ABSTRACT
Ghost signs are faded, often obscured, remnants of hand-painted signage. They are survivors of a period when signwriting was a common form of advertising, and their rarity today is evidence of how urban landscapes have been transformed over recent times. Here, I consider ghost signs from the perspective of the observer, the person in the street, who encounters ghost signs-or witnesses their disappearance-in the built environment, and I address psychological aspects of how these experiences can affect people and their sense of connection to those places. Ghost signs can reassure, surprise, delight, disappoint, and inform us. Rather than treat these faded, often semi-concealed, images as relatively static environmental features, here they are considered as less permanent aspects of how people experience their environments, and I reflect on how they contribute to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity in our social constructions of place and self. I consider how these effects can occur psychologically, and what they might tell us about the relationships between people, their identities, and their sense of place.
