Haunted by Hauntings: Ghosts and the Modern Museum Visitor

Bellamy house in 1975 appearing extra ghostly.

Researched and written by Leslie Randle-Morton,
Bellamy Mansion Museum Associate Director.

Fall—when days get shorter, leaves change color, and pumpkin spice reigns. It is also the time of year when the sublime and spooktacular seep into every corner of our lives. More things seem to go bump in the night and houses, especially old houses, are presumed extra haunted and active. But in the world of historic house museums, it’s like Halloween year-round as ghosts and ghouls are always on visitors’ minds. Museum goers of every age, every culture, and every background ask Bellamy Museum staff and volunteers daily about the supposed spooks and historic haunts on property—and some even come back from tours with stories of their own.
        Sometimes a visitor has an experience they did not expect and did not seek out. This summer a Marine came back with photos of light anomalies he captured on the children’s level of the main house after a seemingly normal self-guided tour. A mother recently came into the visitor center visibly shaken because her child, whom she claims is sensitive to spirits, was so upset by what he felt and saw in the house, he ran out crying. Some visitors come with the expressed desire of encountering the paranormal while they tour, and on the most extreme end are those visitors who rent the site to conduct para-scientific “investigations” in an attempt to get to the bottom of the ghostly goings-on.
            The question is why do so many people not only assume the site is haunted but desire it to be haunted…almost need it to be haunted? Why do vacationers seek out death during their down time? This article attempts to shed light on why modern visitors spend their leisure time and discretionary income in the pursuit of what has become known as “dark tourism.”[1]

Paranormal Popularity: Ghosts in Modern America      
       The concept of the ghost is universal,[2] yet expressions of ghosts are culturally constructed according to the needs of a particular culture at a particular time. Ghost stories have been used by societies in myriad ways including as discursive metaphors, as moral warnings, and as vehicles of social ritual. According to media professor John Potts, the ghost as an idea is utilized as a solution to a problem; it is an answer to a question.[3] The concept of the ghost, the solution, does not change, but its performative function evolves as cultural challenges evolve over time. From a scholarly perspective it is pointless to postulate whether ghosts are real or not. What is important is how ghosts and their corresponding stories culturally function.
         In the 21st century, the paranormal seems as popular as ever and can be found in many facets of American culture beyond books and movies. Reality television series such as Ghost Hunters, Paranormal Witness, and Ghost Adventures have multiplied in recent years and now ghostly programming is offered by almost every major cable channel. Even scripted forensic dramas such as The Ghost Whisperer and Medium achieved popularity in a post-9/11 America that assuaged new anxieties with detectives who could see the unseen.[4] The internet is awash with websites selling ghost hunting equipment and promising definitive paranormal proof, one goal of which is to recruit would-be ghost hunters.
       The thirst for paranormal experiences has spilled over into other free-choice learning environments where an amalgam of walking ghost tours, haunted reenactments, and cemetery tours are a short walk or a leisurely drive away for most Americans. History museums have not been spared from America’s obsession with all things paranormal. John Potts argues this is partly because ghosts “are representations of the past as [they] endure in the present. To be haunted by a ghost is to be haunted by the past.”[5] And in this age where younger visitors desire an experience for their Instagram story over a boring old souvenir, being haunted by the past is all the rage.

