Rachel Walker and Amy Haines’s papers focus on how social movements have drawn on the idea of haunting and ghostly manifestations of the dead to legitimize their political projects and promote particular visions of national history. Walker’s paper examines American abolitionists and their practice of summoning the spirits of the founding generation through spiritualist séances so that they might affirm that they had ultimately (if only posthumously) recognized the evils of slavery. During a period when many Garrisonian abolitionists joined Southern slaveholders in asserting that the American founding documents were pro-slavery, the voices of the dead provided a powerful means for other abolitionists to advance an alternative vision of core American values—one in which universal liberty was the true Spirit of ’76. Amy Haines’s paper examines a different national vision advanced by reactionary anti–Black Lives Matter protestors in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Haines analyzes how these protestors used the battlefield at Gettysburg, widely regarded as a haunted space, to link their movement to lingering legacies of conflict over the position of Black Americans in American society and to violent assertions of white supremacy.

Peter Dedek and Katie Hemphill’s papers use haunting to explore broader issues of consent and ethics in historical practice. In particular, they ask what historians and others who peddle historical narratives owe to the dead. Dedek focuses on ghost tours in New Orleans cemeteries, placing these tours within the broader history of cemeteries as venues of tourism while arguing that they represent uniquely exploitative attempts to commodify the dead and their stories. Hemphill’s paper uses a personal account of feeling haunted by a historical subject to explore haunting as a sensation that emerges in response to the troubling ethical and consent issues raised by writing about historical sexual abuse. More broadly, haunting becomes a lens through which to consider the challenges of navigating the fundamentally uneven relationship between historians and the (deceased) subjects of their narratives.

The papers in this panel situate themselves within an interdisciplinary field of scholarship on ghosts and haunting and present work that will interest public historians; scholars of dark tourism; historians of memory; scholars of race, slavery, and abolition; and scholars concerned with historical methods and ethics.