
































Haunting Tourism 

Review by Anne-Marie d’Hauteserre

Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism and the Past

by Michele Hanks

Left Coast Press, 2015

This book offers a fascinating encounter with a practice that could render certain tourist destinations

even more attractive by revealing their hidden historic secrets attributable not just to official heritage

sites: heritagization or pseudo-history fit  in well  with tourism’s ability to stage fantastic simulacra.

Michele Hanks’ text, however, dwells more profoundly with how “the ghost has a special role to play

in making history” (p. 20). She demonstrates how it allows those who have felt neglected by official

history and historical narratives to reconfigure and reinterpret power and knowledge. She articulates a

reclaiming of public-space for the non-elite as “a class-based critique of the representations of the

past.” As she underlines, visiting haunted sites and searching for ghostly presence raises important

questions not just about history and heritage but also about, for example, what happens after death. The

absence of proof positive does render the production of knowledge difficult for those who want to

“reposition themselves as experts” and “challenge the orthodox production of historical knowledge” (p.

117), but it also opens ontological and epistemological spaces for spectrality and its believers, ignored

until now. One feels drawn into and sympathetic to the cultural politics of ghost enthusiasts and their

nationalist and populist roots and consequences.

The book contains five chapters together with an introduction and a conclusion.  It is richly

filled with first person accounts by the author and by the participants. The introduction familiarizes the

reader with many of the terms used as well as the practices examined in the following chapters. The

author announces her aims, such as unveiling how ghosts do play a special role in making history or in

refashioning the past for their own aims; how ghost tourism provides an embodied means of evidencing



ghosts; what types of nationalism and modes of populism ghost hunters (etc.) engage for their politico-

social  goals,  even  if  they  are  only  implicit.  These  are  intertwined  with  discussions  of  ‘scholarly

expertise’ of traditional historical accounts and amateur expertise performance in search of a different

meaning and social acceptance. These threads run through the text, to the conclusion that the past, like

other tourist destinations, “can be experientially known.”

This is an excellent anthropological study of ghostly paranormal attractions but it seems its

relationship to tourism as a widely shared practice is rather minute. Tourism studies have taken on

different epistemological turns within recent years to generate new meanings and anthropology has

participated in the broadening of our understanding of the experiences and practices of tourists and of

those who cater to them (Xiao, Jafari, Cloke and Tribe, 2013). The well-depicted practices of ghost

tourists are of great interest to scholars of tourism but they do not qualify them as tourists. The author

launches her discussion of ghost tourism with no working definition of the term, though we later learn

that it is characterized by pleasure seeking (p. 64), an essentialist limited definition. Leisurely travel is

but one aspect of tourism. We do discover that each ghost tour “seems particularly bound to its city and

country of origin” (p. 16): for a practice to qualify as touristic, it must be done sufficiently far away

from one’s own area that one has to remain overnight. Ghost tourism is also emerging as sustained and

regular (p.45); tourism is not characterized by constancy but rather by volatility. Tourism, for example,

tends to be seasonal and to fluctuate according to global as well as local events.

The author also claims that her work engages several significant areas of tourism and tourism

research when it only superficially touches them. The study concentrates on English ghost tourism,

mostly in central England, between Manchester in the south and Middleborough in the North.

The  guide  books  about  ghosts  and  ghost  tourism assume,  according  to  the  author,  that  travel  is

necessary  to  access  haunted  places,  although there  is  no  indication  of  distance  travelled.  There  is

mention of rare international travellers (and they all come from ex colonies of Great Britain) but most

are  ‘domestic’ tourists.  Would  they  not  be  rather  ‘domestic  visitors’ since  “there  will  always  be

somewhere worthy of a visit” (p. 43)? It is translated by the author as an invitation to travel, but such

an invitation (p.45) does not automatically translate into a tourist practice. It can also mean that one can

find haunted places right around one’s own town or region.

