Haunted Places in US Culture

What makes a place haunted is the narrative of its ghosts: the curse of the place is expressed through the hauntings of that place by the ghosts of the people who died there. Ghosts are an expression of negative transgression, that is, a violation of social norms and cultural values that leads to the moral destabilization of the community: haunted places are places of tragedy, of deaths caused by violence and negligence. The basic features of haunted places in the US are liminality, the historical experience of what happened there, and the fact that they represent the boundary between the everyday and the impossible. The crossing of the existential boundaries by ghosts is analogous to negative transgression in social behavior. The liminality of ghosts thus corresponds to the liminality of haunted places in spatial, existential, ontological and moral terms. They appear as a kind of propaedeutic device in cultural communication, for the atrocities of their stories address what is good and bad according to the norms of cultural thought, and what is proper and improper in social behavior. Several different types of places are featured in this discussion: private ones, like dwelling places, as well as numerous public places, including a public library, a quarry, a public park, a village lane, a teahouse, the site of one of the best-known battles in United States history, a former correction facility, a beech etc, across the entire country: Atchison, Kansas; New Orleans, Fort Leavenworth and plantations in Louisiana; Peoria, Illinois; Reelsville, Indiana; Little Bighorn, Montana; Washington DC; New York City; the San Francisco Bay area; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portage County, Wisconsin; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Forester, Michigan; Cape May, New Jersey; Tucson, Arizona; Mason, Ohio.

Homebuilder Practices and Perceptions of Construction on the Wooded Lot: A Quarter Century Later Follow-Up Assessment

Building new homes on wooded lots is common in the upper Midwest, United States. Existing trees are often left behind during construction to become part of the future landscape. A study conducted in 1980 found that homebuilders in Portage County, Wisconsin, U.S. generally had a poor understanding of how construction activities could impact the health of trees intended to be preserved. Researchers replicated that study 27 years later by surveying homebuilders in the same region to see how their tree preservation knowledge and use of construction activities have changed during that time. The results indicate few construction activities changed significantly, showing that little has changed overall to improve tree preservation. Even though builders significantly improved their knowledge of the negative effects that storage of fill soil on roots poses to tree preservation, they also significantly increased usage of that very same activity. Builders almost never consulted a tree preservation expert and thought doing so was the least important activity when making tree preservation decisions. Interest in a tree preservation training workshop was limited. Unless pressured by consumer demand or regulation, builders will probably not improve their tree preservation knowledge, change their construction activities, or include tree experts anywhere in the process.