"Am I Going to See a Ghost Tonight?": Gettysburg Ghost Tours and the Performance of Belief

Ghost tours, which purport to bring tourists into situations where they may encounter the paranormal, hinge on humanity's near-universal fascination with the spirit world. Ghost belief has been a contentious and ubiquitous feature of human culture through recorded time. The ghost as a theoretical construct has spanned continents and societies, surfacing in entertainments and rituals alike. In America, a tradition of paranormal belief dates to the early settlers, reaches through the fanatic and controversial mediums of the nineteenth century, and persists in modern-day psychics and paranormal investigators.1 Ghost tours join the ghost hunter clubs, paranormal-themed television shows, amateur and ethnographic ghost story collections, and ever-evolving procession of horror films in contemporary culture's seemingly endless enthrallment with the paranormal. Gettysburg is one of many locations with a burgeoning ghost tour tradition. Salem, New Orleans, and Atlanta are among the myriad American towns and cities that feature ghost tours. And in Europe, it is not unusual for ancient castles or ruins to make their own paranormal claims to visitors. This is not to suggest, however, that ghost tours and paranormal tourism are the central focus of these destinations. At popular historical tourism sights, like Gettysburg, ghosts are only rarely the main motivation for a tourist's visit. They exist on the margins of more serious vacations, relaxing and entertaining tourists after a long day of museums and historical sights. But their marginal status does little to dissuade from their popular appeal. At the height of the tourism season in Gettysburg, scores of tour groups wander the main streets passing through dark alleys and fields and moving in and out of haunted buildings. Though many may relegate ghosts to the scrap heap of more serious ventures, people cannot seem to resist the draw to seek them out. To be sure, humanity's relationship with the paranormal is marked by a powerfully conflicted attraction. Ghost tours provide a window onto the fate of ghost belief in the scientifically rationalized and technologically sophisticated West. Although Americans have largely exorcised the formerly omnipresent demons, angels, monsters, and poltergeists of the past, some part of the culture still holds tight to the possibility of worlds and truths that exceed material existence. Against her or his better judgment, the individual seeks out that sense of mystery that comes from an experience with the supernatural or paranormal. The fact that Americans do so in the context of a trivialized, touristic, and sometimes silly ghost tour speaks to the place that ghost belief has come to occupy in American culture. Entertainment is the veneer, hiding Americans' paranormal obsessions from themselves. Ghost tours, like roadside psychics and ghost-themed reality television shows, have become the refuge for an otherwise profound need to believe in ghosts. Gettysburg is arguably the most mythologized spot in the country or at least the most mythologized Civil War battlefield. It has been constructed as "the turning point of the Civil War" and features more monuments than any other American battlefield.2 It also bears the distinct reputation of being a place where roughly 11,000 men and boys died. All of these individuals died violently and, in many cases, horrifically. These deaths form the basis for the notion that Gettysburg's historic buildings, streets, and fields are haunted. Gettysburg's haunted status has given birth to no less than eight ghost tour companies in the borough. The sheer volume of ghost tours in Gettysburg make it an ideal case study for ghost tourism. On a Gettysburg ghost tour, a tourist joins a group of other tourists who have been attracted to a roadside stand or souvenir shop by advertisements that ask "do you believe in ghosts? " and promise to take you to places where "the veils of the spirit open to catch a glimpse of soldiers and civilians long dead, who still reach across the barriers of time. …