A visit to sites, haunted, ghostly or otherwise, within one’s own town or region is not considered

tourism by most  scholars of that  topic.  The traditional definition of tourism is  that it  involves the

discretionary travel and temporary stay of persons away from their usual place of residence for one or

more nights. The overnight stay distinguishes tourists from day-trippers (visitors) who exist in much

larger numbers and underlines a different psychological orientation for tourists  (Leiper  1979).  The



touristic bears the relation to a ‘different’ place and to otherness as its central proposition (Darbellay

and Stock 2015); so tourists inhabit and interpret places differently to local residents. It does involve a

playful decoding of local practices, as in ghost tourism, so long as the haunted visits are far from home.

Tourists  use  discretionary  time  and  money,  another  reason  for  the  volatility  of  tourism  but  they

(international  or  domestic)  are  net  consumers  within  the  areas  visited,  if  they  correspond  to  the

definition above.  Tourists  are  welcome because  they bring  new money to  a  region,  which  is  why

tourism is considered an economic growth engine. Local residents spend local money: they do not

increase the amount circulating.

The  author  does  indicate  that  ghost  walks  and  commercial  ghost  hunts  are  two  forms  of

recreation, which would be the correct way of identifying the activity of most of their practitioners, as

she describes it. The author then discusses how the particular kind of engagement by ghost tourists

“disrupts  the  usual  profile  of  tourists”  (p.  122),  certainly  that  of  the  1970s  (much of  the  tourism

literature referred to dates back to the 1970s). Tourists might have been passive voyeurs, concentrating

their  gaze as John Urry (1990) had underlined, but embodied participation has been researched by

many tourist scholars over the past 25 years (Buda, d’Hauteserre and Johnston, 2014). Some tourists

engage in recreation while touring but not all. Tourism is much more complex than a simple pleasure-

seeking activity,  demonstrated  by large  participation  in  dark  tourism,  which  the  author  sometimes

mentions.

Much of this text does contribute to enriching our knowledge of one category, ghost tourists, as

well as of more democratic forms of nostalgia. It is a great read whether you believe in ghosts and the

paranormal, or not, and would be useful to scholars of heritage to broaden its present political ordering.

Even though it has not enriched the scholarly landscape of tourism, the text raises many issues of

interest to students of anthropology. The author arouses sympathy for how a particular group of citizens

seeks to manifest their presence on a national stage from which they feel marginalized, to “constitute an

occult resistance to the erasure they experience” through the application of scientism (p. 168). The

author enthusiastically concludes (even though she did admit just a few pages before that such critique

might  have  limits)  that  heritage  scholars  and  officials  should  collaborate  with  these  ‘dangerous’

subversives of established canons. It could also engage researchers and students in tourism in a moral

awakening to social change and transformation.

References Cited

Buda, M., d’Hauteserre, A-M, and Johnston, L. 

2014. Feeling and tourism studies. Annals of Tourism Research, Volume 46, Issue 1, pages 102-114.



Darbellay, F. and Stock, M. 

2012. Tourism as a complex interdisciplinary research. Annals of Tourism Research, Volume 39, Issue

1, pages 1-114.

Leiper, N. 

1979. The framework of tourism: Towards a definition of tourism, tourist, and the tourist industry.

Annals of Tourism Research, Volume 6, Issue 4, pages 390-407.

Urry, J. 

1990. The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London: Sage.

Xiao, H., Jafari, J., Cloke, P. and Tribe, J. 

2013. Annals: 40:40 vision. Annals of Tourism Research, Volume 40, Issue 1, pages 352-385.

Anne-Marie d’Hauteserre is the convenor of the tourism program in the School of Social Sciences at

the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Her main research interests are in critical issues raised by

the development of tourism or by development based on tourism projects such as the Indigenisation of

tourism development in the French Pacific or the urbanisation of the Eastern Paris Basin by Walt

Disney Company and the French state.

© 2015 Anne-Marie d’Hauteserre