Death and Disney: Visitor Motivations and Learning in Museums
       Visitor study researcher John Falk offers a possible explanation as to why Americans seek out ghosts during their leisure time. He explains that many 21st century citizens focus on the higher ends of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: security, self-esteem, and self-fulfillment. The struggles for food, shelter, and warmth are no longer major driving motivations in developed nations, and moving up Maslow’s hierarchy is now enacted through leisure rather than work including in free-choice leisure learning environments like museums. Americans expect their spiritual, cultural, and intellectual needs to be simultaneously met during their leisure time in a type of “consumptive multi-tasking”[6] which are congruous to the overlapping motivations of the personal, the sociocultural, and the physical which Falk and Lynn Dierking argue each visitor brings to a free-choice learning setting.[7]
       These qualitative shifts in leisure needs have given rise to a quantitative explosion of leisure opportunities, and visitors exert choice and control over where they go and what they learn. According to Falk, this control fuels self-actualization and feeds the higher end of Maslow’s hierarchy creating and affirming personal identity. So, when a visitor chooses a certain museum or a specific guided tour, they are essentially affirming who they are through their leisure activities.[8] But why do visitors expect all old buildings, especially historic house museums, to be busting at the seams with specters, and why are they so bummed out if we tell them they’re not? 
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From Pilgrimages to Post-Modern Angst: The History of Thanatourism
       For centuries, humans worked through the emotional, spiritual, and psychological effects of death, dying, and the afterlife within formal settings such as the church, but one fairly-new lens through which to examine the modern American fascination with death and the paranormal is that of the burgeoning, yet sometimes problematic, study of “thanatourism,”[9] or “dark tourism.”
       First touched upon in the early 1990’s by Chris Rojek, who discussed tourism’s ‘black spots,’[10] the term thanatourism was first coined by Anthony Seaton in 1996. Seaton defines thanatourism as “…travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death… particularly, but not exclusively, violent death…,” although this interest in violence only developed over time.[11] Seaton argues that this interest represents a metamorphosis of thanatopsis—the contemplation of death itself, an almost universal concern. According to Seaton, thanatopsis became thanatourism as pilgrimages to sites of martyrdom and holy shrines became stylish for the eighteenth-century European elites.
       In the early stages of thanatourism, the supply side was spontaneous such as battlefields or sites of executions, and often religious in nature. Visitors were focused on the idea of death itself rather than the manner of death. This defining characteristic evolved during the Romantic period as science began to obfuscate religion which, according to Seaton, dislodged thanatopsis from the church, and thanatourists became motivated by a spiritual need to “…make death a highly normal and present element in every-day life…”[12] Thanatourism continued to develop, even with deliberateness, involving both historical and contemporary sites. The Romantic notions of the Sublime, the Other, the Gothic and Black Romanticism further transformed thanatourism through the abandonment of “older notions of communal morality and belief…” and the development of “a secular taste for murder and violence…”[13] As a result, the particular manner of death began to matter as much as the notion of death itself.

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The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was one of the first major sites for thanatourists. According to researcher Anthony Seaton, "No other battle attracted comparable public attention or detonated such an immediate spate of visitation—so immediate, in fact, that it started while the battle was actually taking place." Image courtesy of Getty Images.

In addition to defining and explaining thanatourism, Seaton also developed a five-part taxonomy, based on a spectrum of intensity:
1. Travel to watch death
2. Travel to sites after death has occurred
3. Travel to internment sites and memorials
4. Travel to re–enactments
5. Travel to synthetic sites at which evidence of the dead has been assembled
 
       Philip Stone has also recently elaborated on Seaton’s categorization of intensity, suggesting that sites associated with death are situated at the lighter end of the spectrum while sites of death are situated at the darkest end. [14]

Tourism scholar Graham Dann alliteratively extended Seaton’s categories without considering a spectrum of intensity to include:

1. Perilous Places: which include towns of terror from the past as well as dangerous destinations of the present
2. Houses of Horror: refer to buildings associated with violent ends. This category also contains edifices that have been appropriated by the tourism industry as places of display (dungeons of death) or accommodation (heinous hotels)
3. Fields of Fatality: encompass tracts of land devoted to the commemoration of fear, fame or infamy. This group comprises bloody battlegrounds, the hell of holocaust and cemeteries for celebrities
4. Tours of Torment: as the name suggests, place the accent on group visitation of dark attractions. Subsets include trips to sites of mayhem and murder, and meetings with the now notorious.
5. Themed Thanatos: relates to various collections that have been constructed around life and death. They include morbid museums and monuments to mortality.[15]

 
​       While Seaton analyzed the development of dark tourism in antiquity, other scholars have considered the topic of dark tourism as a modern manifestation. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley maintain that thanatourism is an exclusively modern manifestation which grew out of early twentieth-century industrialization, universal suffrage, and the spread of education in America. These hallmarks of modernity gave some the “wealth and freedom to travel and the education to benefit from the experience,”[16] spawning a tourism industry that encompassed travel, accommodations and attractions.
       In spite of their interpretive disagreements, Anthony Seaton and John Lennon joined forces in 2004 in order to further expound on the definition of dark tourism. Blending their understanding of dark tourism, they acknowledge that “mass media have largely usurped the function of the church as an institution with the power to sacralize people and places as targets of devotional travel.”[17] They further remark that contemporary members of developed societies feel a need to find new ways to connect with death, as modern hospitals, nursing homes and funeral parlors have served to privatize death and erode its place in the modern collective mind. With death separated from everyday life, the “media and tourism [now] offer opportunities for legitimate, vicarious contact with death”[18] and visitors often believe we museum professionals are just hiding the truth about ghosts from them.

