ABSTRACT
The online ghost story platform is constructed on various manifestations of spectral returns, which expose the digital framework as connected to notions of haunted and dispersed consciousness, and, to echo Nicholas Royle’s approach to the uncanny, “the ghostliness of machines”. The hauntological focuses on time in the online ghost story acts as a narrative counterpart to the website’s own geographically disjointed narrative, which often appears to exist in a space-time vacuum—as is often the case when one enters the intangible networks of cyberculture. The dynamics of digital communication are, for the most part, not confined to one aspect of cultural interaction, and often rely on continuous and ephemeral echoes of narrative representation. What makes the spatial factor so important to the online ghost story is that the narrative interactions with location are at odds with the digital repository’s own lack of physical location.
