Ghost Sensations, In-Between Territories and Postmodern Connections: Haunted Houses, a fieldwork in Contemporary Denmark

This paper wishes to explore the sensation of ghosts as an in-between sensation. The uneasy feeling tied to sensations of ghosts is connected to a feeling of something not real manifesting itself as real. Ghosts seem to be perceived as something not being in the world, they are out of place, not in time, in-between. They seem to point to something not here but there, not now but before or even in the future. They seem to walk in and out of time and space.
Ghosts may be experienced in open poly-social spaces, with few inner walls and transparency between the inside and the outside, in houses with electrical lamps, cellular phones, CD players, televisions, and computers. Through the clicking of switches, the turning on and off of music on the CD player, and the footsteps on the concrete floor, ghosts have adjusted to today’s spatial surroundings. This might affect the way these sensations are perceived, but it does not alter the fact that many people experience unexplainable sensations in such settings. In other words the haunted perceive these strange sensations as, on the one hand, in between, but on the other hand, they are part of the modern – or postmodern – world of today.
This double figure attached to haunting produces a gliding between territories in regard to the space of the haunting, and the habitus and cultural imagination of the haunted; this will be unfolded through the concepts of in-between territories and deterritorialisation, striated space and smooth space. My work in progress, Haunted Houses, focuses on the relations between space and haunting, I conduct fieldwork on haunted houses in Denmark today.