Death in the American home was once common, and many Americans were born, lived, and died in the same house. Holding wakes and funerals in the home was also standard. As hospitals and mortuaries grew in popularity, the average American no longer experienced closeness with death to the same degree, and Americans began to seek out experiences with death in other ways. Image courtesy of Getty Images.

​Into the Light: Victorian Spiritualism and the Afterlife
       Seaton and Lennon argue that secularization and anxieties associated with the processes and products of modernity play a part in visitor motivation to sites of dark tourism, but they leapfrog neatly over major modern societal developments of which we are still heirs—namely the evolution of modern religion that came about during the 19th-century and man’s quest for proof of the afterlife.
       Just like thanatourism, the exact origins of American Spiritualism are elusive. Spiritualism, “a popular religious practice conducted through communication with the spirits of the dead,”[19] contained traces of Shakerism, Quakerism, mesmerism as well as tenets of some lesser known fringe groups like the followers of the mid-eighteenth century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg attempted to use theology as empirical proof of man’s immortal soul. His practical blending of empirical scientific thought with the reading of Scripture led Swedenborgians to believe that there was an absolute truth beyond man’s external senses. The mystic laid out a detailed geography of heaven that both Swedenborgians and later Spiritualists used to explain communing with the spirits and their objections to the formation of formal churches. Swedenborgians eventually succumbed to a formal church system and rejected communication with spirits which is why some historians give the Swedish mystic credit for planting the “cosmic seeds of a system”[20] without actually giving him credit for the Spiritualist movement itself.
       Most historians maintain that the true timeline of American Spiritualism can be traced to 1848, on a New York farm, where two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, began communing with Mr. Splitfoot, the spirit of a murdered peddler who had died in their home. Through raps, taps, and various knocks, Mr. Splitfoot answered the girls’ questions in conversations that were more personal than any spirit communication Swedenborgians or Shakers experienced. The Fox sisters maintained that they operated a “spiritual telegraph”[21] through which messages could be received from and sent to spirits. Unlike that of Quakers and Swedenborgians, the Fox sisters’ communication methods and messages were of a more personal nature which, when considered with the cultural and historical confluences of antebellum America including sectarianism, revivalism, African religious influences, and utopian experimental societies, help explain why within a few short years American Spiritualism was ubiquitous. Séances were held from coast to coast where spirits rapped, levitated, and spoke through mediums delivering everything from benign messages of comfort for surviving loved ones to portents of doom in a rapidly industrializing society.

Kate and Maggie Fox, "spiritualists" from Rochester, NY. Photo courtesy of Alamy Stock Photo.

       ​According to historian Molly McGarry, Spiritualism, which began “as a children’s ghost story, and later as an after-dinner entertainment, quickly became a popular national phenomenon and a powerful new religion.”[22] This religion did not require faith, but merely asked potential devotees to investigate the spiritual plane, which could therefore prove the existence of an eternal spirit, and Spiritualism’s need was “unflagging—and at times desperate—in its effort to prove survival.”[23]
       This blending of new scientific thought with mystical elements of traditional religion exemplified the Victorian struggle with modernity in a society in which the traditional was seen as being quickly supplanted by the innovative. Spiritual mediums even imbued modern technologies with magical properties as they channeled human telegraphs and produced spectral photography. This dichotomous belief in unseen forces and the need for scientific proof of their existence is embodied today in what John Potts describes as the “enlightened believer.”[24] Ghost hunters, equipped with electromagnetic field monitors, full spectrum cameras, and electronic voice phenomenon recorders are simply secular late modern versions of 19th century Spiritualists “who firmly suspect that ghosts and other supernatural phenomenon do exist, but that plausible evidence must be found for them, based on empirical evidence.”[25]

