Yorkshire Ghosts, But Not Really : On the uncertainty of weird experiences

Sammanfattning

This ethnography takes place in Yorkshire, England, and deals with the experiences of uncertainty in reportedly haunted places. I examine how people in Yorkshire come to terms with uncertainty, and suggest that this is done through an imagination of unknown presences; these were ghosts, as well as what I call the ‘something-more’. Imagination here is conceptualized as a reflexive, open-ended process, exploring many possibilities without intending to settle on one. This thesis is based on seven weeks of fieldwork in Yorkshire, England, where I visited reportedly haunted places. In addition to conventional ethnographic methods, I employed drawing, walking, and other sensory-centered methods. The central aim of this thesis is to attend ethnographically to uncertainty, and to emphasize its primacy during my fieldwork, as well as its value to anthropological analysis. I take inspiration here from previous anthropological works on uncertainty, particularly by Lisa Stevenson (2014). In discussing uncertainty of weird experiences, I approach the issue of adequate communication of such experiences, which I refer to as an ‘issue of linguistic representation’. This draws on ideas presented by Diana Espírito Santo (2023) and Mattijs Van de Port (2011) that language as a medium cannot fully represent elusive or ambiguous experiences. Essentially, this thesis argues that imagination was a way of coming to terms with the uncertainty of weird experiences. However, the imagination did not resolve uncertainty. Instead, it allowed people to engage with their experiences and the possibilities they denoted, and this way, people could move forward with their uncertainty.