Fragmentation in the Contemporary Haunted Ruin

Fragmentation in the Contemporary ‘Haunted’ Ruin John G. Sabol I.P.E. Research Center Bedford, Pennsylvania (USA) August 2024 In this era of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’, this ‘Age of Destruction’, we have a large variety of exploratory and investigative work in and around contemporary abandoned buildings in various states of ruination and conspicuous atmospheric settings: paranormal investigation, public ‘ghost hunt’, dark tourism, ‘legend-tripping’, even archaeological field survey. But the means of those who come to these places to establish the ‘subject’ of their visits and/or fieldwork is not the same as those practices one must use to achieve an objective of determining what still remains amid the surface debris and disorder. This becomes a difference between what one is ‘doing’ there, and what one is attempting to accomplish at these sites of abandonment. This has led to various types, ways, and levels of distraction from a serious analysis of documenting the continuing presence of the past in the present, as a possible reality beyond the obvious material debris and structural fragmentation. There is confusion, a frequent component of fieldwork at these locations, between objective and method, between ‘edutainment’ and ‘carnivalesque’ behavior, and between present and past. Let’s not define (or re-define) what is present and what is past within the banal and subjective generalization of a generalized ‘para-normality’ presence within the ruin and abandoned buildings. Such a negative, initial orientation and perspective surely is marginal and locates presence on the edge, at best. It contrasts ‘dramatically’ with a more challenging view that what may remain may be located in continuing fields of memories, as an inquiry into a broader, contextual, layered history of cultural production, site occupation, and ‘humanness’. Within (and ‘below’) the surface debris and architectural disorder and fragmentation, is there the presence of some aspect of past reality still in use and movement? The conceptualization of this reality may be what archaeologist John Barrett (2014) has stated as an “understanding of humanity as an emergent form of life whose history has been one of fragmentation into diverse forms of humanness” (2016: 134). The distinct fragmented forms of humanness unearthed through archaeological excavations throughout the world and among other societies and cultures has always been that ‘other’ presence, as localized forms of this humanness, even when that presence remains (and continues) in ruin and abandonment. We must eliminate, especially at these abandoned places, the idea of ‘absence’ and the obsession with presenting ‘presence’ from this absence in a ‘paranormal’ way. We must begin to think in terms of ‘fragmented humanness’. And an engagement with this ‘fragmented humanness’ must be worked (and performed) within the context of an understanding of those conditions that caused this fragmentation. This changes the engagement process at these locations to an analysis of ‘place-making’ that created that particular ‘humanness’ in a particular layer of site occupation, one now in ruin: a specific social and material architectural setting into which performances were once enacted. This (these) setting(s) becomes layers of socio-temporal ordered memory practices of ‘humanness’ that may remain, albeit in fragmented form today at these locations. Fragmentation is a familiar trope in the exploration of landscapes in ruin, and in archaeological excavation (cf. Chapman 2000). It is also a characteristic element at many haunted locations, especially in paranormal investigations of contemporary abandoned buildings and other structures in ruin. At such sites, there is still fluidity, a movement against boundedness, a place where trace and fragmented presence could be understood in an ongoing meaningful way. If places, in various states of contemporary ruination, were socially and performatively constructed in which spaces were organized and identities were created and defined, then such places may still contain fragments (‘signature traces’) and ‘time-marks’ (cf. Rost 2024) of sociotemporal order amid fields of memory. These potential ‘time-marks’ are important in such locations: “A time-mark is an event of cultural significance that occurred at or in association with a place and that helped create or reinforce the place value of that place” (Chapman 2012: 73). Do haunted locations, especially those contemporary sites in ruin and now abandoned, have significant ‘time-mark(s)’ that reinforce the value of that particular location in other than a ‘paranormal’ way? Is this ‘place value’, one in a fragmented state, representative of layered fields (or strata) of memory? Are ‘identity’ and ‘performance’ still remembered in practices that may still be executed there as ‘socially-constructed’, perceived haunt phenomena? If these fragmented ‘time-marks’, as specific ‘signature traces’ within layers of ordered memories, their contemporary fragmented nature becomes a conceptual tool and category of the presence of the past in the present, and can be recovered, I propose, and ‘exposed’ at these haunted sites. They can become “part of a social strategy of remembrance” (Rost 2024: 174) at the site as a form of investigative ‘memory activism’. By using the concepts of ‘time mark’ and ‘place value’ at a contemporary site in ruin and abandoned, it can situate investigations there within a specific layer of socio-temporal order of site historical context. And through space-specific performance practices, in unison with material (object) memory (that was known at the time in that layer of occupation), meaning can be recreated to the time of past situation/event in potential conserved fields of memory, even when these layers of ‘time-marks’ are fragmented. Furthermore, can possible practices, in various states of fragmentation, be also related to wider social processes, as inter-site/landscape relations to other so-perceived ‘haunted’ locations? If so, then fieldwork