       Historian Robert S. Cox elaborates on the performative nature of Spiritualism to include Victorians’ search for personal identity through the notion of soulmates. To find one’s authentic self, men and women began opting for sympathetic relationships based on love and interconnectedness rather than societal pressures of status or socioeconomic assuredness. Spiritualists espoused the benefits of free love and sympathetic, referred to by Spiritualist A.B. Child as “soul affinity.”[26] Spiritualists who adopted Child’s fascination with soul affinity believed that every person on earth has a spiritual counterpart but understood that the pitfalls of the mortal world might inhibit true soul affinity until after the spirit departed the body. They maintained that two destined souls could never truly be separated. This Victorian emergence of mutual love and a bond everlasting bestowed ghost stories with a reoccurring theme recognizable still: lost love. Doomed spirits, usually sad Victorian women robed in long white or gray dress, are destined to wander the cliffs, or the widow’s walk, or the cemetery in an eternal search for their soulmate. One longtime Bellamy volunteer who has been involved with the site since before it was even a museum has his own “lady in grey” story about a forlorn ghost he claims many used to see wandering the rooms in the main house.
       Spiritualism and the idea of soul affinity did more for 19th century women than turn them into forlorn spectral protagonists of Victorian ghost tales. The idea of a soulmate made women spiritually necessary. Spiritualist discussions of a balanced universe emphasized equally the importance of men and women. Female mediums channeled spirits who delivered radical messages on topics from marital rape to women’s role in public office. The most visible evidence of “the link between female empowerment and Spiritualism is the historic connection between suffragism and Spiritualism.”[27] Not all Spiritualists were suffragists or vice versa, but the first suffrage leaders in America noted that Spiritualism embraced the equality of women with a zeal yet unheard in antebellum America. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony acknowledged the religion’s positive position on women in suffragist writings. Spiritualist newspapers openly advocated for women’s rights, and female mediums commanded public speaking platforms.
       The end of the era of Spiritualism with a capital “S” cannot be neatly packaged. Some historians, like Robert S. Cox, determined the 1870’s as the twilight years of American Spiritualism asserting that the half million casualties of the Civil War did not speak through mediums with any amount of fervor found in antebellum America.[28] Others, like Molly McGarry, asserted that Spiritualism continued, though fractured, through the beginning of the twentieth century because “the ghost is a powerful way of understanding memory and identity.”[29]
       Even if Spiritualism as a religion faded way, the search for an afterlife has not.  In a 1993 article for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Brian Harley and Glenn Firebaugh found that over 70% of Americans believe in some form of an afterlife. In fact, the overall trend in Americans’ belief in an afterlife rose, although slightly, between 1970 and 1990.[30] There is evidence, from the proliferation of pseudoscientific ghost hunting societies to Americans’ insistence in belief of an afterlife that remnants of 19th-century Spiritualism are still at work in American society today.

The Spiritualist movement had an impact on 19th century women as it made them necessary in new ways--as "soulmates" and as mediums. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony acknowledged the religion’s positive position on women in suffragist writings, and Spiritualist newspapers championed ideas of women's equality. Images courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Paranormally Perceived: Opportunities and Obstacles of a “Haunted” Historic Site
            So it seems pushing back on visitors’ desire to encounter death and life after death at historic sites would just be an exercise in futility, so how do museum professionals harness this deep, intrinsic visitor motivation, and should they? The majority of museumgoers is under the age of fifty[31] and is more accustomed to “curating culture” and filtering personal preferences through mass media avenues like Facebook and Instagram. As institutions like print newspaper and fraternal organizations decline, websites like Reddit and YouTube continue to gain popularity because, like other leisure options, the user has choice and control of what content to explore along with the option to give feedback or engage in discussion with likeminded users. These qualities appeal to the population that already makes up the majority of museum visitors, and museums need to respond to these “extremely creative consumers”[32] lest they run the risk of losing them to other leisure options. Historic sites and museums that offer ghost tours, historic happy hour, adult arts and crafts, and other specialized classes or tours are tapping into modern visitors’ personal, sociocultural, and physical needs of consumptive control, self-actualization, and identity making, but it remains to be seen if these offerings fulfill the educative mandates inherent in museum mission statements and programming goals.  
       An area dark tourism can have a continued, positive impact is when it comes to a museum’s bottom line. So many historic house museums, the Bellamy Museum included, are not-for-profit organizations or run by small nonprofits which receive no state or federal funds. Revenue comes from grant writing, donations, admissions, and after-hours private rentals. This means a site’s ability to host weddings, business meetings, and even paranormal investigations can be an integral part of the annual budget. Most recently the Bellamy Museum leaned into people’s deathly desires not by offering ghost tours ourselves, but by renting to ghost hunting companies like Haunted Rooms America who offer anyone the ghost hunter experience in historic places across the U.S. for a fee. Haunted Rooms America will hold six overnight investigations at the Bellamy site in 2025. Please note the Bellamy Mansion Museum does not allow any investigating in the site’s original slave quarters building. These groups only have access to the main house on property.

