There are multiple presences of the past that are embedded into the Centralia landscape. Even in the absence of a social community, Centralia remains a place of continuing occupation. At present, there are multiple representations of this occupied place, many of which, however, denote negative imagery ("Hell on Earth"). An alternative approach to what remains of Centralia is presented here. A site-specific performance, digging deep to "unearth" the multiple layers of a coal mining community, is explored.

It's time to end the popular "ghost hunting" trope of exploring haunted space. This popular movement has too long been characterized by contemporary entanglements between cultural myths, "legend-tripping," New Age philosophies, and mysticism in the form of a "paranormal world." Ghost hunting has become a form of "object animation" tied to electronic devices, calling the entanglement a scientific approach. There is a need for character emplacement as social interactional entanglements with past fields of memory and social behaviors. Promoting a type of fieldwork called "ghost excavations," we...

The "afterlife" of the "coal boom" in NE Pennsylvania has been too long left out of contemporary academia and heritage considerations. This is a book about this "coal boom" ruination, as a form of recovering anthracite memories. It becomes an "excavation" that exposes various layers of ruin in the form of collapsed walls and dreams, immobile machinery and economic stagnation, exposed floors and history. These remains all reveal previous entanglements of a now defunct coal mining industry. The "coal rush" is over and buried, but the infrastructure and the families of those who sustained that...