Abstract
Ghost walks have become a very popular phenomenon internationally. Examples in the United States are numerous — from the ‘French Quarter Phantoms’ ghost tours of New Orleans to the ‘Ghosts of Gettysburg’ tours. Examples in the Czech Republic include the ‘Mysterium Tour’, and the ‘Ghosts and Legends Tour’ by ‘Haunted Prague’. Paris has the ‘Mysteries of Paris Ghosts and Vampire Tour’. Significantly, these last three examples are English-language tours, aimed at English speaking tourists. In Scotland, Edinburgh’s ghost tours are big business. A number of different companies compete with each other for visitors’ custom: walk down the Royal Mile in summer and you end up with a fistful of flyers for a variety of walks. The largest of the companies, Mercat, offers ghost tours daily, all year round, and they don’t just run in English — there is a ‘Misterios de Ultratumba’ tour for Spanish-speaking tourists. Ghost walks are popular in England too. The London Walks Company offers several: ‘Ghosts, Gaslight and Guinness’ (starting at Holborn Tube station, its blurb influenced by an Ackroydian discourse of occult geometries), ‘Ghosts of the Old City’, ‘Haunted London’ and ‘The West End Ghost Walk’ amongst them.1 The website boasts that, barring Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the company hosts a ghost walk every day of the year.2
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Notes
Catherine Spooner, ‘“That Eventless Realm”: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black and the Ghosts of the M25’, in Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard (eds), London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (London: Continuum, 2010), pages 80–90, page 82.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), page 63.
Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), Chapter 2, ‘The Geography of Haunting’, pp. 45–64.
Alex Woodward, Haunted Weymouth (Stroud: The History Press, 2011), page 30.
Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), page 177.
Kristine Keller (2010) ‘Ghost Tours as a Form of Alternative Tourism’. http://csun.academia.edu/KristineKeller/Papers/968554/Ghost_Tours_as_A_Form_of_Alternative_Tourism (accessed 14 October, 2012), page 2.
Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), page 42.
Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead: A Study in Folk-Eschatology in the West Country After the Reformation (Ipswich and Cambridge: D.S. Brewer and Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), page 24. See Chapter 3 ‘The Folk Ghost’.
David Lodge, Paradise News (1991) (Penguin: London, 1992), page 75.
Julian Holloway, ‘Legend-tripping in Spooky Spaces: Ghost Tourism and Infrastructures of Enchantment’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Vol. 28 (2010), pages 618–637, page 622.
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© 2016 Emma McEvoy
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McEvoy, E. (2016). Ghost Walking. In: Gothic Tourism. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391292_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391292_5
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