       With investigations come “evidence” which often lives in perpetuity on online platforms. These videos, photographs, and “electronic voice phenomenon” shape a narrative outside the purview of museum professionals and an educational mission, so when a visitor asks “Is this place haunted?” the official answer is important lest people confuse the interpreted for the inferred. At the Bellamy Museum we often answer that question with an identity affirming, “if you believe ghosts are here, then they are, and if you do not, they are not.”

Interested in hearing more about the supposed spooks at local sites like the Bellamy Museum and positioning documented historical education alongside the public's interest in the supernatural? Check out the podcast link “Burgwin-Wright Presents: Haunted Tales of the Cape Fear” from our friends at the Burgwin-Wright House and Gardens—Wilmington’s oldest historic home open to the public. BWH Assistant Director Hunter Ingram talks with Leslie Randle-Morton of the Bellamy Museum about their experiences.
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[1] John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, two professors of hospitality, tourism and leisure management at Glasgow Caledonian University first coined the term in the late 1990s. Their first full length exploration and analysis of this phenomenon was Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster published in 2000. 
[2] John Potts, “The Idea of the Ghost,” in Technologies of Magic, ed. John Potts and Edward Scheer (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006), 82.
[3] Potts, 79. Potts draws on the evolution of intellectual historians such as Collingwood, Focault, and Kuhn in acknowledging that ideas are not unchanging but are dynamic in their historical function and require contextualization rather than just a moniker (the name attached to an idea) to truly understand them.
[4] Ann McGuire and David Buchbinder, “The forensic gothic: Knowledge, the supernatural, and the psychic detective.” Canadian Review of American Studies 40, no. 3 (2010): 290.
[5] Potts, 83.
[6] John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009), 43.
[7] John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Learning from Museums (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2000), 13.
[8] Falk, 41-45.
[9] Anthony Seaton, “Guided by the Dark,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996).
[10] Chris Rojek, Ways of Escape (London: MacMillan, 1993), 136. 
[11] Seaton, 240. 
[12] Seaton, 237. 
[13] Seaton, 237.
[14] Richard Sharpley, “Shedding Light on Dark Tourism,” in The Darker Side of Travel, ed. by Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009), 20. The chart was scanned directly from the book.
[15] Graham Dann, “The Dark Side of Tourism,” Etudes et Rapports L, no. 14 (1998): 3.
[16] Lennon and Foley, 7.
[17] Anthony Seaton and John Lennon, “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century,” in New Horizons in Tourism, ed. Tej Vir Singh (Oxfordshire: CABI Publishing, 2004), 69.
[18] Seaton and Lennon, 70.
[19] Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Future Past (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2008), 1. 
[20] Robert Cox, Body and Soul (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 2003), 12-13. 
[21] McGarry, 2. 
[22]  Ibid, 2.
[23] Roy Stemman, Spirits and Spirit Worlds (London: Danbury Press, 1975), 26.
[24] John Potts, “The Idea of the Ghost,” in Technologies of Magic, ed. John Potts and Edward Scheer (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006), 82. 
[25] Potts, 86.
[26] Robert Cox, Body and Soul (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 2003), 95.
[27] McGarry, 46-49.
[28] Cox, 233.
[29] McGarry, 175.
[30] Brian Harley and Glenn Firebaugh, “Americans’ Belief in an Afterlife,” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32, no. 3 (1993), 269-278. The study analyzed answers from over 16,000 Americans who identified as Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, Jews, “None”, and “Other.”
[31] Susie Wilkening and James Chung, Life Stages of the Museum Visitor (Washington, DC: AAM,2009), 7.
[32] Wilkening and Chung, 145.