becomes an analysis of presence as ‘haunt phenomenal multiplicities’ as it relates to ‘subject/place’ haunting associations. This idea of fragmentation at a haunted location, however, is not a ‘stand-alone’ phenomenon, but may also include the process of ‘enchainment’ and ‘gathering’, a movement within and between haunted locations. This ‘enchainment’ at a haunted site is not associated with ‘entrapment’ to a space/place due to an untimely, horrific death. Enchainment refers to a ‘fractured’ practice still present and performed at the haunted site that ‘haunts’ the present, and is tied (or ‘enchained’) to a particular entity/practice/object entanglement that remains ‘active’ (though not necessarily always present) until invoked, I suggest, by practices of investigative memory activism. This ‘enchainment’ is a particular ‘time-mark’ at the location, and adds an important ‘place value’ to the site as a specific ‘signature trace’ of past socio-temporal order and memory, even in its fragmented state. A haunted location may have various fragments of intra-site ‘enchained’ practices, part of a wider fragmented biographical history of both an individual (or group) ‘humanness’ that still remains at the location, and that also remains ‘active’ at other locations that individual or group once occupied. These other fragmented types of haunted locational ‘enchainment’ would ‘haunt’ different layers of order at each location, representative of different ‘times’, social circumstances, and situational histories that they interacted with at those other locations. In many ‘paranormal’, ‘folkloric’ narratives of popular culture and ‘legend-tripping’, we have instances of various entities who haunt multiple locations. For example, in the United States, Edgar Allan Poe is said to haunt locations in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and others. In the U.K., it is said that Anne Boleyn haunts Hever Castle, the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, and other locations. At haunted locations, ‘enchainment’-links of people, performance, and object use- facilitates, through investigative memory activism practices, the recovery of fragmented individual and/or group ‘humanness’, in the form of various manifestations of their particular human character at these different haunted locations. This represents an individual ‘gathering’ (or group) of particular memories that differ from one site to another. This suggests a deeper ‘mapping’ methodology of inter-site relations and associations of fragmented entities who ‘haunt’ differently at each location. Such mapping could produce individual (or group) ‘life-cycles’ and their ‘life-after’ cycle, both of which retain their particular form of ‘humanness’, albeit in fragmented form. These ‘haunting’, fragmented performances may suggest that reality at some, if not many, haunted sites may relate to a form of ‘ontological continuity’: what was performed in the past is what hauntingly remains today, in a fragmented form, at many different locations. This ‘fragmentation’ of acts may manifest as a mode of ‘becoming present’ when activated through investigative memory activism via a remembrance and execution of those past practices in contemporary fieldwork. At a haunted location, even in places in ruin and abandoned, there may exist no ‘dead time’, except when the investigators make it so: through the ‘monitoring’ of space, either remotely or in a ‘vigil’, and waiting for something to happen. Things may continue in motion at these locations, but without doing something that awakens memories, nothing may occur. I also propose that this type of haunt phenomena will continue as long as its original associations with past memories remains in place, even in this fragmented ‘state of being’. This fragmented ‘state of being’ (a ‘ghostly presence’) can be thought of as a ‘dividual’, not an individual. Archaeologist C. Fowler (2004) has stated that a ‘dividual’ describes a “state of being in which the person is recognized as being composite and multiply-authored” (2004: 8), “the person is comprised of multiple features with different origins” (Ibid: 8). If a person in life was ‘dividual’ with ‘multiple features’ and acted as a ‘composite’ because of ‘different origins’ (performing differently in different spaces and places?), can (does) this fragmented ‘dividual’ behavior continue in a ‘life-after’ physical death? And is this a form of ‘fragmented humanness’, as cultural performance, that may present itself in the occupational record of different sites in which the ‘dividual’ once lived and/or worked during their lifetime? Does this mean, as archaeologist John Barrett (2022) has stated that this is “the way towards understanding how an archaeological commitment to other forms of humanity might be practiced” (2022: 110)? Is this ‘other form of humanity’ what is occurring at some haunted locations? Does this presence of humanity at multiple locations represent ‘multiplicity’ and ‘discontinuities’ in time (and layer of social order) at each site this ‘fragmented dividual’ may ‘haunt’? Does this create different ‘haunt stratigraphy’ at each site involved in this ‘dividual fragmentation’, itself dependent upon the particular performance practices, associated with particular material objects, that the ‘dividual’ enacted at each location, and as a continuing ‘humanness’ of their particular persona? Such thinking, away from the concept of ‘paranormality’, is a paradigm shift toward this ‘ontological continuity’ that may be occurring at a haunted site, through ‘dividual fragmentation’ of a human ‘signature trace’. This shifts our perspective beyond thinking about ‘ghosts’ as fixed entities and/or non-human environmental anomalous conditions that suggest a haunting may be occurring. A shift toward human biographical research and the concept of ‘fragmented dividual’ entities, rather than ‘para-history’, can become a focus on the idea that ‘humanness’, as a continuity of cultural production that remains in memory, may exist in (and through) space and time as ‘life-after’ performance practices. A haunting