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Ghost Criminology has used the metaphors of haunting to sketch the pressing demands of a present in which the intersecting crises of racial injustice, structural imbalance, and climate catastrophe rise. In listening to the ghosts of the future, we must shape the “not yet” and imagine a social order that does not “let die.” We must imagine a state that is not death-dealing, that does not rely upon the technologies of war to police its subjects. Rather than using the “language and rituals” of violence, we must imagine communities that operate through non-violence, through empathy.

This article is an autoethnographic account of the authors' trespassing in the abandoned Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. For three decades before its closure in 2000, the Maze was the site of intense political struggle. The ruins of the Maze-a space once built to let no one out that now allows no one in-exist now in a state of limbo, between the conflicting narratives of the prison's troubled past, and an uncertain future. We present a brief historical account of the Maze, and explain our unconventional choice of 'research method', before introducing Foucault's notion of the heterotopia. We suggest that the Maze is an archetypally heterotopic space and our experience of exploring the prison can equally be described as such.