This book is a history lesson. It is about "ghost excavations" at four haunted sites and what we learned from the experience. The objective is pure and simple. It is to show how, by questioning basic tenets of a "ghost hunting" paradigm, we can go beyond the contemporary reality of a field that is entertainment, and entertaining, and arrive at an investigative position of constructive research. In the process of this "excavation," we learn what it was (is) to be and remain human.

July 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. This battle is the experience most people associate with Gettysburg, as if the history of Gettysburg remains unwritten what came before the battle and what happened afterwards. Today, Gettysburg is perceived as a haunted location inhabited by the presence of ghosts who fought there 150 years ago and continue to enact that Civil War struggle today. This book is an evaluation of that perceived experience, suggesting that Gettysburg is much more than a haunted Civil War battleground.

All battlefields are haunted by the memory of what occurred there. Some, however, are haunted by more than remembrance, memorialization, and heritage events. There are American Civil War battlefields that remain "active" with the ongoing manifestations of past military behaviors. A theory of American Civil War battlefield hauntings is presented here, tied to mid-19th c. concepts of (and belief in) a "good death" and the importance of home and family. Fieldwork exploring these ideas shows, in many battlefield manifestations, a direct relationship between these concepts and battlefield...

We must respect the ruin and its presences for what they were. As we enter someone's familiar space, we must not bring an unfamiliarity to our exploration and expectations. Once inside that landscape, we are crossing perhaps multiple temporal and social boundaries. Space and time, as two fragmented walls, can inhibit our interactions with someone else's experiences and memories of that place. This is Centralia, as it was, and as its remains are visualized today.

Centralia can be thought of as a "remnant landscape." It is a geography of destruction that holds historic and social importance: the effects of coal mining operations on attached social communities. Centralia is "haunted" by the ghosts of place as a process that generates renewed materializations of past actions in new spaces (above rather than below ground). It has created an uncanny and haunting "afterlife" for this former coal mining town. There is still a lived experience here (the "Graffiti Highway"); there is still emotional attachment (the Memorial Day ceremonies by former residents);...

Sometimes, archaeological work is a performance practice entangled with a still embedded sensory presence. This book is but one point of articulation along the movement of fieldwork that traces a particular path of haunting sensory entanglements. Contextual cultural performances are meant to be archaeologically effective without imposing modernist boundaries. As archaeologists, we must be interested in the persistence of these uncanny materializing sensory entanglements. Fieldwork becomes a process of extending the 'artifact' assemblages of movement, experience, memory, and temporality to a...