may be, in many cases, about the human performance of these ‘dividual’ entities and their continuing ‘enchained’ relationships toward associated assemblages of particular material objects within specific layers of socio-temporal order (not ‘disorder’) at several sites. Our task as investigators at these sites is to expose and analyze how different relationships of human behavior had (and continue to be) enacted and may be producing haunt phenomena at each location in individual and/or group ‘life-cycles’. The reality of many contemporary abandoned and in ruin buildings is not their absence of presence and silence, but the abundance of human and non-human (material) fragmentation, haunting histories, ‘the dividual ghost story’, and also, unfortunately, the ‘interference’ imprinted on the investigative scene from media archaeological residue that continually focuses on ‘paranormality’ as the ‘normal’ reality of these locations. Within these synecdochic settings of fragmentation, human popular culture flourishes, including forms of ‘dark tourism’ and ‘legend-tripping’. These responses to the trace and fragment, the incomplete record of function and occupational place biography, have resulted in many instances of outbursts of emotional, not investigative, ‘carnivalesque’ activity as the re-occupation of site, even though most are of short and limiting duration. Still, these non-context-specific and ‘disorderly’ presences amid layers of ruination ‘open-up’ new associations and create new realities that are applied toward new purposes that produce alternative palimpsest processes through a series of erasures. Does abandonment and ruination, then, become a surface ‘staged’ space for transformation in something that was not part of the past reality of the site(s)? And is this reality a ‘haunting’? Human and non-human (material) entanglements have created fragmentation, ‘actors’ who co-equally are involved in a location’s degree of ruination and disorder. This fragmentation goes deeper than the surface debris. Haunted histories are full of these fragmented bodies of information. Yet, their exploration remains simply a surface scan and/or measurement. Yet, this large body of fragmentation, both on the surface and in layers of presence beneath, might reflect some kind of order that differ from the perceived disorder and ruin. Can one use this “fragmentation theory”, similar in conception to one used in archaeology (cf. Chapman 2000), to develop a particular human and material culture assemblage that ‘haunts’ these sites in ruin? Archaeologist J. Chapman (2000) has shown how fragmentation played a role in creating people and places; and how material object fragmentation could reference memories across time and space in which new contexts were created. Does a specific type of fragmentation occur in these places that create a sense of ‘haunting’? Can this haunting fragmentation evolve into local ‘ghost stories’ as the site’s new transformative character? Are the haunting fragmentations that may be manifesting producing a shifting order of past presence rather than the contemporary disorder seen at many of these sites now in ruin and abandoned? Is the haunting, then, a particular state of becoming present (as transformed fragmentation), rather than merely already present (as a fragmented state of being)? Can layered fragments of presence have importance as past acts, situations, and events, that may remain conserved in memory, in the ‘life-after’ of formal human occupants of these locations? Can such a state of transforming fragmentation be ‘activated’ today? Can a “fragmentation premise” (cf. Chapman and Gaydarska 2007) represent an association between contemporary investigative memory activism at these locations and can past transforming fragmentations, in the form of ‘responding’ memory activations, produce a particular type of haunting phenomena at these sites? If so, this would enable entanglements of practices and memories to potentially transform fragmented ways of being in the world and, at the same time, be transformed into specific ‘ordered’ ‘fragmentation assemblages’ in the contemporary setting of ruin and disorder. This may lend support to the idea of an incomplete past reality that is still largely unrecognized at these locations, something still missing in the ruin and abandonment, that is not being perceived or recorded but still remain in memory as part of the site’s occupational record. Finally, is a haunting, especially a ‘haunter’ who is perceived at various locations, a form of intentional ‘dividual’ fragmentation directly related to important and personal continuity of selected memories? If so, this can provide information and clues to localized haunting identity and regionalized practices that continue to become present at selected locations by the ‘haunter’. This idea of intentional, selective performance fragmentation, forming a specific layer of memory stratigraphy at selected sites, becomes a meaningful deposit of an ongoing cultural production of ‘humanness’ at these locations. In fragmentation at haunted sites, especially contemporary buildings in ruin and abandoned, we have the beginning of the end product of a ‘rite of passage’ for some, as a transformation to a different state of being, and a different way of being present. In this sense, the fragmentation into different ‘dividual’ presence that haunt various locations is not the end of ‘life’ but becomes a transformed beginning, enabling new paths (and journeys) of presence to occur and become present, amid trajectories of ‘haunt’ phenomena from a single human or perhaps group) lifetime. The time of ‘pulp explorations’ of one haunted location in a quest to identify one ‘ghostly presence’ is over… Bibliography Barrett, John. 2014. The Material Constitution of Humanness. Archaeological Dialogues 21 (1): 65-74. 2016. Archaeology after Interpretation: Returning Humanity to Archaeological Theory. Archaeological Dialogues 26 (2): 133-37. 2022. Humanness as Performance. Archaeological Dialogues 29: 109-19. 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