Ghosts, Troubles, Difficulties, and Challenges: Narratives About Unexplainable Phenomena in Contemporary Denmark

Abstract

Many people experience something that they cannot explain, often they hear something that is not there as a visible fact. The sensation of hearing, for example, someone who is walking through your apartment, when no one is there as far as your eyes can see, poses a problem to the witness, especially if he or she does not think that this kind of occurrence is possible. Based on my fieldwork on haunted houses in Denmark today, this article deals with the narratives of people who have experiences that they cannot explain and that they consider to be on the limits of reason. Many of them do not consider 'ghosts' or 'haunting' as a possible explanation. This causes difficulties when they narrate and contextualise their experience, and typically they present ambiguous narratives and stress their disbelief at and bewilderment with the experiences. Still, as I will try to show in my article, their bewilderment and the way they use the notions 'ghost' and 'haunting' point to possible reinterpretations of these notions, so that the narrative mediation shapes not only the experience but also the ways that 'ghosts' and 'haunting' are reinterpreted in contemporary Denmark.

The Dead in Vernacular Magic Practices among Bosniaks

“…Moreover, it seems that continued communication between the living and the dead need not be confined to the margins of contemporary society. Perhaps their continued existence simply goes unrecognized "because its domain of existence has changed from the natural to the symbolic" (Kwon 2008, p. 16), or perhaps people simply lack the discourse to articulate their experiences (Raahauge 2016). Indeed, since the late 1980s, scholars of bereavement studies have recognized the importance that the agency of the dead plays in the lives of survivors.…”