ABSTRACT
This chapter explores different ways in which emotional responses to material culture, museums and other heritage sites have often been ignored by interpretive strategies that focus on a range of other meanings, directly linked to disciplinary practices and conventions. For some the emotional human response to objects, artistic installations, displays, testimonies, photographs, spaces and interpretive strategies such as living history are difficult to describe and even more difficult to analyse and are understood to be 'poetic' in some way. However, at present there has been very little research into how and why visitors respond emotionally as they do when they visit such places. Design and interpretation in heritage sites can also engender emotions. For many local people their emotional engagement with this site is through stories of its ghosts and through memories of family visits to the place. The chapter concludes with encourage personal emotional responses in experimental, temporary ways in a museum.
