Hauntings at the Murder House

In “Haunted Data, Transmedial Storytelling, Affectivity,” Lisa Blackman explores what she calls a hauntological method. In this, she draws upon Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, highlighting how a “ghostly trail of haunted data” can emerge when the type of connectivity that Gordon discusses is brought to bear on digital narratives.¹ Through the creation of the video posted here, I decided to explore this hauntological method in a very literal way.

Three years ago, my friend Kodee and I went to the Villisca Ax Murder House in Villisca, Iowa. What I’ve posted here is a digital narrative that weaves together “image, words, sound and movement.”² “Welcome to Pine Point” and “The Third Eye” functioned as guides as I created my own narrative. “So often a memory depends on who we need to be at the moment of remembrance,” note the creators of the first work, and this struck me as hauntological in itself–as delving into the digital can heuristically restructure our own stories. I set out to simply retell the trip Kodee and I had made, but—in the process—I ended up writing about the person I used to be.³ In the second work, Professor Shyam Sharma considers the “range of semiotic resources” afforded by digital narratives: “the visual appearance of the narrators and their environments; their tone, voice, and accent; and their gestures and other non-verbal elements.”⁴. While attempting to embrace this full range that Sharma notes, I was struck by the quote he uses from Cynthia L. Selfe, who connects this dynamism with the formation of identity that the creators of Pine Point mention: “by locating themselves precisely and in nuanced ways within complex and dynamic social systems in their narratives […] storytellers actually compose their lives and values in reference to those around them, positioning themselves relationally to the other characters in their stories, to their previous selves, and to their listening audiences” (Sharma). This is exactly what I found occurred as I began telling my own narrative.

Lastly, as I created this small project, I dwelt on Ash Read’s story about Facebook’s new push to re-capture users and user-generated content.⁵ As I tried to figure out how to include my video in this post, I found myself hesitant to utilize a platform that would make my video available to just anyone. I wanted it to be here only—in the context of this blog. At first, I avoided YouTube, thinking the platform would make my video too public, but I then found out you can post an unlisted video, i.e. a video that you can only access if you have its URL. Not only does this speak to the issue that Facebook is currently facing, it also makes a full circle back to the hauntological method. If the content we (as a society) are currently interested in making is ephemeral by design, what does that mean for the digital ghost hunters of the future?