the 2nd part) for the analysis of other similiar haunted landscapes. A methodology is used that incorporates techniques derived from archaeology, ethnography, and performance studies. In doing so, it introduces a new multidisciplinary research methodology called Ethnoarchaeoghostology. This book is a dedicatory salute, however humble, to the achievements and daily struggles of those who came before to inhabit this Mahanoy Area. These hauntings fill-in the blank spaces between the words in historical narratives, and thus gives the reader a different image of events in local and regional social histories. In doing so, they show that greatness is not measured by the content of what we do, but how, on a daily basis, we do it.

This book is part of a series of ethnographic studies in cultural hauntings and ghostly landscapes. The first book, Ghost Excavator: Unearthing the Drama in the Mine Fields, was a personal excavation of the haunted Mahanoy Area. In this second book, a theory of cultural hauntings is presented that serves as a framework for investigative fieldwork. Specific techniques are introduced as a means of scientific practices to evaluate the data observed and recorded at haunted locations. This book is meant to form the infrastructure of a developing ghost science, one built from the "bottom-up". The integrated symmetrical approach of theory and scientific practice that is outlined here is a beginning point for the continuing evolution of the ghost science of the future. This search and analysis of haunting phenomena is seen as an approach that can be participated in by the many and who, through their continuing efforts, will help fill-in the "blanks" of a "ghost map" of what Shakespeare has called the "undiscover'd country".

"Digging-Deep" is an excavation of the archaeological site called "John Sabol". It is an unearthing of the author's memory of experiences ofpast presences that cuts across space, time, and culture. Water, mining operations, dust and dirt, dogs and wolves, and ghosts are seen as important features that are re-covered from these memory excavations. Some of the re-called practices that are unearthed include an alternative remembrance of "trick or treat", the multiple symmetrical worlds of history, myth, and ghosts in Winchester, England, the haunting nature of archaeological excavations and field surveys, the actor's encounters with more than a filmed "death scene", and a search for a legendary monster in Arkansas. All of these memories are perceived as symetrically-interrelated though they originate in different places. They are viewed as a form of "theatrical ghosting", a resonating element that unfolds time, as events and activities are framed by their contemporary significance in the author's life. In this process of excavation, a re-curring haunting drama manifests in the life of this archaeologist, who also happens to be a cultural anthropologist, actor, and "ghost excavator".

Phantom Gettysburg discusses the contemporary alternative version of a perceived haunted battlefield. In order to understand this alternative perception, contemporary anomalous phenomena must be affixed to and analyzed within their exact historical setting and social context. An ethnographic model of mid-19thc. American culture is used as the basis for this analysis. Specifically, the cultural beliefs relative to the concepts of death and the afterlife, as it was envisioned by these soldiers, is the basis for this model. This historical ethnographic analysis serves two purposes. First, it is a means to legitimize the methodology and fieldwork practices of ghost research. Second, it is meant to analyze the Gettysburg experience and its haunting uncertainty in its historical and sociocultural environment. The conclusion that is drawn from this comparative approach alters the reality and representation of an interactive ghostly battlefield presence. A Gettysburg haunted by Civil War soldiers is considered, for the most part, a phantom experience.

A major focus of ghost excavation, as opposed to ghost "hunting", is an archaeology of experience. The emergence of this experience is unearthed through the investigative engagement of haunted space. One aspect of this engagement is performance, which requires a specific sociocultural and historical context of understanding. This context of understanding must be understood in terms of layers of meaning. Gettysburg is used as a specific example of the use of performative and dramatical activity. Each of these activities performed at Gettysburg predisposes a genre,a set of beliefs, practices, social relations, manifestations, and locations which together define categorically what it is that is manifesting on the battlefield, and what interpretations are being used to understand these performative cultural practices. The genres of performative action at Gettysburg are important because they are located at places on the battlefield where belief systems become mobilized into actual practice. This book will explore various haunting uncertainties and cultural situations associated with ghostly activity, and the implications of these performances as they are enacted by ghost hunters, Civil War re-enactors, the tourism industry, and the "ghosts" themselves.

Ghost Research is archaeological work that requires specific field practices. This book introduces the investigative techniques of a "ghost archaeology". This is defined as a scientific discipline of the "ordinary", a search for the repetitive patterns of cultural behavior that can be unearthed during an field investigation. Six case studies of cultural hauntings are presented which illustrate the usefulness of archaeological methodology and techniques in field research. The investigation of ghostly presence at Gettysburg, in the anthracite coal region, at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and a Civil War haunting in Petersburg, Virginia are cited. These investigations show how potential evidential data can be uncovered, if only the investigators would maintain an archaeological sensibility in their fieldwork operations.

Haunted America & Other Paranormal Travels allows the reader to discover haunted venues in every state in America and even some abroad. Creepy tales from celebrities, ghost-riddled trains and highways, eerie phenomena, and unexplained anomalies. Its all here if you dare.