ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a number of ethnographic examples of haunting, drawing on two quite different ethnographic projects, one on British Quakers, the other on local government workers in the northeast of England. In recent years narrative has become an increasingly weighty concept across a wide range of disciplines. Blaise Pascal, mathematician, physicist, and devout Christian, argues that imagination is 'that mistress of error and falsehood, an arrogant faculty, the enemy of reason'. Aristotle places imagination in a mediating position between perception and intellect, and made it necessary to the latter. Philosophical accounts, as one might expect, lack empirical content and it is clear that anthropology can provide the detailed description required if we are to make any headway in understanding the social consequences of imagination. The chapter explores, an anthropological imagination that can be cultivated, though some of us, as we would surely expect, are more sensitive to hauntings than others.
