ABSTRACT
Social haunting, which Karen Till adapts from Jacques Derrida, is an excellent concept for illustrating the role of places of memory, for exploring how the remnants of the dead still inhabit and influence the space of everyday life and modernity. Places of memory are places where people feel the need to be haunted, and to perform that haunting in public. Ghosts are spectral traces of the past, and their essence is contained in the material and non-material vestiges of the past. These vestiges in turn create a sort of temporal bridge, a linkage between the space of the present and the space of the past. People may leave, they may emigrate, they may establish a new life elsewhere, and they may carry their ghosts with them, but haunting itself will never allow the haunted to fully sever themselves from a place of memory.
